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Sheriff Vernon Betts sued to force a recount—but will have to decide by 5 p.m. if he wants a more costly hand recount.

A four-year-old girl was accidentally shot and killed by a child in north St. Louis early Tuesday morning, with police investigating the incident as an accidental shooting.

When someone wants to add chicks to their backyard farm or populate a larger operation, they often order from hatcheries. For the past 100 years, those hatcheries have used the U.S. Postal Service to ship live baby birds around the country. Increasingly, customers and suppliers say slow deliveries are causing birds to arrive dead. The Midwest Newsroom’s Kavahn Mansouri investigates.

Built in 1976, the suburban St. Louis mall will be razed this October.

Sarah Adam made history as the first woman to play wheelchair rugby for Team USA.

St. Louis Public Schools District has taken steps to resolve transportation issues by securing additional buses and re-routing the transportation system, ensuring safe and reliable transportation for all students.

ST. LOUIS - One of the prettiest Labor Days I can remember Monday with sunshine and great temperatures. Now, clouds have been streaming in overnight. Tuesday will bring mostly cloudy skies but no rain. Highs will be around 80, as the cloudiness will slow the warm-up. Clouds linger through Tuesday evening but begin to clear [...]

by James Bandler, ProPublica, A.C. Thompson, ProPublica and FRONTLINE, and Karina Meier, FRONTLINE

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

This story is part of a collaboration between FRONTLINE and ProPublica that includes an upcoming documentary.

In late December, a 26-year-old construction worker in Sarasota County, Florida, used his phone to send a flurry of ominous online posts.

Alexander Lightner, tapping away on his Samsung Galaxy, announced his intention to commit mass murder, according to federal court records. He used the coded language of a new breed of neo-Nazis who call themselves Accelerationists. Lightner wrote that he planned to become a “saint” — the term followers use for someone who advances their racist cause through lethal acts of terror — and to set a new “Highscore,” or death toll.

Lightner launched what federal prosecutors allege were threats on Telegram, the sprawling, no-holds-barred platform that has become a hive for the movement. Accelerationists aim to speed the collapse of modern civilization and create a white ethno-state from the ashes of today’s democracies. Deep in the chatter of the platform’s roughly 900 million users, these extremists have created a constellation of Telegram channels where they encourage followers like Lightner to assassinate political leaders, sabotage power stations and railways, and commit mass murder.

A week after firing off his alleged threats on Telegram, Lightner woke up from a nap at his home to his father’s shouts: “Whoa, whoa, whoa. What’s this? Are these people here for us?”

Lightner threw an illegal, homemade silencer into a laundry basket, according to a summary of his interview with federal agents. Then he stepped into the sunlight. In his front yard, agents in camouflage and body armor pointed rifles at him. An armored vehicle faced his family home, its massive battering ram aimed at the front door.

An FBI agent asked Lightner if he knew why federal agents were at his door.

Lightner answered simply: “Telegram,” according to court records.

FBI bodycam video shows Alexander Lightner’s arrest at his Florida home. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Late last month, Telegram burst into the news with another arrest related to alleged criminal activity on the giant messaging and social media platform. This time, the man in police custody was the company’s founder, Pavel Durov. French authorities detained the Russian-born billionaire after his plane touched down at an airport a few miles north of Paris.

French prosecutors issued preliminary charges against Durov last Wednesday related to alleged criminal activity on his platform. The allegations include organized fraud, drug trafficking and possession of pornographic images of minors, as well as refusal to cooperate with authorities, according to a press release by the Paris public prosecutor.

David-Olivier Kaminski, a lawyer for Durov, could not be reached for comment. French news reports quoted him saying that it was “totally absurd to think that the person in charge of a social network could be implicated in criminal acts that don’t concern him, directly or indirectly.”

The platform Durov created has long been both applauded and derided for its extreme commitment to free speech and for rebuffing inquiries from both U.S. and foreign law enforcement agencies, which have sought to gather information about alleged criminal activity on the platform.

“They are exceedingly unhelpful,” said Rebecca Weiner, the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism. Weiner, who oversees one of the world’s largest metropolitan counterterrorism units, said the platform was notable for “being a center of gravity for a wide range of extremist content” and for its “unwillingness to work with law enforcement.”

Telegram’s ease of use, its huge public channels and the ability to encrypt private conversations have helped fuel its global appeal. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky used the app to rally his compatriots to repel the Russian invasion. Activists in Hong Kong turned to Telegram to organize demonstrations against a repressive law. In Belarus, pro-democracy forces used the platform to fight back against election fraud.

