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This home is a Victorian masterpiece.

The Human Rights Campaign Foundation ranks Missouri last in its brand new State Equality Index, the most comprehensive survey of state-level commitment to LGBTQ+ equality. Twenty-three states accompany Missouri in the lowest-rated category on the list, which came out earlier this week.

Argylle gives us something we really don’t need right now: another exhausting, long-ass Matthew Vaughn movie. The British filmmaker/Guy Ritchie collaborator/husband of Claudia Schiffer has always had trouble deleting scenes from his lengthy genre spectaculars.

From the team behind Sugarfire Smoke House and Hi-Pointe Drive-In, the throwback pizza joint will be located in the former Pi Pizzeria space in the MX building.

There were indications that the men had been shot elsewhere and the bodies taken to the the rather isolated spot where they were found.

A new Missouri Historical Society collection is highlighting the life of a prominent Black St. Louis physician. Dr. John H. Gladney was the first Black ear, nose, and throat specialist in the city.

by Rob Davis

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

In the 1990s, Oregon’s powerful timber industry used its influence to win a series of tax cuts that have cost local governments a cumulative $3 billion. Once-vibrant communities were left struggling to pay for basic services without the taxes that once came from logging the valuable forests that surround them.

Now the industry is in line for another tax break, thanks to a key ally.

With the costs of fighting Oregon’s wildfires climbing, the timber industry worked with policymakers behind closed doors to develop legislation that would reduce what industrial forest owners pay for protecting their cash crop from flames. Timber lobbyists not only helped write the bill, they even helped write a top lawmaker’s talking points.

When the Oregon Legislature opens a monthlong session Monday, lawmakers in the nation’s top lumber-producing state will weigh a bill proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Steiner, a Portland Democrat running for state treasurer. Steiner, one of the state’s top budget writers, wants taxpayers to pay $7 million more annually for fighting fires so timber and ranching interests can pay less.

Her rationale: fairness. She says wildfires affect everyone, not just timberland and ranchland owners. Steiner told lawmakers at a Jan. 10 hearing that “we wanted to be sure that we came up with a solution that reflected the fact that this is a statewide problem.”

Meanwhile, a competing effort would do the opposite: raise taxes on timber. Democratic Sen. Jeff Golden’s bill would restore some of the income lost when lawmakers slashed taxes on the industry in the 1990s, which sapped money for libraries, prosecutors and sheriff’s patrols in communities where trees are harvested.

Steiner said she expected Golden’s plan to get “a robust public hearing,” but she also voiced concerns.

Oregon is one of a handful of states that place no limit on how much corporations or anyone else can give to political campaigns, and the timber industry has for years donated more to lawmakers in the state than anywhere else in the nation, a 2021 analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive found.

Timber companies also harvest more trees and pay less in taxes in Oregon than in neighboring Washington state, state analyses have shown.

Records show that timber companies and their trade groups have given Steiner $24,000 since 2020, most recently a $1,000 December donation from Weyerhaeuser, a major forestland owner. Golden’s financial disclosures list only one check from a timber company in his career, and the records show he gave the $500 to a nonprofit focused on restoring forests.

Steiner told ProPublica that her bill — cosponsored by one other Democrat and two Republicans — had nothing to do with campaign contributions and that Oregon’s history of cutting timber taxes is “only partially relevant to this particular conversation.”

“You can make an argument that we’re letting them off easy, or that we’re giving them the big tax break,” Steiner said. “And I’m gonna say, I don’t know, you may be right. It’s a bigger conversation.”

A 2020 investigation by ProPublica, Oregon Public Broadcasting and The Oregonian/OregonLive revealed how the timber industry wielded its influence to win the 1990s tax cuts even as timber harvests soared and local jobs disappeared with dramatic advances in automation.

Steiner said she hadn’t read the investigation. Golden has repeatedly cited the news organizations’ findings as essential reading.

The Wall Street real estate trusts and investment funds that now control much of Oregon’s private timberland “seem to be taking so much natural wealth out of Oregon forests,” Golden said, “without the corresponding benefit to communities and workers that traditional Oregon-based timber companies offer.”

Golden and seven Democratic cosponsors want a measure added to the November ballot that would raise taxes on timber companies by between $75 million and $110 million a year and partially restore what counties once received. Some of the new money would go to wildfire protection and protecting drinking water supplies that are threatened by logging.

