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How much has WildCare Park cost taxpayers? How many animals are there now? When will it open? The safari-style park’s general curator answers questions about progress.

Tower Grove CDC develops software app that it describes as a “Zillow for nonprofits.”

St. Louis County Clerk Diann Valenti’s attorney said the accusations won’t hold up in court.

St. Louis County will have a new prosecuting attorney shortly after the New Year, when Wesley Bell leaves office to take his newly won seat in Congress.

The Board of Elections will be closed Wednesday, December 25, 2024, in observance of the Christmas Holiday.

O’FALLON, Ill. — Two people died early Christmas morning, Dec. 25, 2024, following a head-on collision on Interstate 64 near O'Fallon, IL., prompting the closure of the eastbound lanes at mile marker 19. The crash occurred at approximately 3:23 a.m. on Wednesday, according to Illinois State Police. Illinois State Police reported that a Lexus driven by Quincy Jones, 41, of St. Louis, was traveling westbound in the eastbound lanes when it collided with a Ford driven by Christopher M. Sahs, 34, of New Baden. Sahs was pronounced dead at the scene, while Jones was transported to HSHS St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in O’Fallon, where he was pronounced dead at 4:45 a.m., according to St. Clair County Coroner Calvin Dye Sr. Emergency responders were required to extricate at least two victims from the wreckage. The investigation into the crash is ongoing, and authorities indicated that dense fog may have been a contributing factor. The eastbound lanes of Interstate 64 were

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A Democrat from St. Ann is once again pushing for legislation placing more restrictions on commercial dog breeders, though it faces long odds thanks to resistance from pet stores and large agriculture operations. A bill that would regulate commercial animal breeders is awaiting the 2025 legislative session — though its sponsor predicts pushback from pet […]

Situated along Grant's Trail, the new concept in the former Pedego Electric Bikes will feature Perennial's beers and Common Ritual Whiskey's spirits.

Some details are included in an emergency court action from January that allowed Jeffrey Goedde's mother to be designated temporarily as guardian, the decision-making authority.

Of the 96 microlicenses issued so far, 41 have either been revoked or are currently at risk of being revoked. Another three are under investigation.

ST. LOUIS - One of the suspects allegedly involved in the shooting death of CBC student Colin Brown is set to appear in court Thursday. Donovan Baucom is expected to appear before a judge at the Carnahan Courthouse Thursday. Baucom faces six felony counts: murder-first degree, three counts of armed criminal action , assault-first degree, [...]

ST. LOUIS - It's mild but damp out there, with areas of fog, drizzle and spotty light rain. The drizzle will continue through the morning hours Thursday. Temperatures will be in the low 50s Thursday afternoon. We'll have scattered rain again overnight into Friday morning. Friday temperatures will be similar to Thursday, in the low [...]

by ProPublica

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

Over the past year, as the 2024 election dominated headlines, ProPublica’s reporters and editors dove deeply into the issues atop many voters’ minds.

Kavitha Surana, Cassandra Jaramillo and Lizzie Presser uncovered the deaths of at least five women who weren’t able to access timely reproductive and medical care under abortion bans in Texas and Georgia. As part of our series examining new patterns of immigration, Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel reported on what was happening in Whitewater, Wisconsin, as the city became a Republican talking point. Eli Hager and Lucas Waldron dug into why low-income families in Arizona weren’t using school vouchers as voucher supporters were pitching similar programs across the country.

That’s not all. Our reporters also spent months investigating other issues that touch readers’ lives, from the challenges of finding a mental health care provider who takes insurance to the human toll of the fentanyl crisis.

ProPublica reporters will continue this work in the new year as Donald Trump’s second administration takes shape. In the meantime, revisit ProPublica’s 25 most-read stories published in 2024, as measured by the total amount of time spent reading them across several of our publishing platforms.

1. The Year After a Denied Abortion By Stacy Kranitz, special to ProPublica, and Kavitha Surana

Tennessee law prohibits women from having abortions in nearly all circumstances. But once the babies are here, the state provides little help. ProPublica followed Mayron Michelle Hollis and her family for a year as they struggled to make it.

2. “Eat What You Kill” By J. David McSwane; co-published with Montana Free Press

Hailed as a savior upon his arrival at St. Peter’s Hospital in downtown Helena, Montana, Dr. Thomas C. Weiner became a favorite of patients and the hospital’s highest earner. As the myth surrounding the high-profile oncologist grew, so did the trail of patient harm and suspicious deaths.

