Aggregator

On county prosecutor Melissa Price Smith's first day, she agreed to dismiss the case her predecessor filed against Diann Valenti.

MoDOT, IDOT, and the Missouri State Highway Patrol are urging drivers to stay off the roads unless absolutely necessary this weekend.

In a 6-1 ruling, the Montana Supreme Court affirmed their constitutional right to a “clean and healthful environment.”

On her first day in the job, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Melissa Price Smith dismissed a case her predecessor Wesley Bell filed against the county clerk. Diann Valenti was indicted by a grand jury on Dec. 18 over her alleged role in a nepotism hire made by Councilman Dennis Hancock, a move her attorney has maintained was a "political sideshow." Hancock was accused of hiring his stepdaughter at a rate of $24.88 per hour, with perks that included a $300 monthly vehicle allowance and full…

Miles of LED Christmas lights synchronized to rocking Christmas music – that’s what you’ll find at WonderLight’s Christmas at World Wide Technology Raceway. Open nightly from Nov. 15 to Jan. […]

The post WonderLight’s Christmas appeared first on Explore St. Louis.

ALTON - A woman from East Alton faces multiple felony charges after a series of heated arguments led to her damaging her boyfriend’s home and car before attempting to run him over with her own car. Elyse M. Ruyle, 29, of East Alton, was charged with aggravated battery (a Class 3 felony), two counts of criminal damage to property (both Class 4 felonies), and criminal trespass to residence (a Class A misdemeanor). On Dec. 26, 2024, Ruyle allegedly used a Chevrolet motor vehicle as a deadly weapon by attempting to run over her boyfriend, causing injury to the victim and damage to the car and a nearby concrete pillar. She was also charged with damaging one of the victim’s car tires and one of the windows of his residence, with those damages totaling over $500. A petition to deny Ruyle’s pretrial release describes the circumstances leading up to the incident. The victim in this case reported to authorities that his girlfriend “attempted to run him over wit

Continue Reading

HOK will create the main designs for the multi-billion dollar overhaul of St. Louis Lambert International Airport.

GLEN CARBON — Sophomore Sarah Hyten is making waves in the world of high school golf, showcasing her talent at Father McGivney Catholic High School. Recently, she earned All-State honors after finishing fourth in the Illinois High School Association (IHSA) 1A State Finals for 2024. Additionally, Hyten was named to the first-team all-Gateway Conference girls golf squad. She is a Byron, Carlson, Petri & Kalb Female Athlete of the Month for the Griffins. Hyten, a member of the class of 2026, has consistently demonstrated her skills on the course, maintaining a strong academic record with a GPA of 4.32 as an honors student. Her golf prowess is reflected in her current Golf Handicap Index (GHIN) of +1.2 and her impressive rankings: 703 nationally, 193 in her class, and 5th in the state, with the same ranking among her peers in the class of 2026. The young athlete has also qualified for the USGA Women's Amateur Four Ball, further highlighting her competitive edge. During the 2024

Continue Reading

ALTON - Alton Police have charged a Belleville man with theft and a Mascoutah woman with debit/credit card crimes in two separate cases. Charles B. Blount, 35, of Belleville, was charged on Dec. 30, 2024 with one count of retail theft over $300, a Class 3 felony. On Nov. 6, 2024, Blount allegedly stole an EGO commercial backpack blower from the Lowe’s on Homer M. Adams Parkway in Alton. The item had a total value of more than $300. In a separate case, Chelsea Nunn, 30, of Mascoutah, was charged with one count of unlawful use of a credit or debit card, a Class 4 felony. A description of the charge states that from Dec. 19, 2023 to Jan. 4, 2024, Nunn allegedly used someone’s credit or debit card to obtain over $300 from Busey Bank. The Alton Police Department presented both cases against Blount and Nunn. Both were granted pretrial release from custody. The issuance of charges is based solely upon probable cause and is not an indication of guilt. All subjects

