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Winter is on the way and some of your neighbors might need help staying warm. The 23rd annual 'Warners' Warm-Up Coat Drive' starts Monday.

The newly appointed police chief of Granite City is visiting Riverbend Head Start and Family Services on Monday.

Multiple incidents of gun violence occurred over the weekend in the city of St. Louis, including two murders and two children shot. Among the latest crimes was a homicide late Sunday night.

Police are responding to an early morning burglary in Fairview Heights.

We will warm back up Monday and stay that way for much of the work week, 10 to 15 degrees above average.

Simple, yet stunning accents of character are spread throughout this space.

One of Saint Louis University’s most popular courses is Vampires: Then and Now, taught by the charismatic Russian-born Sergey Toymentsev. The assistant professor of Russian considers the vampire story a great way to “smuggle” hardcore knowledge to students, saying he can use these tales to explore not only literature and history but everything from psychoanalysis to post-colonial theory.

This story was commissioned by the River City Journalism Fund Seyoon Choi walks down South Grand Boulevard — a dog harness in one hand, a cell phone in the other.

U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley and Democrat Lucas Kunce have something big in common – their campaigns are heavily dependent on money from outside Missouri. Hawley, an Republican incumbent seeking his second term, and Kunce, who narrowly lost the 2022 Democratic primary for Senate, are the best-funded candidates in the race according to campaign finance reports […]

The post Hawley, Kunce draw heavily on donors outside Missouri to fuel U.S. Senate campaigns appeared first on Missouri Independent.

It takes concentration not to see certain realities — the mother holding the handwritten sign at the traffic light; the man sleeping under a bridge; the tent cities on public right of ways. But we make the effort. In downtown Kansas City, developers plan an entertainment district with a Ferris wheel centerpiece. There’s also talk […]

The post Our ‘thing-oriented’ society puts development ahead of human needs. We all suffer the consequences appeared first on Missouri Independent.

Recent pay increases for 911 dispatchers have helped with recruiting, Public Safety Director Charles Coyle said.

by Andrea Bernstein and Andy Kroll

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

In July 2015, Wisconsin’s Supreme Court shielded Gov. Scott Walker, then a rising Republican star with aspirations to the presidency, from a criminal investigation.

The court’s conservative majority halted the probe into what prosecutors suspected were campaign finance violations. One of the deciding votes was cast by Justice David Prosser, a conservative who had won reelection a few years earlier in a heavily contested race. During the race, a state GOP operative said if their party lost Prosser, “The Walker agenda is toast,” according to an email included in a trove of documents the Guardian surfaced. Another vote for Walker came from Michael Gableman, a justice who had also waged a contentious campaign for his Wisconsin Supreme Court seat.

The high court, determining the prosecutors had overreached, ordered the investigation’s documents destroyed. But not before the Guardian got its hands on a copy. And buried in the 1,500 pages was a reference to a key figure in propelling both Prosser and Gableman to victory: the co-chair of the right-leaning legal group the Federalist Society, organizer of dark money groups and conservative strategist Leonard Leo.

The Prosser and Gableman races were crucial skirmishes in Leo’s decadeslong, ambitious effort to shape American law from the ground up. It’s a project whose full dimensions are only now becoming clear. ProPublica detailed the arc of Leo’s activism in a recent story and podcast with “On The Media.”

If Leo’s name sparks a note of recognition, it’s usually because he was Donald Trump’s judge whisperer and a leading figure in helping create the 6-3 conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court. Leo realized decades ago it was not enough to have a majority of Supreme Court justices; he would have to approach the legal system holistically if he wanted to bring lasting change. To undo landmark rulings like Roe v. Wade, Leo understood that he needed to make sure the court heard the right cases brought by the right people and heard by the right lower court judges.

Leo at a dinner hosted by President Donald J. Trump at the White House in 2017. (Official White House Photos by Shealah Craighead)

Leo built a machine to achieve that goal. He helped ensure the nominations of justices from Clarence Thomas to Amy Coney Barrett. He used his closeness to the justices to attract donors to support his larger effort. He then used those donations to build a network of dark money groups supporting his candidates and causes across the U.S. And he helped elect or appoint state Supreme Court justices who were predisposed to push American jurisprudence to the right.

