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A festival favorite, the family-owned and -operated business specializes in birria tacos, loaded drippin' nachos, birria fries, and crispy "birri-tos."

Midas Construction has rebranded as MBG and doubled its office headquarters.

Mia Rose Holdings has started construction on 144 new apartments near the Southern Illinois University Edwardsville campus.

Missourians seem poised to legalize abortion and increase the minimum wage in November but are unlikely to embrace the Democratic statewide candidates who are among the ballot measures’ most ardent supporters, a new poll shows. The proposal to enshrine the right to abortion up until the point of fetal viability in the Missouri Constitution drew […]

Brandi James, a 25-year-old Chesterfield woman, has been charged with two counts of statutory sodomy or attempted statutory sodomy and one count of third-degree child molestation after allegedly meeting a 13-year-old victim at church and engaging in sexual activity with her.

If one change could profoundly elevate American politics, it is how campaigns are funded. The relentless need for fundraising incentivizes candidates to exhaust the generosity of small-dollar donors and, at the risk of diminishing their values and policy objectives, rely heavily on a limited number of wealthy contributors. After all, for politicians who have gotten […]

The Mark Twain National Forest includes more than 1.5 million acres of land across southern Missouri and hosts more than half a million visitors a year. Vince Keeler is the new forest supervisor as of this month. He sat down with St. Louis Public Radio’s Jonathan Ahl to talk about his vision to manage the land in terms of conservation and recreation.

ST. LOUIS - We made it to 95 on Wednesday, and we’ll be right back there again on Thursday. Pair that with the high humidity, and heat index values are still expected to be 100+. The Heat Advisory continues for the metro St. Louis region. Please stay cool and hydrated and limit time spent outdoors [...]

by Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

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

A congressman intervened to help former President Donald Trump’s social media company jump the line for a difficult-to-obtain foreign-worker visa to bring a company executive to the U.S., according to interviews and records reviewed by ProPublica.

A former staffer for Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican, said the congressman personally instructed her to help Trump Media, even though she thought it was inappropriate to mix politics with the office’s constituent services duties.

“I specifically did not want to do this,” Bacon’s former director of special projects, Makenzie Cartwright, told ProPublica when asked about emails showing the lawmaker’s intervention. “It was specifically the congressman that suggested I needed to deal with it.”

“Thank you so much for your help on making sure we push this forward,” the company’s chief operating officer wrote to another Bacon staffer in January 2022, according to an email reviewed by ProPublica. “I will make sure to thank the congressman as well!”

Trump Media, which now accounts for roughly half of Trump’s net worth, presents conflicts of interests for the former president, according to ethics experts. While there have been concerns about donors and special interests seeking to curry favor with the Republican candidate for president, this is the first known instance of a politician helping Trump in a private matter involving his social media business.

And it shows that as Trump has presented himself as an immigration hawk, his company has sought special treatment to bring its own foreign executive to the United States.

His administration generally pushed U.S. companies to hire Americans over foreign workers and instituted policies that made it harder to secure visas for skilled workers. Trump’s current platform pledges to “strengthen Buy American and Hire American Policies.”

Trump Media’s relationship with the executive, a software developer in North Macedonia, began in part because American candidates for the same work were more expensive, according to a person involved.

Dan Berger, an immigration attorney who handles such cases, called Trump Media’s hiring of a foreign worker “hypocritical.”

“It got harder in every way possible,” he said of the visa cases he handled during the Trump administration. “It was just one thing after another.”

Before Trump Media reached out to Bacon’s office, the company had already helped get the executive, Vladimir Novachki, approved for the visa. But a backlog at the American embassy in the Balkan nation was causing severe delays in scheduling interviews for Macedonians to finalize the process.

Bacon’s office helped fix the problem for Trump’s company, according to the person involved. Last year, Novachki, who had moved to Florida, was named Trump Media’s chief technology officer.

Bacon’s intervention on behalf of Trump’s company came at the same time Trump was talking publicly about recruiting a primary challenger against the moderate Republican congressman.

“Is there favoritism being extended to the potential president?” said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer. “Was there some sort of concern of what happens if you don’t make the call?”

“It’s a classic conflict of interest,” she said.

It’s common for companies to ask members of Congress to help speed along such applications. But they typically do so when the applicant or company is based in the lawmaker’s district. Trump Media, headquartered in Sarasota, Florida, is far outside of Bacon’s Nebraska district.