3. Armed and Underground: Inside the Turbulent, Secret World of an American Militia By Joshua Kaplan

Internal messages reveal how AP3, one of the largest U.S. militias, rose even as prosecutors pursued other paramilitary groups after the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol.

4. How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe By Sharon Lerner, photography by Haruka Sakaguchi, special to ProPublica; co-published with The New Yorker

Decades ago, Kris Hansen showed 3M that its PFAS chemicals were in people’s bodies. Her bosses halted her work. As the EPA took steps to force the removal of the chemicals from drinking water, she wrestled with the secrets that 3M kept from her and the world.

Candace Fails holds a photograph of her daughter Nevaeh Crain, who died last year after seeking help from two hospitals for pregnancy complications. (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica)

5. A Pregnant Teenager Died After Trying to Get Care in Three Visits to Texas Emergency Rooms By Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana

It took three ER visits and 20 hours before a hospital admitted 18-year-old Nevaeh Crain as her condition worsened. Doctors insisted on two ultrasounds to confirm “fetal demise.” She’s one of at least three Texas women who died under the state’s abortion ban.

6. Multiple Trump Witnesses Have Received Significant Financial Benefits From His Businesses, Campaign By Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

Witnesses in the various criminal cases against Donald Trump have gotten pay raises, new jobs and more. If any benefits were intended to influence testimony, that could be a crime.

7. “Not Medically Necessary”: Inside the Company Helping America’s Biggest Health Insurers Deny Coverage for Care By T. Christian Miller, ProPublica; Patrick Rucker, The Capitol Forum; and David Armstrong, ProPublica

When companies like Aetna or UnitedHealthcare want to rein in costs, they turn to EviCore, whose business model depends on turning down payments for care recommended by doctors for their patients.

8. IRS Audit of Trump Could Cost Former President More Than $100 Million By Paul Kiel, ProPublica, and Russ Buettner, The New York Times

The tax agency concluded in its long-running investigation that Donald Trump effectively claimed the same massive write-off twice on his failed Chicago tower.

9. A Woman Died After Being Told It Would Be a “Crime” to Intervene in Her Miscarriage at a Texas Hospital By Cassandra Jaramillo and Kavitha Surana

Josseli Barnica is one of at least three pregnant Texas women who died after doctors delayed emergency care. She’d told her husband that the medical team said it couldn’t act until the fetal heartbeat stopped.

10. Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable. By Kavitha Surana

At least two women in Georgia died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state, ProPublica has found. This is one of their stories.

11. How Walmart’s Financial Services Became a Fraud Magnet By Craig Silverman and Peter Elkind

Scammers have duped consumers out of more than $1 billion by exploiting Walmart’s lax security. The company has resisted taking responsibility while breaking promises to regulators and skimping on training.

12. He Was Convicted of Killing His Baby. The DA’s Office Says He’s Innocent, but That Might Not Be Enough. By Pamela Colloff, photography by Stacy Kranitz; co-published with The New York Times Magazine

When new scientific evidence casts doubt on convictions, the justice system has no easy path to freedom — even when it’s the prosecutors doing the asking.

13. Trump’s Lawyers Told the Court That No One Would Give Him a Bond. Then He Got a Lifeline, but They Didn’t Tell the Judges. By Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

An appeals court reduced Donald Trump’s bond by more than 60% after his attorneys claimed it was a “practical impossibility” to pay the full amount. Their failure to disclose a proposal from a billionaire financier may have violated ethics rules.

14. For the Women Who Accused the Trump Campaign of Harassment, It’s Been More Harassment By Marilyn W. Thompson

Donald Trump is well known for publicly bullying his political rivals, but the president-elect’s campaign has also used similar tactics to launch private, relentless attacks against some of its own workers.

15. Inside the Historic Suit That the Gun Industry and Republicans Are on the Verge of Killing By Vernal Coleman, photography by Sarahbeth Maney

For 25 years, gunmakers have repeatedly tried to end one city’s lawsuit over illegal gun sales. Meanwhile, illicit purchases of firearms continued at an unrelenting and hazardous pace.

16. Inside Ziklag, the Secret Organization of Wealthy Christians Trying to Sway the Election and Change the Country By Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented

The little-known charity is backed by famous conservative donors, including the families behind Hobby Lobby and Uline. It spent millions to make a big political push for the 2024 election — but it may have violated the law.

(Collage by Han Cao for ProPublica. Source images: Brown County, Wisconsin, court document and photographs courtesy of Maylia Sotelo and Carrie Harrison.)

17. Maylia and Jack: A Story of Teens and Fentanyl By Lizzie Presser; co-published with Teen Vogue

Police knew she was selling fake Percocet but did not stop her. His mother sought the right treatment for his addiction but could not find it. Two teens got caught up in a system unprepared to handle kids on either side of the drug trade.

