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An “American supper club” restaurant that first opened in July 2023 in the Central West End is relocating to a larger space within the neighborhood.

Since opening up its first of five crisis centers in 2021, Compass Health Network has saved the state over $62 million and served over 17 thousand people.

The Democratic National Committee will send $2.5 million to more than 30 of its state and territorial parties, including Missouri, in the closing weeks of the 2024 election cycle, the DNC said in a Friday statement. With the new grants, national Democrats will have contributed to all 57 state and territorial chapters for the first […]

A Washington County man was killed in a train crash on Thursday night after his vehicle was struck by a train while he was stuck on the tracks.

In 2023, the federal government reinstated access to Pell grants to incarcerated students– allowing them to apply for financial aid. This will affect the future of higher education in Missouri prisons. Rebecca Smith has more from one graduation ceremony where both incarcerated individuals and Department of Corrections staff received associate’s degrees.

Police said the crossbar, lights and bell at the tracks "were active and in working order."

At Cortex, lab space is available at a fraction of what it would cost companies and entrepreneurs on their own through shared-space company CIC St. Louis.

After three days of battling over scientific papers and expert testimony, the trial of a lawsuit challenging Missouri’s restrictions on gender-affirming treatments on Thursday turned to the impact the law has on patients and providers. Nicole Carr, a nurse practitioner at Southampton Community Healthcare in St. Louis, said anxiety, fear and depression first increased in […]

ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. - A shooting on Interstate 70 in Earth City overnight leaves a stretch of the highway shut down for hours. Police received the call for a shooting on I-70 a little after 12 a.m. early Friday morning. Police say the shooting happened on westbound I-70 in Earth City between Highway 141 [...]

ST. LOUIS - A surge of moisture from Hurricane Helene and an upper-level low pressure center over the mid-Mississippi Valley are coming together as expected and creating a wet Friday for the St. Louis area. Steady rain will be with us Friday through the daytime hours, with the heaviest falling from mid-morning through late afternoon. [...]

Peter Frampton is clearing the air over comments he made blaming Megadeth for him having to cancel a show in Virginia. During his Sept. 19 concert in Philadelphia, Frampton said he canceled his…

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Many times as I pass the tiny post office in the small Michigan town in which we live, I will think of my father, his struggles, the Depression… and the judge.

by Lisa Song

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In a landmark lawsuit filed this week, the California attorney general accused ExxonMobil of “deceptively” promoting chemical recycling as a solution for the plastics crisis, citing ProPublica’s recent reporting and expanding on our findings.

In June, we examined the oil giant’s claim that it had transformed discarded plastic into new fruit cups through an “advanced” chemical recycling technology called pyrolysis. We broke down the math to show just how little recycled content winds up in products made this way and how companies inflate that percentage in their marketing.

The lawsuit cited the fruit cup example alongside the attorney general’s own discoveries, which reveal an even more extreme gap between what ExxonMobil advertises and how much recycled plastic its products actually contain.

ProPublica reported that plastic made via pyrolysis can’t contain more than 10% recycled content. Because the technology is shrouded in secrecy, we could not determine the specific amount in ExxonMobil’s products.

Citing internal company documents, the lawsuit said ExxonMobil’s process yields less than 0.1% recycled plastic content.

Yet it marketed the cups as containing “30% ISCC PLUS certified-circular content” — shorthand for 30% recycled — through a controversial accounting method called mass balance, which allows recyclers to pump up the advertised recycledness of one product by reducing the advertised recycledness of other, less lucrative products.

The lawsuit cited ProPublica’s reporting on the first federal action against mass balance, taken last month when the Environmental Protection Agency prohibited its use in a voluntary program for sustainable products. The California lawsuit said mass balance is “widely criticized, including by some members of the plastics industry, precisely because it is deceptive to the public.”

ExxonMobil has a “massive financial interest” in ensuring that mass balance methods are “accepted broadly and even enshrined in law,” the lawsuit stated. “Indeed, continuing the public deception is ExxonMobil’s business model.”

During a press conference on Monday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta blasted the oil giant for “falsely touting ‘advanced recycling’” as a solution to the plastic crisis, calling it ExxonMobil’s “biggest greenwashing campaign.”

In a statement, an ExxonMobil spokesperson insisted that advanced recycling works. “To date, we’ve processed more than 60 million pounds of plastic waste into usable raw materials, keeping it out of landfills.” California officials have known for decades that the state’s recycling system isn’t effective, the statement said. “Instead of suing us, they could have worked with us to fix the problem.”

The California lawsuit does not focus solely on chemical recycling. It accused ExxonMobil of misleading the public for decades about the sustainability of plastic, first by promoting traditional recycling despite knowing that plastic is functionally not recyclable, and more recently by marketing advanced recycling as a cure-all. Unlike traditional recycling, advanced recycling uses heat or chemicals to break plastic down to its molecular building blocks. But it’s done little to improve America’s 5% plastic recycling rate and can’t solve the environmental damage or health problems caused by microplastics and toxic chemicals.