In response to questions from ProPublica, Bacon’s spokesperson said the office was barred from discussing the details of the case because of privacy concerns, but said Trump Media was not given special treatment. The request, the spokesperson said, came from a Trump Media employee who lived in Bacon’s district.

“This case was not treated any differently than the hundreds of cases we process every year” at multiple federal agencies, the spokesperson said. “Politics don’t come into play for official congressional work.”

A spokesperson for Trump Media declined to answer detailed questions but said in a statement: “ProPublica has grotesquely manufactured this hit piece by fabricating statements, misusing stolen communications containing our employee’s private information, and maliciously insinuating wrongdoing where categorically none exists.”

The hiring of a foreign chief technology officer is part of a larger effort by Trump’s company to source labor abroad, interviews and records show. Trump Media has contracted with a foreign outsourcing firm, according to invoices, and multiple people based abroad list jobs at Trump’s company on their LinkedIn profiles, even as Trump has promised to “stop outsourcing” and “punish” companies that send jobs overseas.

A Trump campaign spokesperson said in a statement that “when President Trump is back in the White House, he will enforce our immigration laws and deport illegal immigrants.” The spokesperson added that “Trump has always been in favor of allowing in thoroughly vetted highly skilled immigrants who do not undercut American wages.”

A lawyer for Trump Media sent ProPublica a letter threatening a lawsuit and accusing the outlet of intending “to publish yet another hit piece on the company that includes false, misleading, and defamatory statements.”

Novachki got his start coding in grade school when he came across a textbook that taught basic concepts without requiring access to the internet. He went on to develop an app, called Skopje Taximeter, that allowed residents of North Macedonia’s capital city to use their smartphones to track their own cab fares.

But his biggest break came when he got a job at Cosmic Development, a Canadian IT and tech outsourcing company with offices in North Macedonia. The firm was co-founded by Chris Pavlovski, who also started the video platform Rumble, which has become a popular alternative to YouTube among American conservatives and which partners with Trump Media. Novachki quickly rose through the ranks.

As a Cosmic employee, Novachki, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, began working with Trump’s company in its early days. Pavlovski recommended him as someone who could build a prototype of the company’s Truth Social platform cheaper than American bidders, according to a person with knowledge of the process.

Trump Media and Novachki applied for a visa reserved for those with “extraordinary ability” in their fields, known as an O-1.

The Department of Homeland Security had approved his application, but before he and his family could come to the United States, they needed an appointment with the American embassy in North Macedonia to finalize the process. In January 2022, emails show, the embassy notified Novachki that his interview was scheduled for December 2023.

But Trump Media wanted Novachki in Florida sooner: “It is extremely important for Vlad to be in the United States so he can work side-by-side [with] other high-level technology executives to ensure our product and tech stack functions well,” one of its executives wrote in an email at the time.

One of Trump Media’s executives, Andrew Northwall, a Nebraska political consultant, reached out to Bacon’s office.

An aide to the congressman replied promptly, assuring the former president’s company that Bacon’s office would get to work: “We will follow up with the proper officials about your concerns.”

The request from the former president’s company came at a delicate moment in Bacon and Trump’s relationship. Bacon had supported Trump in both his presidential campaigns up until that point. But he was also willing to buck his own party at times, criticizing Trump’s actions during the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, for example, and voting for President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill.

That vote prompted Trump to release a statement in January 2022 raising the specter of a primary challenge against Bacon that year: “Anyone want to run for Congress against Don Bacon in Nebraska?”

The emails from Trump’s company asking for help from Bacon’s office came a couple weeks later. Canter, the ethics expert, said the timing made the request more troubling, potentially increasing the pressure on Bacon to help. (No significant primary challenger materialized, but Trump did not support Bacon in his race.)

Records show Bacon’s office quickly went into motion, gathering the forms and rationales it would need to push the case forward with the State Department.

When ProPublica first reached out to Cartwright, Bacon’s former director of special projects, she initially said she had only a faint recollection about the case. She called back hours later unsolicited and in a brief conversation shared some details about her role. She recalled that someone had called the congressman to ask for his intervention and that the request was not treated like typical pleas for help from constituents.

“It was higher-level than your average Joe,” she said.

