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The final steel beam was put in place Tuesday on the new 16-story inpatient hospital tower that’s under construction at Barnes-Jewish Hospital.

EAST ST. LOUIS-- A woman was killed in a fatal shooting in East Saint Louis early Wednesday morning. The incident occurred around 1 a.m. on the 1300 block of N. 44th Street at the Roosevelt Homes housing complex, according to police. The Illinois State Police public safety enforcement group was on the scene, investigating. The [...]

by Duaa Eldeib

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The Senate on Tuesday passed legislation that, for the first time, expressly permits states to spend millions of federal dollars on stillbirth prevention.

The Maternal and Child Health Stillbirth Prevention Act, which passed the House in mid-May, now goes to President Joe Biden, who is expected to sign the measure into law.

ProPublica has spent the past two years reporting on the crisis around stillbirth, the death of an expected child at 20 weeks of pregnancy or more. Every year in the U.S., more than 20,000 pregnancies end in stillbirth. Research shows as many as 1 in 4 stillbirths may be preventable.

The bipartisan bill, which does not allocate any new money, amends the Social Security Act to add stillbirth prevention and research to the programs that can use existing Title V funds dedicated to improving the health of mothers and children.

“This bill is the first step to preventing stillbirths across America, and I will keep pushing to deliver the federal resources needed to bring down the shockingly high rate of stillbirths and maternal mortality in the United States,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., who credited ProPublica for keeping a spotlight on the stillbirth crisis.

Merkley introduced the bill with Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., and U.S. Reps. Ashley Hinson, R-Iowa, and Alma Adams, D-N.C., introduced the measure in the House.

For decades, Adams said, Congress has underinvested in addressing stillbirths, despite having tremendous power to direct money and resources toward research, awareness and effective interventions.

“This does not have to be a silent crisis anymore,” she said, adding that several thousand lives can be saved every year.

“I’m very thankful to ProPublica,” Adams said. “They’ve raised this issue to the forefront of U.S. politics.”

The U.S. has long lagged behind other wealthy countries in reducing stillbirths, but Adams said she hopes that will change.

The bill, which was first introduced in 2022 but never voted on, was reintroduced last July. The Senate passed the measure unanimously, but it was sent back to the Senate because of minor changes made in the House.

Emily Price, CEO of the Iowa-based nonprofit Healthy Birth Day, which has championed the measure, said when Title V was written in the 1930s, stillbirth was left out because of the outdated belief that stillbirths just happen. The bill’s passage, she said, means stillbirth “is finally being recognized for the crisis that it is in America.”

“Now we know better, and we must do better,” she said. “The impact will affect families immediately and for generations to come.”

She said that after ProPublica’s stillbirth series was published, more people opened up about their experiences, and members of Congress and their staffs began sharing how stillbirth had affected their own families and friends.

“It was in these moments that we saw change coming,” Price said.

Fewer than 20 state health departments use money allocated under Title V Maternal and Child Health block grants for stillbirth prevention, Price said.

The new legislation includes examples of services that states can implement, many of which have been adopted in other countries. Programs include tracking fetal movement, improving the timing of birth when risk factors are present, encouraging safe sleep positions during pregnancy, supporting pregnant patients to stop smoking and monitoring for signs that the fetus is not growing as expected.

Without a federal law in place, states have had to look for local solutions. Minnesota mother Amanda Duffy, who was at the center of a November 2022 ProPublica story, enlisted the help of Minnesota lawmakers, including newly elected state Sen. Susan Pha, who was pregnant. Pha tested Healthy Birth Day’s Count the Kicks app, which encourages expectant parents to track their baby’s movement in the womb, during her third trimester. She was convinced.

“This needs to be in the hands of every single expectant mom who is pregnant because it is such a powerful tool,” Pha said.

She was lead author of the Minnesota bill to establish a stillbirth prevention pilot program that incorporates Count the Kicks. The Minnesota Legislature passed the bill last month.

North Carolina doesn’t have a state stillbirth prevention law in place, which is part of the reason Tomeka James Isaac had been advocating for the Maternal and Child Health Stillbirth Prevention Act.

In 2018, the North Carolina mother was rushed into emergency surgery. She delivered her stillborn son, Jace, and then nearly died herself. Isaac, a Black woman, is now executive director of the nonprofit Jace’s Journey, which addresses disparities in maternal and infant health. Black women are more than twice as likely to have a stillbirth than white women, and they face an increased risk of dying during or soon after pregnancy.