But the platform has also served as the online home of the Russian mercenary company Wagner Group, which has posted gruesome videos of extrajudicial killings. In April, the British government targeted the Terrorgram Collective, a subset of Telegram users who promote racially and ethnically motivated terrorism to people like Lightner, making it a crime to support or belong to the group. And more recently, the service played a key role in fomenting the anti-immigrant riots that swept across the United Kingdom.

ProPublica and FRONTLINE have been investigating Telegram’s role in a string of recent alleged far-right acts of sabotage and murder, and how the company’s inaction allowed extremists to plan and even advertise their crimes. Researchers have long warned that Telegram routinely allows extremists to share propaganda aimed at inciting violence, noting that the Islamic State group and al-Qaida were able to use the service for years with little interference.

“Telegram plays a key role in the perpetuation of militant accelerationism,” said Michael Loadenthal, a research professor at the University of Cincinnati and director of the Prosecution Project, which tracks felony cases involving political violence in the U.S. The company, he said, “has shown that deplatforming violent and hateful content is not its priority.”

Before Durov’s arrest, a Telegram spokesperson responded to questions from ProPublica and FRONTLINE in messages on the platform. The spokesperson said that the company bars users from calling for acts of violence, adding that moderators remove millions of pieces of harmful content from the platform every day. “As Telegram grows, it will continue to solve potential moderation problems with efficiency, innovation and respect for privacy and free speech,” the spokesperson, who used the name Remi Vaughn, said in the messages.

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in 2016 (Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Yet ProPublica and FRONTLINE found that Telegram today is the main nexus of far-right Accelerationist crime. Law enforcement agencies on both sides of the Atlantic have interrupted a series of criminal schemes, including:

• In July, a Georgian man accused of leading an Accelerationist terror group was arrested in Europe for allegedly soliciting people to carry out murders and bombings in the U.S. Michail Chkhikvishvili allegedly used Telegram to communicate and distribute his group’s propaganda and is facing charges in New York. He is being held in Moldova pending extradition, according to Wired. ProPublica and FRONTLINE could not locate counsel for him.

• The same month, federal prosecutors charged an Accelerationist named Andrew Takhistov with plotting to destroy an energy facility in New Jersey. They allege he used Telegram to incite racial violence and share a how-to guide for white supremacist terrorism that included instructions on the use of Mylar balloons and Molotov cocktails to damage power substations. An attorney for Takhistov did not respond to a request for comment.

• In June, Manhattan prosecutors announced charges against Hayden Espinosa, accusing the Texas man of selling illegal guns and firearm components through a Telegram channel aimed at white supremacists and Accelerationists. Espinosa allegedly used a contraband phone to sell weapons and gun parts while incarcerated in federal prison. He has pleaded not guilty.

• A judge in England recently sentenced a British man to eight years in prison for plotting to carry out a suicide bombing at a synagogue. According to the Crown Prosecution Service, 19-year-old Mason Reynolds was “the administrator of a Telegram channel which shared far right extremist, antisemitic and racist views, as well as manuals on bomb building and how to 3D print firearms.”

• Brandon Russell, a former leader of the Atomwaffen Division, a now-defunct neo-Nazi group tied to five murders, was charged last year with planning an attack aimed at disabling the power system in Baltimore. Russell and a co-defendant, Sarah Beth Clendaniel, used Telegram to organize the sabotage scheme, according to prosecutors. Clendaniel has pleaded guilty; Russell faces trial later this year. Attorneys for the duo declined to comment.

And then there is Lightner. U.S. prosecutors say in court filings that Lightner went to Telegram to discuss his plans to use a .308-caliber rifle to kill as many people as possible. He remains in jail awaiting trial on federal charges of making threats online and possessing an illegal silencer. He has pleaded not guilty. His attorney declined to comment.

Before Lightner’s arrest, he told an agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that he was “blackout drunk” at the time of the posts, distraught over a bad breakup. “I was broken and really upset. And I went drinking, and then I did some stupid thing online,” he said, according to a recording of the conversation. He told other agents that he was not planning an act of violence but just wanted someone to notice him and care.

Lightner told federal agents that he started using Telegram in 2015, about two years after the platform launched. The online service grew steadily over the next few years, with the majority of users coming from outside the U.S. Then in 2021, Telegram’s growth exploded after its rival WhatsApp announced a new privacy policy. Some users feared WhatsApp was poised to begin sharing their confidential messages with parent company Facebook, now called Meta. In a Telegram post, Durov boasted that his platform was experiencing “the largest digital migration in human history,” claiming that 25 million new users joined Telegram in 72 hours.

