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An apparent domestic violence situation ends with two men shot in Wood River, Illinois.

Millions of people are boarding flights and heading home after a big week of holiday travel.

Christmas has come and gone, and when you're ready to take down that live Christmas tree, there are plenty of places across St. Louis where you can get rid of it.

The Gateway Arch is operating with extended holiday hours this week.

A two-car crash took place on Interstate 270 north at the Page Avenue exit in west county.

A driver was shot overnight in the O'Fallon neighborhood of north St. Louis.

It's a colder day Tuesday, and some sunshine is breaking through the clouds by late morning. Colder, with highs in the mid-40s. Clouds thicken back up Tuesday evening and temperatures fall into the 30s overnight.  

A bill to allow home-educated students to participate in Missouri public school activities is back for the upcoming legislative session — and has been coupled with provisions rolling back state oversight of homeschooling families. Sen. Ben Brown, a Washington Republican, pre-filed a 52-page bill that largely resembles the version he sponsored that cleared the Senate […]

The post Bill would open Missouri public school sports to homeschool students appeared first on Missouri Independent.

The Sophia Project's mission is to empower girls of color and provide support for those who are experiencing trauma, facing academic difficulties, and generally struggling with the transition from middle to high school in St. Louis.

When Christmas is over and January looms in the near-future, cold and dark and pointless, you may feel like crying into your beer. (It's OK, we've all been there.)

The grounds of the Gateway Arch at 4:30 p.m. on a chilly Monday are what you’d expect: barren. But at the far eastern end of the park, atop the steps that lead to the lower riverfront, a bedazzled woman in a red sequined dress cuts through the gloom.

by Sarah Alvarez, Outlier Media

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

DTE Energy, Michigan’s largest utility, will be required to publicly disclose information about how often it sells struggling customers’ old debt to third-party collectors following revelations that it does so far more often than other utilities in the region.

The Michigan Public Service Commission this month ordered DTE to start reporting information about debt sales every year. The utility, however, fended off an effort to end the practice altogether, according to commission documents.

In response to the decision, Chris Lamphear, DTE’s head of corporate communications, said in an email, “We will share information with the Commission on the timetable they request, though we have no plans for a sale at this time.”

A 2022 investigation by Outlier Media and ProPublica detailed how DTE sold customer debt from closed accounts for pennies on the dollar over a period of nine years. Jefferson Capital Systems, a company that bought the debt, has sued Detroiters, garnished paychecks and income tax returns and put liens on homes. The last time DTE sold debt, Outlier and ProPublica found, was 2017.

The company’s debt sale practices were unusual, our investigation found. We surveyed the 11 other investor-owned electric utilities that each serve at least 400,000 customers in the Great Lakes states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin. All of them, including Consumers Energy, Michigan’s second-largest utility company, said they do not sell debt. Five of the utilities also said they do not directly sue their customers over debt. The ones that do said they do so only on rare occasions.

Commissionstaff then explored the issue while weighing a rate increase request from DTE, which provides power for Detroit and southeast Michigan. A brief submitted by commission staff in the rate case said the debt sales resulted in “hardship-inducing collection tactics” affecting the utility’s most financially vulnerable customers and suggested that DTE stop selling uncollectible accounts.

The staff was also concerned that DTE’s debt sales allowed for “double recovery.” In other words, according to the staff, some debt is recovered by the third party that buys it even as the utility factors uncollected debt into its calculations for rate increases affecting all customers.

DTE disputed that debt sales would allow for a double recovery, and an administrative law judge involved in the case only acted on one part of the staff request: the need for DTE to regularly report on any third-party debt collection.

The commission made the final decision and will now require annual reports from DTE on debt sales for the previous five years detailing the number of accounts sold to a third party for collection, the amount of debt associated with those accounts and how much money the company made from the sales.

Commission officials declined to comment. Spokesperson Matt Helms said by email the commission was “letting the order speak for it.”

Jackson Koeppel, the founder of an environmental justice organization called Soulardarity, which often testifies in DTE rate cases that go before the commission, said the reports are a “good start.” But Koeppel wants to see commissioners go further.

“The commission needs to put a nail in the coffin of this cruel practice,” he said. “We also need to talk about what is going to be done to help these people who are still dealing with the effects of the debt that has already been sold,” he said.

Jefferson Capital has not commented on its arrangement with DTE or its collection tactics despite numerous attempts by reporters to contact a spokesperson.

Iris Foster-Ray, a Detroit resident still struggling to pay off debt DTE sold to Jefferson Capital in 2017, is hoping no one else will have to go through the stressful, costly process she experienced.