Wisconsin was where Leo honed his strategy. In 2008, in a racially charged challenge to the state’s first Black Supreme Court justice, Leo himself raised money for Gableman, according to a person familiar with the campaign. Leo passed along a list of wealthy donors with the instructions to “tell them Leonard told you to call,” this person said. All those people gave the maximum. Gableman won, the first time an incumbent was unseated in Wisconsin in 40 years. (Leo declined to comment to us on his role in that race.)

Then in 2011, state GOP operatives turned to Leo to boost Prosser. They hoped he would help them raise $200,000 for “a coalition to maintain the Court,” the emails show. Prosser won, by half a percentage point. (When the emails mentioning his race surfaced, Prosser defended his independence.)

In 2016, Leo got involved again. Walker had a vacancy to fill and had three people on his shortlist: two Court of Appeals justices and the former attorney for an anti-abortion group and Federalist Society chapter head, Dan Kelly. “Leo stepped in and said it’s going to be Dan Kelly,” a person familiar with the selection told us. Walker denied speaking to Leo, who said he didn’t remember. From 2016 until the present, a group called the Judicial Crisis Network (which is now known as the Concord Fund), was a regular donor to state judicial races. Leo has no official role at the JCN, which as a dark money group does not have to disclose its donors. But he helped create and raise money for it, and JCN often works toward the same goals as the Federalist Society.

JCN was a crucial financial supporter of the public campaigns to win support for Supreme Court nominees backed by Leo, from Chief Justice John Roberts to Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett. In Wisconsin, JCN sent increasing amounts of money to judicial races through circuitous routes. Sometimes the contribution flowed through a national political organization like the Republican State Leadership Committee. Other times, the money was sent to Wisconsin-based outfits.

Wisconsin is not the only state that Leo focused on. North Carolina shows the effects of more than a decade’s worth of big-dollar funding from his network and a torrent of negative ads questioning the integrity of the judiciary.

In 2022, after years of sustained campaign spending by the Judicial Crisis Network and allied groups, North Carolina’s high court flipped from a 4-3 Democratic majority to a 5-2 Republican majority. Months later, the court did something extraordinary: It reinstated a voter ID law that the same court, in its Democratic-led iteration, had found discriminated against Black voters. It also overturned a newly court-approved elections map that had produced an electoral outcome reflecting the state’s partisan split.

In Wisconsin, the battles over the high court continue to be fierce. In April, Kelly, Leo’s chosen candidate, ran to maintain a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. It was the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history, with both sides spending at least $51 million. But Democrats were activated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn Roe and by election maps that had maintained Republican dominance in the Legislature in a state evenly divided along partisan lines. Their candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, won resoundingly.

But that hasn’t stopped Republicans from trying to regain control. In September, there was talk of impeaching Protasiewicz because of comments she made during the campaign about “rigged” election maps. That effort has subsided — for now.

Leo’s candidate lost in Wisconsin — but his efforts over the years have succeeded in something else: transforming seats on state Supreme Courts into political prizes. In many states, such judges are no longer viewed as independent arbiters from a branch of government that operates outside partisanship but as a kind of super-legislator. “That’s bad for the system,” Robert Orr, a former Republican North Carolina justice, told us. “It’s bad for democracy. It’s a very dangerous path to tread down.”

In a written statement, Leo said state courts “are more independent and impartial today than they were when trial lawyers and unions dominated state judicial races without any counter.”

The stakes for democracy are stark. Already, a University of Washington study ranking the health of democracies in states found North Carolina and Wisconsin have plummeted from two of the highest-scoring states to scraping the bottom.

One result of this project is clear. Today, the practice of deploying every weapon in the American political arsenal, from nasty campaign ads to spending by groups whose donors are hidden, is now a routine aspect of campaigns for the judges who rule on state laws and, in 2024, might well decide the outcome of elections in battleground states.

Foghat is gearing up for the release of their new studio album, Sonic Mojo, and they’re giving fans yet another preview of what to expect. The band has released the third single from the…

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Israeli Americans held a rally Sunday in Forest Park. Meanwhile, Palestinian Americans held an emergency protest in downtown Clayton.

The Illinois Invest In Kids tax credit scholarship program is scheduled to expire unless legislators give it new life.

Parliaments have mechanisms for resolving the impasse in the House of Representatives. The U.S. does not.