He would also eliminate the Oregon Forest Resources Institute, a tax-funded agency that the news organizations found operated for years as a de facto lobbying arm of the industry. (The institute did not respond to a request for comment about the legislation.)

Other lawmakers have tried to tackle these issues before and failed.

State Rep. Paul Holvey, a Eugene Democrat, has been introducing bills to restore logging taxes for a decade. “Getting the Legislature to stand up and understand this issue and recognize the impact it’s having on our communities, our budgets and just across the board,” Holvey said, “it’s always been a challenge.”

During the 2021 legislative session, lawmakers set out to increase taxes on logging but ended up temporarily cutting them instead.

In heavily forested Polk County, west of Salem, cuts to Oregon’s tax on the value of timber took away more than $100 million in revenue over the years, the news organizations found.

Jeremy Gordon, one of three Polk County commissioners, said his county has to ask voters to approve new levies every five years just to afford basic public services like 24/7 sheriff’s patrols, jail staff and district attorneys. Golden’s proposed tax would allow the county to drastically reduce what taxpayers are asked to spend.

“That would be a big chunk of our public safety levy,” Gordon said. “I mean, that would be significant.”

On the other hand, Gordon is not enthusiastic about Steiner’s proposal because it pushes more firefighting costs — which include the cost of protecting the industry’s trees — onto taxpayers.

The head of a tax watchdog group also said she was taken aback by what Steiner put forward. “I think that Sen. Steiner was rolled by the industry,” said Jody Wiser, president of Tax Fairness Oregon.

“It absolutely makes no sense that legislators would go along with it,” Wiser said. The timber industry has “massive tax breaks already. They absolutely should not be getting additional tax breaks.”

The bill contains a complex variety of tax changes. But on the whole, it reduces costs for big timber and ranchland owners and raises them for Oregon income tax payers and people who own homes in the woods, among others. If the legislation passes, the state’s general fund alone would take a $7 million hit.

Weyerhaeuser, a publicly traded $24 billion real estate investment trust with 1.4 million acres of forestland in Oregon, participated in a private working group that agreed on Steiner’s proposal.

Betsy Earls, a Weyerhaeuser lobbyist, helped craft a two-page “talker” for Steiner that described how the bill’s cost shifts would create a system that is “stable and equitable.” Earls’ role in crafting the talking points was first reported by the Oregon Capital Chronicle.

Kyle Williams, a lobbyist for the Oregon Forest & Industries Council, an industry group whose funders include Weyerhaeuser, sent the talking points to Steiner on Nov. 28, according to an email that Steiner’s office provided. Weyerhaeuser donated $1,000 to Steiner’s campaign less than three weeks later.

“We support candidates in our operating areas across the country, and across the political spectrum,” a Weyerhaeuser spokesperson said.

Steiner said the industry’s donations had no effect on her position.

“I have a reputation as somebody who does her homework, works really hard to take a balanced approach, and that’s why entities across the political spectrum are so comfortable contributing to my campaign,” she said.

A spokesperson for the Oregon Forest & Industries Council said the trade group had not yet seen Golden’s bill and had no comment.

Golden and Steiner are refining the details of their bills as lawmakers prepare for their monthlong session. But Golden wants to see his plan on the ballot in a presidential election year, when turnout is typically higher.

Staff advisers to Gov. Tina Kotek also worked on plans for promoting Steiner’s bill, emails provided by Steiner show. A “communications strategy” document called for the governor’s staff to brief Kotek and get her support.

A spokesperson for the governor, Elisabeth Shepard, said Kotek’s staff only provided “technical support” to the group working on Steiner’s bill. Shepard declined to comment on the apparent contradiction.

Asked whether the governor supported Steiner’s proposal or Golden’s, Shepard said the governor “looks forward to reviewing any legislation on this matter that makes it to her desk.”

Tony Schick of Oregon Public Broadcasting contributed reporting.

Former Lynyrd Skynyrd drummer Artimus Pyle is out with a new album, Anthems - Honoring The Music Of Lynyrd Skynyrd, and he tells ABC Audio there was a clear reason why he wanted to make…

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Accompanying business fashion changes was also the changing language of business… always with an attempt to be “in the forefront, with it or a vision leader.”

Voters approved funding the Baltimore Children and Youth Fund following the unrest from the death of Freddie Gray, a Black man who died in police custody.