Iris Foster-Ray is still struggling to pay off debt DTE sold to Jefferson Capital in 2017. (Nick Hagen for ProPublica)

Over the years, she has had her paychecks garnished. She said that she now has a payment plan where she owes Jefferson Capital $150 a month and that her income tax refund was garnished two years ago. There is a lien on her house as well.

“DTE shouldn’t have sold the account,” said Foster-Ray, who failed to pay her utility bill during a time when her family was dealing with high medical bills. “If you are behind on any utilities, there should be help because you need heat, and you need water to live.”

Stephanie Johnson testified in a 2022 DTE rate case about how Jefferson Capital came after her for about $5,000 in old debt she built up years ago when she fell behind on one of the utility’s shut-off protection payment plans. Jefferson Capital sued her during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The case was finally closed in October, according to court records.

“I am so grateful that I was able to lend my voice to this and share my experience and that it had an effect on DTE not selling people’s debt going forward,” Johnson said.

Most months, tens of thousands of DTE customers can’t afford their bills and have their electric accounts shut off by the company.

Some of those accounts remain closed and are written off by DTE as uncollectible debt. The utility disconnected 162,128 electric accounts for nonpayment through the end of September this year, the last month for which data collected by the MPSC is available. That number is about 30,000 less than for the same period last year.

“We perform significant outreach every day to connect our at-risk customers to financial aid and prevent an interruption of service, which is a last resort we always strive to avoid,” Lamphear said.

After more than 60 years making music, The Rolling Stones proved in 2023 that they won’t be slowing down anytime soon by releasing their first album of new music in 18 years: Hackney Diamonds. …

Source

The best of the year from our co-founder and co-editor

Our staff writer reviews 2023 and her work.

by Logan Jaffe, Ash Ngu and Mary Hudetz

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

American museums and universities repatriated more ancestral remains and sacred objects to tribal nations this year than at any point in the past three decades, transferring ownership of an estimated 18,800 Native American ancestors, institutions reported.

And more repatriations are forthcoming. Museums, universities and government agencies have filed 380 repatriation notices this year — more than the previous two years combined — under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, declaring that they plan to make human remains and burial items available to tribes.

“By every measurement, this has been a record-breaking year,” Melanie O’Brien, manager of the Interior Department’s National NAGPRA Program, said during a recent federal review committee hearing on repatriation. “I’m reminded every day that with each notice that gets published and every inventory that is updated, it means that another ancestor is closer to being respectfully returned.”

The increase follows a ProPublica investigation that revealed how institutions have for decades failed to fully comply with NAGPRA, in some cases exploiting a loophole that allowed them to keep the remains by denying their connections to present-day Indigenous communities. And some institutions, including Harvard University, pursued destructive scientific studies on those remains without the informed consent of descendants.

In response to our reporting — which included a dozen stories and an interactive database that allows the public to see the status of repatriation in their communities — there has been widespread acknowledgment of past failures. More than 70 news outlets cited ProPublica’s database to report the repatriation progress of institutions in their communities. And coming regulatory changes promise to improve the repatriation process, experts said.

At the start of 2023, museums had yet to repatriate more than 110,000 Native American remains, which equated to more than half of what they had reported holding in their collections, despite NAGPRA’s passage 33 years ago. As the year draws to a close, that figure has dropped to about 97,000. To date, about 180 museums that have reported holding ancestral remains have not begun repatriating at all.

“It’s just mind boggling why these entities would have vast large collections of human remains,” said Armand Minthorn, a former council member for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon who now serves on the National NAGPRA Review Committee, a federal advisory board. “The fight goes on, but we’re not going to give up.”

The work of pushing for accountability and repatriation has long been led by Indigenous people. Before the passage of NAGPRA in 1990, tribal citizens and leaders protested the outsized power that institutions had in determining cultural connections that could lead to repatriation. Grassroots efforts have also shaped newly revised NAGPRA regulations that will go into effect next year.

Typically, institutions and agencies file repatriation notices after extensive consultation with tribal representatives. Publication of such notices means legal control of the remains and objects can be transferred to tribal nations named in the document.

(Ash Ngu/ProPublica)

O’Brien said the notices are a barometer of how actively institutions are working to comply with the law. While it’s difficult to pinpoint an exact explanation for the increased repatriation activity, she said, reporting from ProPublica and scores of local news outlets that cited our repatriation database likely contributed to the uptick.