Continue Reading

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump is scheduled to be sentenced in New York on 34 felony convictions on Jan. 10, just days ahead of his presidential inauguration, according to an order issued Friday by New York Justice Juan Merchan. Merchan wrote he won’t seek incarceration for Trump but rather an “unconditional discharge” that would leave Trump […]

WASHINGTON — Republicans took control of the U.S. Senate Friday under the new leadership of South Dakota’s John Thune, who promised to keep intact the body’s legislative filibuster — the 60-vote threshold for major legislation that some Democrats had targeted for elimination. Thune follows in the footsteps of the longest-serving Senate GOP leader, Mitch McConnell […]

Authorities are investigating a woman's death Friday afternoon in St. Louis' College Hill neighborhood.

Authorities said the explosion Friday morning followed a report of a gas leak.

The state auditor will release the findings of his review of the St. Louis prosecutor's office on Tuesday.

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson has signed an executive order in preparation of a highly anticipated winter storm this weekend.

The dismissal came the same day a new prosecuting attorney, Melissa Price Smith, was sworn in.

by Sharon Lerner

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

A long-awaited report from the Environmental Protection Agency has found that formaldehyde presents an unreasonable risk to human health. But the report, released Thursday, downplayed the threat the chemical poses to people living near industrial plants that release large quantities of the carcinogen into the air.

The health risk assessment was published weeks after a ProPublica investigation found that formaldehyde, one of the most widely used chemicals in commerce, causes more cases of cancer than any other chemical in the air and triggers asthma, miscarriages and fertility problems.

Our analysis of the EPA’s own data showed that in every census block in the U.S., the risk of getting cancer from a lifetime of exposure to formaldehyde in outdoor air is higher than the goal the agency has set for air pollutants. The risk is even greater indoors, where formaldehyde leaks from furniture and other products long after they enter our homes.

In its report, the EPA evaluated 63 situations in which consumers and workers encounter formaldehyde and found that 58 of them contribute to the chemical’s unreasonable risk to health — a designation that requires the agency to mitigate it. Among the products that can emit dangerous levels of formaldehyde in these scenarios, according to the report, are automotive-care products like car waxes, along with crafting supplies, ink and toner, photographic supplies and fabrics, building materials, textiles and leather goods.

While a note accompanying the EPA’s report stated that workers have the greatest exposure to the chemical, the agency’s risk assessment adopted weaker standards for protecting workers from formaldehyde than had been proposed in a previous draft. The move was decried by some environmentalists, including one who said it would affect hundreds of thousands of people whose jobs require them to come into contact with the chemical.

By law, the EPA should now begin the next stage of regulation: drafting restrictions to mitigate the risks it identified. But even before the agency released the report, House Republicans urged the administration to invalidate it. And a chemical industry group immediately attacked the report as flawed, accusing the EPA of “pursuing unaccountable lame duck actions that threaten the U.S. economy and key sectors that support health, safety and national security.”

How — and whether — to rein in the risks of formaldehyde promises to be one of the first tests of the EPA under a second Trump administration. The relatively inexpensive chemical is ubiquitous, used for everything from preserving dead bodies to making plastics and semiconductors. On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump repeatedly said he supports clean air. But he has also vowed to roll back regulations he views as anti-business — and industry has rallied around formaldehyde for decades.

When Trump first assumed office in 2017, the agency was preparing to publish a report on the toxicity of the chemical. But one of his EPA appointees, who was given a high-ranking role in the agency’s Office of Research and Development, was a chemical engineer who had worked to fend off the regulation of formaldehyde as an employee of Koch Industries, whose subsidiary made formaldehyde and many products that emit it. The report was not released until August 2024, long after Trump’s appointee left the agency.

According to ProPublica’s analysis of the EPA’s 2020 AirToxScreen data, some 320 million people live in areas of the U.S. where the lifetime cancer risk from outdoor exposure to formaldehyde is 10 times higher than the agency’s ideal. ProPublica released a lookup tool that allows anyone in the country to understand their outdoor risk from formaldehyde.