18. Inside Project 2025’s Secret Training Videos By Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented

“Eradicate climate change references”; only talk to conservative media; don’t leave a paper trail for watchdogs to discover. In a series of never-before-published videos, Project 2025 detailed how a second Trump administration would operate.

19. What Happened in Whitewater By Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel, photography by Sofia Aldinio, special to ProPublica

Before Springfield, Ohio, became a flashpoint in the immigration debate, Trump and right-wing pundits exploited a police chief’s plea for resources to claim Whitewater was being subjected to an “invasion.” The truth turned out to be much more complicated.

Anna DiNoto in her office in Monroe, Washington. (Tony Luong, special to ProPublica)

20. Why I Left the Network By Annie Waldman, Maya Miller, Duaa Eldeib and Max Blau, photography by Tony Luong, special to ProPublica, design by Zisiga Mukulu; co-published with NPR

Those who need therapy often have to pay out of pocket or go without care, even if they have health insurance. Hundreds of mental health providers told us they fled networks because insurers made their jobs impossible and their lives miserable.

21. An 11-Year-Old Denied Making a Threat and Was Allowed to Return to School. Tennessee Police Arrested Him Anyway. By Aliyya Swaby, ProPublica, and Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio

A state law makes threats of mass violence at school a felony, even if they’re not credible. Judges and school officials say the law unnecessarily traumatizes kids.

22. Skipping School: America’s Hidden Education Crisis By Alec MacGillis; co-published with The New Yorker

Absenteeism has nearly doubled since the pandemic. With state and federal governments largely abdicating any role in getting kids back into classrooms, some schools have turned to private companies for a reimagined version of the truant officer.

Fabiola Velasquez walks her youngest child to school. (Ash Ponders, special to ProPublica)

23. In a State With School Vouchers for All, Low-Income Families Aren’t Choosing to Use Them By Eli Hager and Lucas Waldron

Working-class parents often express interest in vouchers. But in Arizona, the nation’s school choice capital, these families aren’t using them due to the inaccessibility of private schools and the costs of transportation, meals and uniforms.

24. Judge Aileen Cannon Failed to Disclose a Right-Wing Junket By Marilyn W. Thompson and Alex Mierjeski

Aileen Cannon, whose oversight of the Donald Trump classified documents case garnered widespread criticism, has repeatedly violated a rule requiring that federal judges disclose their attendance at private seminars.

25. A Third Woman Died Under Texas’ Abortion Ban. Doctors Are Avoiding D&Cs and Reaching for Riskier Miscarriage Treatments. By Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana

Thirty-five-year-old Porsha Ngumezi’s case raises questions about how abortion bans are pressuring doctors to avoid standard care even in straightforward miscarriages.

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In 2023 Bruce Springsteen was forced to postpone his tour with the E Street Band due to a bout with peptic ulcer disease, but he didn't stay away from the stage for long.…

Source

A look back at a jam-packed year of local music with several standout releases

Our executive editor offers his best of 2024.

From the Boeing door plug blowout to the assassination of Brian Thompson to the never-ending oligarch-fueled genocide of Gaza, 2024 was not a year of moral ambiguity or nuance.

by Renee Dudley

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

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating Microsoft in a wide-ranging probe that will examine whether the company’s business practices have run afoul of antitrust laws, according to people familiar with the matter. In recent weeks, FTC attorneys have been conducting interviews and setting up meetings with Microsoft competitors.

One key area of interest is how the world’s largest software provider packages popular Office products together with cybersecurity and cloud computing services, said one of the people, who asked not to be named discussing a confidential matter.

This so-called bundling was the subject of a recent ProPublica investigation, which detailed how, beginning in 2021, Microsoft used the practice to vastly expand its business with the U.S. government while boxing competitors out of lucrative federal contracts.

At the time, many federal employees used a software license that included the Windows operating system and products like Word, Outlook and Excel. In the wake of several devastating cyberattacks, Microsoft offered to upgrade those license bundles for free for a limited time, giving the government access to its more advanced cybersecurity products. The company also provided consultants to install the upgrades.

Vast swaths of the federal bureaucracy accepted, including all of the military services in the Defense Department — and then began paying for those enhanced services when the free trial ended. Former sales leaders involved in the effort likened it to a drug dealer hooking a user with free samples, as they knew federal customers would be effectively locked into the upgrades once they were installed. Microsoft’s offer not only displaced some existing cybersecurity vendors but also took market share from cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, as the government began using products that ran on Azure, Microsoft’s own cloud platform.