Cartwright did not say if she told Bacon or anyone else that she thought it was inappropriate for her to work on the request. She asked that the article not include her name, but ProPublica did not agree to that request.

The next day, a spokesperson for Bacon reached out to ProPublica and accused a reporter of harassing the former aide and of misrepresenting her statements about the Trump Media visa: “Ms. Cartwright has informed us she didn’t say this to you and that you twisted/misrepresented her words.”

Asked about that claim, Cartwright said in a text message “you misrepresented what I said” and said she worked hundreds of cases at Bacon’s office and all of them were “via the direction of Mr. Bacon, as we have been directed to help constituents.”

In his letter to ProPublica, the Trump Media lawyer said the company “utilized standard constituent services, offered and performed by every member of Congress to obtain legislative assistance in connection with Mr. Novachki’s visa application.” The letter added that portraying the company as “having acted inappropriately” would be “categorically false” and “defamatory.”

If Trump is elected again, not only would his companies potentially get an inside edge in influencing the government to further their interests, but ethics experts have also warned that his more than $2 billion stake in Trump Media could become a path to influencing him. Advertisers, vendors or investors who have political agendas could be in a position to use the social media enterprise to get favorable treatment.

Last month, ProPublica reported that the company quietly entered into a business deal with a major Republican donor who has interests before the federal government.

The Trump administration was sometimes hostile to the various types of visas reserved for skilled foreigners. Immigration lawyers complained during his term that visas with subjective criteria, such as the O-1, became more challenging to obtain. Vetting of an applicant’s acclaim in their field got more vigorous, they said. The Trump administration also stopped deferring to prior approvals for applicants looking to extend their visas.

Most significantly, in 2020 amid the pandemic, Trump enacted restrictions blocking entry to people seeking O-1 and similar visas. The Trump administration said the moves were made to slow the spread of the virus and protect Americans jobs during uncertain times, but immigration advocates alleged the administration was using the pandemic as a pretext to crack down on legal immigration.

Trump has at times expressed more openness to skilled immigrants. A couple months ago, for example, Trump said during a podcast hosted by Silicon Valley venture capitalists that he would allow foreign students at American universities to stay after they graduate.

Trump Media’s reliance on labor from abroad extends beyond Novachki. ProPublica obtained an invoice showing at least one other employee working for Trump Media through the foreign outsourcing firm Cosmic. The LinkedIn pages of five other people, who describe themselves as based in the Balkans, mention working for Trump Media in tasks including software engineering and customer support.

Cosmic did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump in the past has been accused of straying from his immigration platform in his own affairs.

Earlier this year, the Associated Press reported that Trump Media had successfully applied for an H-1B visa, a more common visa generally reserved for those who have specific degrees. The company told reporters at the time that the application was made by prior management and that current management “swiftly terminated the process” when it learned of it.

And Melania Trump, after she had married Donald Trump, sponsored her mother’s application to immigrate from Slovenia and get permanent residency in the U.S. Trump has criticized this so-called “chain migration” — immigrants applying to have their relatives follow them into the country.

“CHAIN MIGRATION must end now!” he once tweeted. “Some people come in, and they bring their whole family with them, who can be truly evil. NOT ACCEPTABLE!”

Do you have any information about Trump Media that we should know? Robert Faturechi can be reached by email at robert.faturechi@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 213-271-7217. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.

The Apple TV+ Vince Vaughn series Bad Monkey features a soundtrack of Tom Petty covers, and the show’s music supervisor, Tony Von Pervieux, says it wasn’t hard to get artists to…

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The Illinois Flag Commission will accept submissions for a new state flag design Sept. 3 through Oct. 18, Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias announced on Wednesday.

A date for the memorial service has yet to be announced.

The Mars-Kellanova merger, the Kroger-Albertsons court case, and the monopolization lawsuit against RealPage all bolster her case against price-fixing.

A paperwork snafu kicked an abortion rights measure off the ballot in Arkansas. Organizers can try again in 2026.

The state has finally embraced indigenous land management techniques to help alleviate its wildfire crisis.

by Lisa Song

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

The Environmental Protection Agency has taken the first ever federal action against a system that misleads consumers about the recycled content in plastic products.

A ProPublica investigation in June showed how the plastics industry uses a controversial accounting method called mass balance to advertise plastic products as 20% or 30% recycled even if they physically contain less than 1% recycled content.