Workers can win union elections, but companies pull out all the stops to prevent them from obtaining a first contract.

He needs to highlight his positions against the Republicans’. And not give away too much in interim deals.

Why the attack on UNRWA looks a lot like collective punishment

by Umar Farooq

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 last decade, police departments across the U.S. have spent millions of dollars equipping their officers with body-worn cameras that record what happens as they go about their work. Everything from traffic stops to welfare checks to responses to active shooters is now documented on video.

The cameras were pitched by national and local law enforcement authorities as a tool for building public trust between police and their communities in the wake of police killings of civilians like Michael Brown, an 18 year old black teenager killed in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Video has the potential not only to get to the truth when someone is injured or killed by police, but also to allow systematic reviews of officer behavior to prevent deaths by flagging troublesome officers for supervisors or helping identify real-world examples of effective and destructive behaviors to use for training.

But a series of ProPublica stories has shown that a decade on, those promises of transparency and accountability have not been realized.

One challenge: The sheer amount of video captured using body-worn cameras means few agencies have the resources to fully examine it. Most of what is recorded is simply stored away, never seen by anyone.

Axon, the nation’s largest provider of police cameras and of cloud storage for the video they capture, has a database of footage that has grown from around 6 terabytes in 2016 to more than 100 petabytes today. That’s enough to hold more than 5,000 years of high definition video, or 25million copies of last year’s blockbuster movie “Barbie.”

“In any community, body-worn camera footage is the largest source of data on police-community interactions. Almost nothing is done with it,” said Jonathan Wender, a former police officer who heads Polis Solutions, one of a growing group of companies and researchers offering analytic tools powered by artificial intelligence to help tackle that data problem.

The Paterson, New Jersey, police department has made such an analytic tool a major part of its plan to overhaul its force.

In March 2023, the state’s attorney general took over the department after police shot and killed Najee Seabrooks, a community activist experiencing a mental health crisis who had called 911 for help. The killing sparked protests and calls for a federal investigation of the department.

The attorney general appointed Isa Abbassi, formerly the New York Police Department’s chief of strategic initiatives, to develop a plan for how to win back public trust.

“Changes in Paterson are led through the use of technology,” Abbassi said at a press conference announcing his reform plan in September, “Perhaps one of the most exciting technology announcements today is a real game changer when it comes to police accountability and professionalism.”

The department, Abassi said, had contracted with Truleo, a Chicago-based software company that examines audio from bodycam videos to identify problematic officers and patterns of behavior.

For around $50,000 a year, Truleo’s software allows supervisors to select from a set of specific behaviors to flag, such as when officers interrupt civilians, use profanity, use force or mute their cameras. The flags are based on data Truleo has collected on which officer behaviors result in violent escalation. Among the conclusions from Truleo’s research: Officers need to explain what they are doing.

“There are certain officers who don’t introduce themselves, they interrupt people, and they don’t give explanations. They just do a lot of command, command, command, command, command,” said Anthony Tassone, Truleo’s co-founder. “That officer’s headed down the wrong path.”

For Paterson police, Truleo allows the department to “review 100% of body worn camera footage to identify risky behaviors and increase professionalism,” according to its strategic overhaul plan. The software, the department said in its plan, will detect events like uses of force, pursuits, frisks and non-compliance incidents and allow supervisors to screen for both “professional and unprofessional officer language.”

Paterson police officials declined to be interviewed for this story.

Around 30 police departments currently use Truleo, according to the company. In October, the NYPD signed on to a pilot program for Truleo to review the millions of hours of footage it produces annually, according to Tassone.

Amid a crisis in police recruiting, Tassone said some departments are using Truleo because they believe it can help ensure new officers are meeting professional standards. Others, like the department in Aurora, Colorado, are using the software to bolster their case for emerging from external oversight. In March 2023, city attorneys successfully lobbied the City Council to approve a contract with Truleo, saying it would help the police department more quickly comply with a consent decree that calls for better training and recruitment and collection of data on things like use of force and racial disparities in policing.

Truleo is just one of a growing number of such analytics providers.

In August 2023, the Los Angeles Police Department said it would partner with a team of researchers from the University of Southern California and several other universities to develop a new AI-powered tool to examine footage from around 1,000 traffic stops and determine which officer behaviors keep interactions from escalating. In 2021, Microsoft awarded $250,000 to a team from Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania to develop software that can organize video into timelines that allow easier review by supervisors.