Plastic recycling is “a farce, a lie, a deceit,” Bonta said during the press conference. “One thing ExxonMobil actually does is recycle its lies.”

Judith Enck, founder of the advocacy group Beyond Plastics, called California’s action “the most consequential lawsuit in the country” in terms of holding the plastics industry accountable and told ProPublica it reminded her of the tobacco lawsuits from the 1990s, which eventually led to billions of dollars in settlements for deceptive advertising on the risks of smoking.

The lawsuit seeks an abatement fund to mitigate the harm caused by the company’s actions. Bonta told reporters that the fund — which he hopes will be “to the tune of billions of dollars” — will pay for efforts such as educating the public about the truth of plastic recycling. Enck said she wants the money to expand the refill-and-reuse infrastructure in California. That could include installing dishwashing equipment in schools and hospitals to reduce single-use plastic, or adding water bottle refill stations, which appear in airports but are rare in other public spaces.

Bonta’s lawsuit was filed on the same day as a separate lawsuit from four environmental groups, including the Sierra Club. The suit similarly accuses ExxonMobil of misleading the public about the recyclability of plastic. Bonta and the groups’ leaders spoke at the same press conference.

Enck said ProPublica’s reporting and other news outlets “created breadcrumbs for litigators.” The California lawsuit comes two years after Bonta’s office sent subpoenas to ExxonMobil and industry trade groups to investigate their “historic and ongoing efforts to deceive the public.”

The lawsuit also cited the company’s collaboration with trade groups like the American Chemistry Council. From 2020-2023, for instance, the company gave the council $19.4 million for an ad campaign and national policy work on advanced recycling. One video, which got more than 8 million YouTube views, declared: “Imagine a future where plastic is not wasted but instead remade over and over into the things that keep our food fresher, our families safer and our planet cleaner.”

This ad campaign, “with ExxonMobil at the helm, deceptively seeks to convince consumers that recycling, especially ‘advanced recycling,’ will save the day in order to continue saturating the public and the planet with single-use plastic,” the lawsuit said.

“It is disappointing that legal action has diverted time and resources away from our industry’s efforts to scale up a circular economy for plastics,” the American Chemistry Council said in a statement. “Regardless, we remain steadfast in our mission to advocate for effective policy, collaborate with communities, and invest in new technologies that help to increase plastics recycling and recycled plastic use in products, contributing to a more sustainable future.”

ExxonMobil’s ads are misleading because the company knows its advanced recycling process is not economically viable and can only handle small amounts of consumer waste, the lawsuit noted. In fact, only about 8% of the waste plastic fed into its advanced recycling system becomes new plastic; the rest gets burned up as fuel or becomes other nonplastic products. Even if ExxonMobil operated a potential future project that’s more efficient, it would only be able to turn 13% of the waste plastic into new plastic.

“The truth is ExxonMobil’s ‘advanced recycling’ program is less like a recycling program,” the lawsuit said, “and more like a waste disposal or destruction program akin to the incineration solutions advocated by ExxonMobil in the past.”

The billionaire seems to be driving some Harris campaign messaging.

Data centers are nothing compared to cattle farming.

Saving America from the Comstock Act and other repressive remnants of the 19th-century past

Tom Tomorrow brings you This Modern World

Harris and Trump’s foreign-policy aims in the Middle East proceed from the same incentive structures and presuppositions about U.S. supremacy.

by B. “Toastie” Oaster, High Country News

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with High Country News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

I’m standing at an Indigenous sacred site, looking at something I’m not supposed to see. Signs of ceremony are all around: little animal skulls, ribbons, a stump of freshly burnt sage stems in ashes, tied together with red yarn. It looks like a ceremony happened in the last week.

I’m here with a source who wants their story told — who wants to expose the harm that the public and private sectors are inflicting on tribal cultures in pursuit of renewable energy development. But the source also wants to protect these cultural sites from public exposure. So I don’t take any photos. I don’t record it in my notes. I walk away and do not publish what I see.

Another month, in another part of the Pacific Northwest, I’m at a tribal community event, not reporting, exactly, but relationship building — an important component of establishing trust in Indigenous journalism. I overhear an elder talking about a ceremonial rite of passage that takes place at a location where I have been reporting, a location sited for renewable energy development. The public isn’t supposed to know about this ceremony, which means I’m not supposed to know either. So I pretend I didn’t hear.

I’m engaged in a yearlong investigation, a partnership between two newsrooms, documenting how proposed developments are threatening sacred lands and Indigenous cultural resources. I usually write for an Indigenous editor, but none of my editors are Native right now on this story. I return to the virtual newsroom, and they’re eager to hear about what makes these sites sacred; we need to be able to communicate this to readers, they say, particularly when we dig into the legal and political mechanisms threatening the sites.