That same month, in the U.S., Telegram got a bump in users when major social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter ousted former President Donald Trump and many of his most ardent supporters in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Today, Telegram is heavily favored by right-wing extremists, including QAnon followers, Proud Boys, militia members, and white supremacist groups like Patriot Front and the Active Clubs.

Axel Neff, who helped start Telegram, said the company’s core team of about 60 employees, 30 of whom are engineers, is too small to monitor the platform for criminal conduct. “Think about the size of Telegram. There are about a billion users on Telegram every month. A billion!” he said. “Telegram is a massive, massive community. … They are not staffed — and they do not have the capacity — to monitor everything that goes on there.”

Neff said it would be “professional suicide” for Telegram, which has marketed itself as a bastion of unfettered speech, to make a serious effort to moderate content. “I don’t think it is something [Durov] will ever do.”

The company’s privacy policy puts strict parameters around cooperation with law enforcement: “If Telegram receives a court order that confirms you’re a terror suspect, we may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities. So far, this has never happened.”

Telegram ignores requests for information from government agencies that aren’t “in line with our values of freedom of speech and protecting people’s private correspondence,” Durov told Tucker Carlson in an interview with the former Fox News host earlier this year. Durov noted that Telegram refused to cooperate with the U.S. congressional committee probing the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

Telegram stores “very limited data” on its users, the Telegram spokesperson told ProPublica and FRONTLINE. “In most cases it is impossible for Telegram to access this data in order to provide it for the authorities,” the spokesperson said. “Police, governments and users are able to report content to Telegram they believe is illegal. Telegram processes these reports according to its terms of service.”

ProPublica and FRONTLINE found that much of the most disturbing content is posted in channels maintained by violent, right-wing Accelerationists, whose ideas have attracted neo-Nazis, Charles Manson admirers and anti-government revolutionaries.

The Terrorgram Collective, the group of Telegram users targeted by the British government’s crackdown, is an alliance of Accelerationists who use an ever-evolving array of Telegram channels to promote terrorism. The group has produced at least three e-books, including a manual celebrating white supremacist mass killers that court documents show was found at Lightner’s home in Florida.

David Skiffington, a former British counterterrorism specialist for London’s Metropolitan Police, said the “proliferation of extremist content” on Telegram “cannot be overstated.”

Other social media platforms such as Steam, Discord and Gab also host extremist-related content, Skiffington said. “But Telegram is by far the most widely used and accessible.”

Skiffington, who now runs the counterterrorism consulting firm DBA Insights, has been monitoring the Terrorgram Collective for years. He said the group’s influencers encourage “angry, white, lonely vulnerable individuals … to commit real-world acts of violence.”

It’s unclear how many people are part of the collective, though law enforcement has arrested individuals in Slovakia, Canada and the U.S. who are allegedly linked to the group.

In Florida, Lightner — or someone using his username, “Death.” — participated in at least 17 extremist Telegram channels, according to an analysis by Miro Dittrich, a co-founder of the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy, a German organization that studies online disinformation and extremism. Three of the channels were part of the Terrorgram network.

On the day of his arrest, Lightner was asked by a federal agent to explain his most explosive Telegram postings. At first, Lightner said he did not remember the online threats. But when a federal agent read the words back to him, Lightner said he had never seriously considered an act of violence. But he added that he knew that in making the Telegram postings, he was “playing with fire.”

Doris Burke of ProPublica and Tom Jennings and Annie Wong of FRONTLINE contributed reporting.

Peter Frampton is getting ready to launch his Positively Thankful tour, and after all these years performing, he likes to change things up now and again when making his set…

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St. Louis-area swimming pools are wrapping up the 2024 season with events that give pups a chance to take a plunge.

That IVF protection bill, S.4445, could come up again in the Senate.

Tom Tomorrow brings you This Modern World

by Robin Urevich, Capital & Main

This article was produced in partnership with Capital & Main, which was a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in 2022-23. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

In the midst of an ongoing housing emergency, the city of Los Angeles has struggled to keep rent-controlled housing, which includes some of the city’s most affordable dwelling units, from turning into short-term rentals. Even though a 2018 law prohibits such conversions, enforcement has been lax.

“Except in a handful of cases, we’re not actually doing that enforcement work in a meaningful way,” said Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who chairs the council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee and is working on recommendations to tighten enforcement.