Dallas-based Polis Solutions has contracted with police in its hometown, as well as departments in St. Petersburg, Florida, Kinston, North Carolina, and Alliance, Nebraska, to deploy its own software, called TrustStat, to identify videos supervisors should review. “What we’re saying is, look, here’s an interaction which is statistically significant for both positive and negative reasons. A human being needs to look,” said Wender, the company’s founder.

TrustStat grew out of a project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research and development arm of the U.S. Defense Department, where Wender previously worked. It was called the Strategic Social Interaction Modules program, nicknamed “Good Stranger,” and it sought to understand how soldiers in potentially hostile environments, say a crowded market in Baghdad, could keep interactions with civilians from escalating. The program brought in law enforcement experts and collected a large database of videos. After it ended, Wender founded Polis Solutions, and used the “Good Stranger” video database to train the TrustStat software. TrustStat is entirely automated: Large language models analyze speech, and image processing algorithms identify physical movements and facial expressions captured on video.

At Washington State University’s Complex Social Interactions Lab, researchers use a combination of human reviewers and AI to analyze video. The lab began its work seven years ago, teaming up with the Pullman, Washington, police department. Like many departments, Pullman had adopted body cameras but lacked the personnel to examine what the video was capturing and train officers accordingly.

The lab has a team of around 50 reviewers — drawn from the university’s own students — who comb through video to track things like the race of officers and civilians, the time of day, and whether officers gave explanations for their actions, such as why they pulled someone over. The reviewers note when an officer uses force, if officers and civilians interrupt each other and whether an officer explains that the interaction is being recorded. They also note how agitated officers and civilians are at each point in the video.

Machine learning algorithms are then used to look for correlations between these features and the outcome of each police encounter.

“From that labeled data, you’re able to apply machine learning so that we’re able to get to predictions so we can start to isolate and figure out, well, when these kind of confluences of events happen, this actually minimizes the likelihood of this outcome,” said David Makin, who heads the lab and also serves on the Pullman Police Advisory Committee.

One lesson has come through: Interactions that don’t end in violence are more likely to start with officers explaining what is happening, not interrupting civilians and making clear that cameras are rolling and the video is available to the public.

The lab, which does not charge clients, has examined more than 30,000 hours of footage and is working with 10 law enforcement agencies, though Makin said confidentiality agreements keep him from naming all of them.

Much of the data compiled by these analyses and the lessons learned from it remains confidential, with findings often bound up in nondisclosure agreements. This echoes the same problem with body camera video itself: Police departments continue to be the ones to decide how to use a technology originally meant to make their activities more transparent and hold them accountable for their actions.

Under pressure from police unions and department management, Tassone said, the vast majority of departments using Truleo are not willing to make public what the software is finding. One department using the software — Alameda, California — has allowed some findings to be publicly released. At the same time, at least two departments — Seattle and Vallejo, California — have canceled their Truleo contracts after backlash from police unions.

The Pullman Police Department cited Washington State University’s analysis of 4,600 hours of video to claim that officers do not use force more often, or at higher levels, when dealing with a minority suspect, but did not provide details on the study.

At some police departments, including Philadelphia’s, policy expressly bars disciplining officers based on spot-check reviews of video. That policy was pushed for by the city’s police union, according to Hans Menos, the former head of thePolice Advisory Committee, Philadelphia’s civilian oversight body. The Police Advisory Committee has called on the department to drop the restriction.

“We’re getting these cameras because we’ve heard the call to have more oversight,” Menos said in an interview. “However, we’re limiting how a supervisor can use them, which is worse than not even requiring them to use it.”

Philadelphia’s police department and police union did not respond to requests for comment.

Christopher J. Schneider, a professor at Canada’s Brandon University who studies the impact of emerging technology on social perceptions of police, said the lack of disclosure makes him skeptical that AI tools will fix the problems in modern policing.

Even if police departments buy the software and find problematic officers or patterns of behavior, those findings might be kept from the public just as many internal investigations are.

Because it’s confidential,” he said, “the public are not going to know which officers are bad or have been disciplined or not been disciplined.”

“If you’re going to develop energy in the U.S. you’ve got to do it with the support of tribal communities."

As sea levels rise, engineers are using massive Dutch-inspired sand sculptures to protect shorefront settlements.

Vermont joins three others in trying to make the fossil fuel industry finance climate action.