It involves a number shuffle, done only on paper, that inflates the advertised recycledness of one product by reducing the advertised recycledness of another, often less lucrative, product. Done purely for marketing, it has been criticized by environmentalists as a greenwashing tactic.

According to an EPA policy released this month, companies that want the federal government’s stamp of approval for their sustainable products can no longer use such convoluted math.

The EPA’s Safer Choice standard is a voluntary program that allows manufacturers to affix a “Safer Choice” label to their dish soap, laundry detergent and other products. The roughly 1,800 products that have earned that distinction include household cleaners sold in grocery stores and more niche products like industrial carpet stain removers. Until now, the program’s criteria have focused on encouraging brands to reduce their use of toxic chemicals. But the updated standard, released on Aug. 8, strengthens requirements for sustainable packaging as well; plastic packaging must contain at least 15% postconsumer recycled content.

A key requirement: The content must be determined “by weight,” effectively forbidding the mathematical sleight of hand.

“This is the turning point” that will allow us to start killing the “hoax” of mass balance, said Jan Dell, a chemical engineer who founded The Last Beach Cleanup, a nonprofit fighting plastic pollution.

It’s the latest of several Biden administration actions to tackle the plastic crisis, which is smothering communities, oceans and even our bodies with toxic material that doesn’t break down in nature. Last month, the White House announced that the federal government — the world’s largest buyer of consumer products — would stop purchasing single-use plastic by 2035. Reuters also reported that U.S. negotiators would support global limits on plastic production in ongoing talks for a United Nations plastics treaty.

This EPA decision shows that President Joe Biden’s team is adopting more aggressive policies to curb plastic, said Anthony Schiavo, senior director at Lux Research. Schiavo’s company analyzes global trends in emerging petrochemical and plastics technologies.

The new requirement effectively shuts out of the program any product made through a much-heralded chemical recycling technology called pyrolysis, which ProPublica’s investigation revealed to be so inefficient that it cannot yield more than 10% recycled content. In practice, it yields far less. Mass balance has been key to marketing those products and the technology.

A prominent plastics industry trade group defended mass balance and cited its use in other products like paper and fair-trade chocolate. “Mass balance is a widely accepted accounting tool used by a variety of industries that would encourage more recycled content in the overall economy,” Adam Peer, the American Chemistry Council’s senior director of plastics sustainability, said in an email.

The EPA gives annual awards to participants that have done particularly well in its program. Those recognized in 2023, for instance, included The Clorox Co., Rust-Oleum, Ecos and Seventh Generation, which grew their inventories of less-toxic cleaning products and educated consumers about the Safer Choice program.

ProPublica asked these four companies whether it would be difficult to transition to plastic packaging that meets the 15% threshold. None responded to requests for comment.

The EPA did not comment directly on the policy’s implications for pyrolysis or mass balance. The agency instead referred ProPublica to comments it made last year to the Federal Trade Commission about mass balance, calling it deceptive and advising against promoting it. “It would be clearer to focus on calculations that involve the actual amount of material used,” the agency told the FTC.

After an earlier version of the EPA policy, posted in November, left the door open for the use of mass balance, activists including Dell warned the agency about the accounting method’s flaws. And a group of state and local officials, including the attorneys general of 11 states, shared similar reservations on how the EPA should define recycled content.

In response to those comments, the EPA wrote that the final policy was written to “respect this consumer expectation” that “products with labels indicating use of recycled content contain post-consumer recycled content.”

“Common sense has prevailed here,” said Peter Blair, who co-wrote the activists’ comments with Dell. Blair, policy and advocacy director at the environmental group Just Zero, said he was thrilled that the EPA’s final decision prioritized “truthful, accurate” labeling of recycled content for a program that’s not explicitly about plastic.

The activists’ campaign reflects the mounting pressure to scrutinize and regulate how plastic — especially plastic recycled via newer technologies — is marketed. European regulators have banned the most extreme version of mass balance. And the FTC is updating the Green Guides, which spell out how companies can advertise recycled content in sustainable products. Those officials, too, are considering whether to allow mass balance.

Blair hopes the EPA decision sets a precedent for where the federal government will stand.

The company’s pledge to conserve water at its data centers doesn’t account for the thirsty power plants that keep them running.