Still, the EPA decided in its finalized assessment that those health risks are not unreasonable, echoing a draft the agency released in March. Back then, to determine whether formaldehyde posed an unreasonable risk of harm, the EPA compared levels in outdoor air to the highest concentrations measured by monitors in a six-year period. The ProPublica investigation found that the measurement the draft report used as a reference point was a fluke and had not met the quality control standards of the local air monitoring body that registered it.

That explanation was absent from the final version released this week. Instead, it offered several new rationales, including that some formaldehyde degrades in the air and that levels vary over people’s lifetimes, but it came to the same conclusion as the draft had: that formaldehyde in outdoor air isn’t a threat that needs to be addressed.

That decision leaves people living near industrial plants — known as fence line areas — with little hope of protection, according to Katherine O’Brien, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, who has closely followed the EPA’s efforts to regulate formaldehyde.

“Despite calculating very high cancer risks for people in their homes and also fence line community residents, EPA has completely written off those risks, and set the stage for no regulation to address those risks,” said O’Brien. “That’s deeply disappointing and very hard to comprehend.”

Compared to the draft published in March, which was heavily criticized by industry, the final version contained weaker standards for protecting workers. The acceptable levels of workplace formaldehyde exposure set in the final version of the assessment were significantly higher than the levels in the earlier draft of the report.

Maria Doa, senior director of chemicals policy at the Environmental Defense Fund, expressed alarm over the decision. “This is a less protective standard that would leave workers at risk,” said Doa, a chemist who worked at the EPA for 30 years. She noted that the report’s figures show an estimated 450,000 workers could be left vulnerable to the effects of formaldehyde as a result.

The EPA press office did not immediately respond to questions about its determination for outdoor air or the change it made to the value set to protect workers.

It’s unclear what parts, if any, of the new report will be allowed to stand.

Last month, Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, urged the incoming administration to make revisiting the Biden EPA’s work on formaldehyde “a top priority for 2025.” In a letter to Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to run the agency, Sessions derided this week’s report as “based upon unscientific data that was utilized by unaccountable officials at the EPA to tie the hands of the new Administration and hamper economic growth.” (The letter was first reported by InsideEPA.)

Sessions, who is a co-chair of the new Delivering Outstanding Government Efficiency caucus and a staunch ally of Trump, recommended scrapping the EPA’s assessments of formaldehyde and reversing course on “broader Biden policies” on chemicals.

Paul Krugman responds today to Donald Trump's latest idiocy on tariffs, complaining that "almost all attempts to refute Trump’s claims that he can replace income taxes with tariffs aim too high." True enough! But then he says: I’m a great admirer of Clausing and Obstfeld’s work on the amount of revenue we could possibly collect ...continue reading "Why can’t tariffs replace the income tax?"

EDWARDSVILLE - Senior forward Kaylea Lacey, who's been a major part of the Alton high girls basketball team for multiple seasons, is still a key to the Redbirds as they seek to go to the IHSA Class 4A state finals in March in Bloomington-Normal. Lacey played a guiding role in the Redbirds' finish last year at 32-3, losing in the super-sectional game to Aurora Waubonsie Valley and Alton is off to a blazing 13-1 start under head coach Deserea Howard in the 2024-2025 campaign. The Redbirds proved to many observers so far this season that Alton is still a very good girls' team even without all-everything point guard Kiyoko Proctor, who has now returned to the lineup after a knee injury forced her out of action for the first part of the season. Proctor was still on the sidelines in her captain role encouraging and helping all the girls around her. Lacey is an Auto Butler Female Athlete of the Month for the Redbirds for her efforts with Alton this year. "We're definitely building chemistry,

Continue Reading

Whether your kiddo needs adaptive play equipment or just a place where the lights and noise are toned down, there are fun options for everyone.