For locals who want to keep their neighborhoods residential or visitors who want to avoid inadvertently booking a unit that skirts local law, navigating the Wild West that is LA’s vacation-rental market can be a challenge. This story covers some signs to watch out for and offers a quick two-step guide you can use to make sure your potential home share — or your neighbor’s — isn’t an illegally converted rent-controlled apartment.

Legally, LA hosts can offer only their own “primary residences” for short stays, and only if those dwellings are not covered by the city’s rent-control law. (Some 660,000 housing units in LA are rent controlled, meaning annual rent increases are capped — usually at about 4% for existing tenants.)

The LA Home-Sharing Ordinance, which took effect in 2019, bars rent-controlled properties from being used for short-term rentals. (Document illustration by Capital & Main) Hiding in Plain Sight

In July, a Capital & Main and ProPublica investigation found that at least 63 rent-controlled buildings that were advertised on booking sites last spring were in apparent violation of the city’s Home-Sharing Ordinance.

The listings hide in plain sight on vacation platforms like Booking.com and Hotels.com, making it hard to distinguish legitimate rentals from those that operate illegally.

Banana Bungalow and Redline Venice are among more than a dozen LA establishments that look and operate like hotels but are classified as rent-controlled apartment buildings. (Screenshot by Capital & Main)

The news organizations found at least 15 rent-controlled buildings — including Banana Bungalow and Redline Venice — that used outdoor signs or online ads to brand themselves as hotels or hostels. According to city law, their rent-controlled status would make them ineligible for use as vacation rentals.

The owners of the 34-unit Banana Bungalow and the four-room Redline Venice didn’t return phone calls. Mark Wurm, the owner of the Venice Beach Hostel, said, “They have it wrong,” referring to the city’s classification of his building as rent controlled. Wurm said the building had long been used as a hotel.

Traditional home shares that don’t purport to be hotels, like those listed on Airbnb or other vacation platforms, also sometimes skirt the law.

One Renter’s Eye-Opening Experience

In May, Rhys Atkinson-Whipps, an Australian transplant, told Capital & Main that he entered LA’s short-term rental market when his apartment underwent major repairs. He said he booked several rentals for weeklong or shorter stays because he expected the repairs to be completed sooner than they were. Atkinson-Whipps, who works at a Hollywood shelter for homeless youth, said he found that the home shares he booked were not always what they seemed.

One listing promised an apartment in Hollywood. But after booking it, Atkinson-Whipps said, he learned it was in Koreatown — miles from where the listing said it was. He thought the bait and switch was sketchy. “You book one place and you turn up somewhere else,” Atkinson-Whipps said. “It’s like you have no power at all.” The listing has since been taken down, he said.

Sometimes listings display more desirable neighborhoods than their actual locations, with the correct details revealed only after booking. In other cases, properties are listed in neighboring cities to evade LA’s home-sharing rules, according to a report by Better Neighbors LA, a nonprofit watchdog group that monitors short-term rentals.

A Los Angeles resident said he booked what was listed as a “cute studio” at this rent-controlled building in Hollywood while his home was undergoing repairs. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Atkinson-Whipps said he also rented a Hollywood apartment that Airbnb listed as a “cute studio.” It turned out to be part of a 14-unit building listed in the Housing Department’s database as rent controlled, which would make it off-limits for short-term rentals.

The owner of the building, which is on Harold Way in Hollywood, is listed as DND ES Properties. A man who identified himself as Edward Dratver, a manager of the company, denied that any of its units are listed on Airbnb. “No,” he said. “Something’s wrong. Some mistake,” Dratver said before quickly ending the call.

However, the apartment was advertised on the site in August despite Airbnb’s 2019 agreement with the city that it would remove illegal listings.

The number of Airbnb listings that aren’t registered with the city for home sharing is on the rise, up from 277 in August 2023 to more than 900 currently, according to Better Neighbors LA. The group cited its analysis of data from Inside Airbnb, a research and advocacy organization that is critical of Airbnb. A planning department report to the City Council noted that as of February, 58% of all the short-term rental listings in the city didn’t comply with city law. These buildings have typically received warning letters from the city planning department.

Airbnb declined to provide a response for this story.

Some Listings Include Fake Credentials

Hotels.com and Booking.com also feature a number of rent-controlled properties that appear to be ineligible for home sharing. But Capital & Main found that Booking.com — the third-largest vacation rental platform in the city — includes listings that say the properties are legally registered with the city for home sharing when they’re not.

Several Booking.com listings include nonexistent, expired or completely fabricated home-sharing registration numbers. Others include a “fine print” section in which hosts wrongly claim that a home-sharing registration isn’t required for their properties.