It all goes back to Nixon.

by Jessica Lussenhop, ProPublica, and Joey Peters, Sahan Journal

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.

The Minnesota attorney general’s office is investigating potentially exploitative real estate transactions that have targeted Somali and Hispanic immigrant homebuyers in the state.

The attorney general’s action follows a report by ProPublica and Sahan Journal last year that revealed how contracts for deed — an alternative home sale agreement made directly between a seller and a buyer — can lock purchasers into inflated prices and unfavorable terms, and sometimes lead to eviction and the loss of their life savings.

“We have received a high number of complaints about predatory lending practices,” Mark Iris, an assistant attorney general in the office’s civil rights division, said in a statement. “Our office is concerned with the potential for abusive lending tactics that extract wealth from already impoverished communities.”

The Sahan Journal-ProPublica investigation identified a rising market in and around the Twin Cities for contract-for-deed sales, particularly in the Somali community. Many buyers in the East African Muslim community avoid paying or profiting from interest because of their religious principles. Investors have been offering them contracts for deed as an “interest free” way to purchase a house and sidestep a traditional bank loan.

But several Somali homeowners said they purchased homes without understanding their contracts, which included huge down payments and balloon payments, some of which soar into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The homeowners said they had been misled, and they told reporters they feared having to walk away from their homes and the money they’d invested.

Contract-for-deed home sales lack many of the consumer protections of a bank-backed mortgage loan. Homes can be sold for tens of thousands of dollars above their current market price, which makes them difficult to resell or refinance. If the purchaser misses a payment, the seller has the power to evict in as little as 60 days.

Based on the reporting, Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., convened a Senate subcommittee hearing in July on the issue, characterizing the contracts as “designed to fail.” She and other senators called for more consumer protections.

Home sellers and investors who use contracts for deed say that they provide a needed, alternative pathway to homeownership for some buyers, and that, when properly used, the transaction is a safe financial instrument. They deny abusive practices.

While contracts for deed are legal, sellers can run afoul of the law by charging excessive interest rates, targeting minority groups with unfair contract terms or using deceptive tactics to lure buyers. The attorney general’s office declined to say what, specifically, officials are investigating. In addition to complaints from the Somali community, Iris said, the attorney general’s office has received a large number of reports of questionable practices being used within the Hispanic community.

Mohamed Goni, executive director of the Central Minnesota Community Empowerment Organization, said he has heard stories about allegedly deceptive tactics used by some contract sellers. Goni’s organization is a nonprofit serving the Somali community in St. Cloud, about an hour northwest of the Twin Cities.

“It’s a way of robbing or putting people into more poverty,” he said. “In central Minnesota specifically there’s a huge, huge housing problem, so it’s really encouraging to see the AG stepping in and doing an investigation.”

Stories about problematic contracts-for-deed practices have been around for years, said Jessica Aliaga-Froelke, CEO of Hispanic Solutions Group in Bloomington. Several Hispanic clients told her they bought homes using a contract for deed because they had bad credit, could not get traditional mortgages or did not have Social Security numbers.

Aliaga-Froelke said the buyers were led to believe that after making huge cash payments for a period of time, they could refinance their loans at a later date.

“They are told, ‘Here, you can have your house,’ but technically they don’t know what they’re signing,” she said. Contract-for-deed sellers “know these people will never be able to refinance with a bank.”

Roxanny Armendariz, a financial counselor with Neighborhood Development Alliance in St. Paul who also works primarily with the Hispanic community, said she hopes the attorney general looks into the role that real estate agents play in pushing buyers toward contracts they can’t afford. Real estate agents sometimes connect homebuyers who don’t qualify for a bank loan with investors who do contract-for-deed sales in bulk. The investor purchases the home through their business or limited liability company, then resells it to the buyer at a price markup.

“They do want to hold these LLCs responsible, but what about the realtors involved? That is the piece that needs to be called out,” she said.

The attorney general’s office declined to provide further details about its investigation. The office said anyone wishing to submit a complaint about contracts for deed can fill out its Tenant Report Form online, or call 651-296-3353 or 800-657-3787.

With little fanfare, the administration is using infrastructure funding to revive dormant plans for pipelines and reservoirs in rural areas across the U.S. West.

Pope Francis is among the most significant religious leaders in the world. But even he can’t bend the emissions curve on his own.