Isaac traveled to Washington, D.C., last month with Price and other stillbirth families to advocate for the bill’s passage and a second bipartisan stillbirth bill pending in Congress. That bill, the Stillbirth Health Improvement and Education (SHINE) for Autumn Act, proposes $45 million over the next five years for improving data collection, stillbirth research, awareness and education, as well as supporting training for fetal autopsies.

Jessica Brady Reader, a former congressional aide, is now pushing for SHINE. After Reader gave birth to her stillborn daughter, Francesca, in 2021, she and her husband parked in front of the funeral home to read their daughter a nightly bedtime story until her body was cremated and they could bring her remains home.

“I view this as the beginning, not the end,” she said. “Passing SHINE is a necessary next step. We can’t stop.”

The St. Louis region gained another corporate headquarters this year, when a Fortune 1,000 company moved from Irvine, California to downtown Clayton.

Congress should stop hiding behind the unelected, bureaucratic, pro-corporate World Trade Organization and restore Country of Origin Labeling for meat in the 2024 Farm Bill. The U.S. House of Representatives released their draft of the Farm Bill, the Senate distributed their Farm Bill framework and neither includes mandatory country of origin labeling for meat. Country […]

The post Farmers and consumers demand country of origin labeling be included in Farm Bill appeared first on Missouri Independent.

A person is dead after a late-night fatal shooting in Wentzville, with one suspect arrested and a woman cooperating with police.

The right haircut can be hard for anyone to find. Some St. Louis hairdressers understand a good haircut is especially important for transgender clients. As St. Louis Public Radio’s Lauren Brennecke reports, these stylists and barbers are moving toward gender-free terminology and using in-depth consultations.

After some very nice days, hotter temperatures are on deck for the next seven days. Mostly sunny skies Wednesday and noticeably warmer, highs around 90 degrees. Clear and warmer overnight; wake-up temperatures Thursday will be in the upper 60s to low 70s. Highs in the mid-90s are expected Thursday with more humidity. That will send [...]

by Ken Schwencke

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

We updated our “Supreme Connections” database on Wednesday with new entries from recently released financial disclosures from Supreme Court justices, as well as five filings from 2003 to 2007 we had previously been missing.

“Supreme Connections” is our database that makes it easy for anyone to browse justices’ financial disclosures and to search for connections to people and companies mentioned within them.

This update includes data from eight disclosures made public last Friday, covering the 2023 calendar year. It does not include data for Justice Samuel Alito, who received a 90-day extension.

The latest update includes two 2019 vacations retroactively added by Justice Clarence Thomas, which were paid for by billionaire Harlan Crow and which the justice had previously failed to disclose. ProPublica was the first to reveal those and an array of other significant gifts from several billionaires. Thomas previously argued he did not need to disclose such gifts.

We have also added information from a 2003 filing from Alito and information from Chief Justice John Roberts’ 2004-07 filings that were previously obtained by JudicialWatch and archived by the Internet Archive. While federal ethics law requires judges to file these disclosures each year, the law requires most of them to be destroyed after six years, making many disclosures from earlier years hard to find.

In total, the update adds $50,000 worth of gifts disclosed (including concert tickets given to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson by Beyoncé herself), 18 new organizations and individuals, and more than 200 new connections, such as book deals, trips and reimbursements.

Browse the database to learn more.

Do you have any tips on the Supreme Court? Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.

Blondie is bringing two of their albums back to digital services.The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame band announced on Instagram that Ghosts of Download and Panic of Girls will both be…

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A woman was believed to have been struck and killed by a train behind the Super 8 hotel.

Monopolies across the grocery supply chain squeeze consumers and small-business owners alike. Big Data will only entrench those dynamics further.

There are seven different trade actions to limit Chinese dominance of solar components. But only now is trade policy being aligned with industrial policy.

by Justin Elliott

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

A few hours after we published a story on the luxury travel a billionaire provided to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the email arrived in my inbox.

A reader had tapped out a single sentence on their iPhone and hit send: We should look, it said, at a relative Thomas had taken in and raised as a son. The reader informed me that Harlan Crow, the same politically connected billionaire who had bankrolled the justice’s travels around the globe, had also paid private school tuition for the relative.