This loft on Hollywood Boulevard was advertised on Booking.com with apparently fake registration numbers. (Screenshot by ProPublica. Address blurred by ProPublica.)

A unit advertised on Booking.com as the “Savana Spectacular Loft” — an apartment in a rent-controlled building — appeared to have city permission to operate because the listing included three home-sharing registration numbers. But none of the registration numbers exist, according to the LA planning department’s home-sharing lookup tool. In fact, listing multiple registration numbers is likely an indication that something is amiss, because the city issues only one home-sharing registration per property owner.

A Booking.com listing included multiple nonexistent city registration numbers. (Document illustration by Capital & Main)

At Realty Center Management Inc., which manages the building, a representative said the company would not comment.

Booking.com did not respond to an email requesting comment on the registration numbers and the company’s procedures for determining if listings comply with local law. Media representatives at Hotels.com also didn’t respond to emails inquiring about listings of rent-controlled properties.

The registration number listed for this building on Booking.com is two digits too long to be an official city registration number. (Screenshot by ProPublica. Address blurred by ProPublica.)

A mile from the beach, the Booking.com listing for a “Venice Beach Gem” features mountain and ocean views and a tennis court.

The ad displays a Los Angeles home-sharing registration number, but it contains too many digits and lacks the required letters found in city-issued registrations. The units for rent on the site are located in a rent-controlled apartment building, according to the Housing Department’s database, and cannot legally be registered for home sharing.

The city fined the Venice Beach units’ owner twice in 2021 for advertising short-term rentals without an official registration. The fines haven’t been paid, according to the city attorney’s website of administrative citations. Still, the units were listed on Booking.com last month.

The property owner didn’t return Capital & Main’s calls.

In some cases, renters, not building owners, have been accused of listing illegal short-term rentals. LA City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto recently sued several people she says earned more than $4 million by leasing apartments for the sole purpose of offering unregistered short-term rentals, some of them in rent-controlled buildings. The defendants have denied the allegations in court filings.

Under the home-sharing law, booking platforms can be fined $1,000 per day for accepting bookings for properties that don’t have official registrations.

In 2022, the city settled a lawsuit against Vrbo for $150,000, accusing it of processing thousands of illegal bookings. The company agreed to remove illegal listings from the platform. A spokesperson for Vrbo’s owner, Expedia, said the company is working “to help drive a high rate of compliance with local laws.”

The City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee is expected to consider recommendations for improving home-sharing enforcement in September.

Meanwhile, for vacationers and locals who want to check the legality of a short-term rental, Capital & Main and ProPublica prepared a two-step guide to researching potential listings before you book:

How Can You Tell If Your LA Vacation Rental Is Legit?

1. Find out if your rental is covered by the LA Rent Stabilization Ordinance by texting the letters “RSO” to the LA Housing Department at 855-880-7368 and following the prompts. If the property is subject to the Rent Stabilization Ordinance, it is likely not allowed to be rented out for short-term stays.

2. Look up whether the rental is registered under the city’s Home Sharing Ordinance. You can find the property address or home-sharing registration number using the city’s records portal. If the unit is not registered, the owner has either not applied for the city-required registration or may have sidestepped the city’s rules on short-term rentals.

You can contact the LA Home Sharing Complaint Line to report a suspected illegal short-term rental at 213-267-7788 or email planning.home-sharing@lacity.org. The reporters at Capital & Main would also love to hear about any potentially illegal short-term rentals you find; contact them at info@capitalandmain.com.

Haru Coryne contributed reporting.

Four years after a string of disasters plagued one Louisiana town, its residents are still on the move.

This autumn, the Windy City offers architectural events, a four-day food festival, and more.

COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — Brady Cook threw for 218 yards with touchdowns running and throwing, Toriano Pride Jr. returned an interception 25 yards for a score, and No. 11 Missouri routed Murray State 51-0 on Thursday night in the season opener for both teams. Luther Burden III had a touchdown catch and Nate Noel and…

The post #11 Mizzou Blanks Murray St. in Opener appeared first on The Big 550 KTRS.

Chuck Reef of Middletown, MO joined the Real Rock Army today

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The 10th biannual exhibition curated from artists within 200 miles. Opening May 7th and on display through October, the 10th Biannual will feature 32 artists and 41 works from a […]

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Return to a time when steamboats ruled the river. The one-hour narrated riverfront cruise aboard the Riverboats at the Gateway Arch explores the history of downtown St. Louis, including the […]

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