I want the public to understand the importance of these places, and part of me wants to tell my editors everything. But if I do, and the information escapes, it will be on me. I’m Native, too, and I have to handle this information responsibly, without selling out my kin. In the Native world, we tend to view each other — and all living things — as relatives. At the same time, my tribe is not from here, and I’m still learning about the cultures I’m reporting on. Language that would bring the location vibrantly to life is right there in my mind, but I don’t feel right about using it. The most I seem to be able to tell my editors — speaking accurately and honestly while respecting cultural concerns — is that tribal leaders won’t share that information with me.

I mention some rock features. My editors ask what the features are used for. A variety of purposes, I say, thinking carefully — hunting, storage, cooking. I’m leaving information out, but everything I say is true. Even mentioning the archaeological features could endanger them, putting them in the crosshairs of looters and vandals. Write one too-specific article, and tribal historic preservation officers might find themselves fighting off new age gatherings of non-Natives appropriating Indigenous worship. Or worse: Western scientists destroying ancestral remains for anthropological “research.”

During our discussion, my editors seem to believe that sharing as much information as possible is a public good. It’s a value assumption of investigative journalism — a very American value, and one I sometimes share. Transparency is what empowers the watchdog press. And of course we aren’t withholding information that’s critical to the investigation. But tribal cultures don’t necessarily put such a premium on transparency. In many Indigenous cultures, information is carefully guarded by storytellers, shared orally and only with select people or at certain times, if at all.

I sit down at my laptop to write, thinking again about words. How do I write about plants and sites and ceremonies I can’t write about?

During my reporting, a tribal government sends me, at my request, a set of guidelines about cultural information it doesn’t want published, like the names or pictures of the first foods that grow where I’m reporting. On the one hand, I don’t work for tribal governments, so I don’t have to do what they say. And I’ve worked with neighboring tribes who publicly identify some of the very same plants, which are threatened by renewable energy development. Yet I know I’d be responsible to the community if that information got out.

My own tribal citizenship impacts the reporting process, too. “Toastie, where are you from originally?” began a conversation I recently had with a Chickasaw legal expert. “You’re Choctaw. We're kind of cousins.” I’m still taken aback sometimes when I hear a question like this from another professional. Normally, I wouldn’t feel obligated to talk about my family history at work. But this part of our conversation is how we recognize each other and orient ourselves in relational space. My conduct as a reporter will reflect on my community. So we talk like Natives a bit before settling into our official roles.

I sit down at my laptop to write, thinking again about words. How do I write about plants and sites and ceremonies I can’t write about? And then one of my editors forwards me a note from another, paraphrasing a third editor: “Readers may say: They are only roots. How do we get them to think beyond that?”

I leave my desk, play some guitar, go for a walk, trying to shake off frustration. I know my editors are speaking for a readership we can’t assume is educated about Native issues like food sovereignty — the ability of a people to govern its own food sourcing. But I have to walk a narrow line between educating and oversharing. I find myself wishing everyone in America, myself included, had learned more about Native issues in school. Then we could avoid situations like this.

The problem haunts me over the dinner stove. “Root gathering,” a phrase I’ve heard Natives use, might be the simplest language to choose. But it sounds primitive, like something hunter-gatherers do; “civilized” people “harvest vegetables.” I pace around my apartment, searching for wording that might clarify what’s at stake. Indignation flashes through my mind as I reflect on how terms like “heirloom” are applied almost exclusively to European foods — Italian tomatoes, say, even though tomatoes were originally engineered by Indigenous scientists in South America.

I find myself wishing everyone in America, myself included, had learned more about Native issues in school. Then we could avoid situations like this.

What would these Indigenous roots be called if they were in rustic-looking display crates at Whole Foods? Finally, I think I’ve found a solution: I write “endemic, heirloom, organic root vegetable harvests.” True, it’s a word salad, but the plants themselves remain anonymous, and non-Native readers could better understand why they’re valuable.

I Slack the phrase to one of my editors. She laughs, understanding the jab at bourgeois vernacular. Few of those modifiers will make it past top edits; what remains in the final draft is simply a “root vegetable harvest.” Not as obvious, but at least we avoided “root gathering.”

It’s difficult to write for Natives and non-Natives at the same time. If a non-Native editor puts the term “first foods” in quotes, that could alienate Native readers. But a non-Native reader may never have encountered the term, and the quotes might help explain that it’s a common phrase.

It’s even more difficult when terms mean different things to different audiences, like the word “sacred.” Natives use it a lot, but I’ve seen it spark scorn in some non-Natives. (“Sacred land? It’s 2024!” reads a social media comment on one of our most recent stories.) Others seem to use it with a shallow understanding.

Handling information amid these tensions, created by different value systems, is the challenge and responsibility of a journalist. Of course, we can’t get into all this in the draft itself. So the challenge remains: How do you write about a sacred site without saying why it’s sacred, in a way that will help non-Natives care? There’s no clear dividing line between too much information and not enough. It’s the liminal space in which a lot of Indigenous affairs reporting takes place.