My colleagues and I chased down the tip; a key break came when we found direct evidence of the billionaire’s tuition payments in some bankruptcy filings for one of the private schools in question. As we reported in the resulting story a few weeks later, the billionaire had paid roughly $100,000 for private school tuition, essentially a gift of cash to a sitting Supreme Court justice.

Crow’s office told us that he “has long been passionate about the importance of quality education and giving back to those less fortunate.” Thomas didn’t respond to questions for the story. On Friday, the justice acknowledged for the first time in a new financial disclosure filing that he should have publicly reported two free vacations he received from Crow.

At ProPublica, we often discuss the concept of the “maximum story.” It comes up when we’re deciding whether it’s worth spending a chunk of time reporting on a given topic. In gambler’s terms, it translates to what’s the biggest potential payoff of making this bet? What’s the best story, the one most vital to the public, that we might land?

It’s a useful idea, but the truth is the maximum story is often one we can’t even imagine. That was the case with the private school tuition tip. My co-workers and I had spent the previous four months piecing together the luxury travel provided to Thomas, but we had not dreamed that a billionaire was also secretly paying basic living expenses for a justice.

And we never would have thought to look if not for the reader who made the decision to write in with that tip. I’ve been a reporter here at ProPublica for more than 12 years covering politics and business, and every major story I’ve worked on has been propelled forward by tips.

I spent years reporting on how Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, has worked against making tax preparation easier and less costly. When I wrote about misleading marketing tactics by Intuit that cost Americans tax filers billions of dollars, I relied on tips from employees at all levels of the company. Sometimes we heard from executives who attended strategy meetings; other times we heard from customer service reps who were unsettled by what they were being asked to do.

After we published, we heard from hundreds of readers who’d experienced deceptive tactics, and we wrote about that, too. In the end, those stories directly led to a legal settlement that delivered $141 million back to consumers.

Many of my sources need to be anonymous, so I’m somewhat limited in what I can tell you about them. In the past, they’ve included company insiders like the Intuit employees or whistleblowers who have seen something that troubled them. But I’m constantly surprised by what I think of as the hydraulics of information: something heard in a restaurant, seen on the street or mentioned by a relative. Those, too, are often important leads for our reporting.

The team behind the award-winning Supreme Court series: from left, Brett Murphy, Alex Mierjeski, Justin Elliott, Kirsten Berg and Joshua Kaplan (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

Going from a tip or rumor to a confirmed story can take weeks or months of reporting, of course. That’s especially true because I focus on the rich and powerful: people, companies and organizations that use money and influence to shield themselves from scrutiny. My ability to home in on those important stories relies on hearing from people like you.

Right now I’m reporting on the election. There’s no shortage of political coverage, but I’m still convinced there are important stories about wrongdoing that haven’t been told yet. I’m interested in the world of Donald Trump — his campaign, businesses and the people around him — as well as the broader 2024 political scene. Tips about other candidates, Democrats and Republicans, are also welcome.

I’m also always looking for under-covered stories about business and politics more broadly, no matter the specific subject.

If you know something you think I should know — a rumor, an observation, something you’ve noticed that’s unusual or concerning — please get in touch. Even if it seems small or you heard it second hand, what you know may be hugely important.

How to Reach Me

My email is justin@propublica.org. You can call or text me at 774-826-6240. If you use the secure messaging apps Signal or WhatsApp, I’m also at that number.

My Mailing Address

Justin Elliott ProPublica 155 Ave. of the Americas 13th Floor New York, NY 10013

Here’s What to Expect if You Reach Out

I’ll read whatever you send. I check my texts and email often. You can also leave a voicemail or even send a physical letter.

Many of my stories rely on people who need to be anonymous, and I take privacy very seriously.

If you have an idea but you think it’s a better fit for another reporter, you can find instructions for how to share information with us securely on our general tips page.

As Cornel West is receiving ballot access help from Republicans, 20 years ago Al Sharpton’s campaign for president was largely orchestrated by Roger Stone.

Corporations sold Americans on the chasing arrows — while stripping the logo of its worth.

Many people seeking asylum are fleeing climate disasters. Biden's latest border move puts them even more at risk.

Of the 147 companies with a package recyclability goal, only 15 percent were on track to meet it.