Some experts told ProPublica that the company’s tactics might have violated laws regulating contracting and competition, and the news organization reported that even some of Microsoft’s own attorneys had antitrust worries about the deals.

Microsoft has said its offer was “structured to avoid antitrust concerns.” The company’s “sole goal during this period was to support an urgent request by the Administration to enhance the security posture of federal agencies who were continuously being targeted by sophisticated nation-state threat actors,” Steve Faehl, the security leader for Microsoft’s federal business, told ProPublica.

Some of those incursions were the result of Microsoft’s own security lapses. As ProPublica reported in June, Russian state-sponsored hackers in the so-called SolarWinds attack exploited a weakness in a Microsoft product to steal sensitive data from the National Nuclear Security Administration and the National Institutes of Health, among other victims. Years before the attack was discovered, a Microsoft engineer warned product leaders about the flaw, but they refused to address it for fear of alienating the federal government and losing ground to competitors, ProPublica reported.

While the engineer’s proposed fix would have kept customers safe, it also would have created a “speed bump” for users logging on to their devices. Adding such “friction” was unacceptable to the managers of the product group, which at the time was in a fierce rivalry with competitors in the market for so-called identity tools, the news organization reported. These tools, which ensure that users have permission to log on to cloud-based programs, are important to Microsoft’s business strategy because they often lead to demand for the company’s other cloud services.

According to a person familiar with the FTC’s probe, one such identity product, Entra ID, formerly known as Azure Active Directory, is another focus of the agency’s investigation.

Microsoft has defended its decision against addressing the SolarWinds-related flaw, telling ProPublica in June that the company’s assessment included “multiple reviews” at the time and that its response to security issues is based on “potential customer disruption, exploitability, and available mitigations.” It has pledged to put security “above all else.”

The FTC views the fact that Microsoft has won more federal business even as it left the government vulnerable to hacks as an example of the company’s problematic power over the market, a person familiar with the probe told the news organization.

The commission is not alone in that view. “These guys are sort of a version of ‘too big to fail,’” said Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who chairs the Senate Finance Committee and a longtime critic of Microsoft. “I think it’s time to amp up the antitrust side of the house, dealing with antitrust abuses.”

The FTC’s investigation of Microsoft, which was first reported by the Financial Times and Bloomberg, is far from the company’s first brush with federal regulators over antitrust issues. More than two decades ago, the Department of Justice sued the company in a landmark antitrust case that nearly resulted in its breakup. Federal prosecutors alleged that Microsoft maintained an illegal monopoly in the operating system market through anticompetitive behaviors that prevented rivals from getting a foothold. Ultimately, the Justice Department settled with Microsoft, and a federal judge approved a consent decree that imposed restrictions on how the company could develop and license software.

John Lopatka, a former consultant to the FTC who now teaches antitrust law at Penn State, told ProPublica that the Microsoft actions detailed in the news organization’s recent reporting followed “a very familiar pattern” of behavior.

“It does echo the Microsoft case” from decades ago, said Lopatka, who co-authored a book on that case.

In the new investigation, the FTC has sent Microsoft a civil investigative demand, the agency’s version of a subpoena, compelling the company to turn over information, people familiar with the probe said. Microsoft confirmed that it received the document.

Company spokesperson David Cuddy did not comment on the specifics of the investigation but said the FTC’s demand is “broad, wide ranging, and requests things that are out of the realm of possibility to even be logical.” He declined to provide on-the-record examples. The FTC declined to comment.

The agency’s investigation follows a public comment period in 2023 during which it sought information on the business practices of cloud computing providers. When that concluded, the FTC said it had ongoing interest in whether “certain business practices are inhibiting competition.”

The recent demand to Microsoft represents one of FTC Commissioner Lina Khan’s final moves as chair, and the probe appears to be picking up steam as the Biden administration winds down. The commission’s new leadership, however, will decide the future of the investigation.

President-elect Donald Trump said this month that he will elevate Commissioner Andrew Ferguson, a Republican attorney, to lead the agency. Following the announcement, Ferguson said in a post on X, “At the FTC, we will end Big Tech’s vendetta against competition and free speech. We will make sure that America is the world’s technological leader and the best place for innovators to bring new ideas to life.”

Trump also said he would nominate Republican lawyer Mark Meador as a commissioner, describing him as an “antitrust enforcer” who previously worked at the FTC and the Justice Department. Meador is also a former aide to Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican who introduced legislation to break up Google.

Doris Burke contributed research.

Threats to home rule could shatter the city’s status as a safe haven.