“The attention and awareness due to ProPublica’s reporting is a part of it,” O’Brien said in an interview. “In addition, the significant amount of local reporting that has followed ProPublica’s reporting has increased awareness of repatriation.”

ProPublica’s database incorporated information from Federal Register notices to make the National NAGPRA Program’s repatriation database searchable by tribe for the first time. For many years, the database could only be searched by institution. Identifying which notices tribes had been included in required sifting through the Federal Register.

Gordon Yellowman, a former NAGPRA coordinator for the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, said in an email to ProPublica that ready access to these reports had aided his tribe’s repatriation efforts.

Changes Among Institutions With the Most Unrepatriated Native American Remains

ProPublica reported this year that 10 entities — including top universities, a state-run museum and the U.S. Interior Department — hold about half of the remains that have not been repatriated under NAGPRA.

For years, the University of California, Berkeley, held the largest number of ancestral remains — a result of fostering aggressive excavations throughout the state that resulted in the school collecting the remains of at least 12,000 Native American ancestors from the late 1800s to the 1980s. Only about a fourth had been repatriated.

But in late October, the university’s standing changed as a federal notice showed UC Berkeley was preparing to repatriate some 4,400 ancestors and 25,000 items taken from burial sites in the Bay Area, the ancestral and present-day homelands of the Ohlone people.

Now, the Ohio History Connection is the institution that has the nation’s largest number of unrepatriated remains — at least 7,100 in total. The Illinois State Museum is close behind as it works to repatriate the remains of about 1,104 ancestors excavated from burial mounds in Fulton County, Illinois.

Lawmakers in Ohio and Illinois passed legislation this year with the aim of removing barriers to repatriation for the museums and tribes alike, while allowing land to be set aside to rebury the thousands of ancestors in each state.

Both museums have told ProPublica that they are committed to repatriating everything in their collections that was taken from Indigenous graves.

Harvard’s Peabody Museum, the institution with the third largest collection under NAGPRA, has made similar pledges as it has reckoned with its past collection practices.

“We are one of the worst offenders, and that’s why Harvard’s actions, and lack of action, have attracted attention and criticism, and why we will be watched closely in terms of what steps we take next,” Kelli Mosteller, executive director of the Harvard University Native American Program, recently told the Harvard Gazette, a university-sponsored publication.

A Senate Inquiry Into Institutions With the Largest Collections

In April, 13 U.S. senators pressed the five institutions with the most Native American remains to explain why decades later they still hadn’t repatriated their holdings. Citing ProPublica’s reporting, the senators asked how they made decisions and whether they accepted Indigenous knowledge as evidence in determining cultural connections.

Almost all said that they had begun working to establish better relationships with tribes only in the last several years.

The Illinois museum said it frequently initiates contact with tribes on repatriation, marking a change from how it previously approached NAGPRA work. In the past and under different leadership, ProPublica reported, the museum favored scientific and historical evidence despite the law’s requirement that various other forms of information, including oral history, have equal merit.

All five institutions said they value Indigenous knowledge as a form of evidence.

Megan Wood, director of the Ohio History Connection, said museum staff in June were “going through the entire collection box by box as requested” to fulfill a request from tribes to reunite each ancestor with items they were originally buried with. Chief Glenna J. Wallace of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma wrote a letter of support for the museum to the Senate committee, stating that leadership changes had led to “an awakening” at the Ohio History Connection.

“As a former vocal critic and now an advocate of the Ohio History Connection, I am confident you will witness long overdue dramatic changes in the near future,” Wallace wrote.

Federal data shows the museum did not complete any repatriations this year.

Neither did Indiana University. The school’s close tribal partner, the Miami Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, declined to comment to ProPublica. But Julie Olds, the tribe’s cultural resource officer and NAGPRA committee chair, this summer told the National NAGPRA Review Committee during a hearing that the perceived slow pace of repatriation at the university is not reflective of the quality of its relationship with the tribes.

“From the vantage point of the Miami people, meaningful consultation has been going on for [a] significant period of time,” Olds told the committee.

Interior Department Says It Will Prioritize Repatriation

The rise in repatriations this year coincided with an Interior Department review of how NAGPRA should be enforced after tribes and descendants said overwhelmingly that the law was not working. The revamped federal rules will go into effect in January.

As Interior officials worked to finalize the new regulations this fall, they acknowledged in internal memos that the department itself holds one of the largest collections of Native American ancestors, echoing ProPublica’s analysis. In total, federal data shows Interior agencies have repatriated more than three-quarters of the human remains they have reported collecting from Native American gravesites. But the department’s efforts over the decades have still left it with the unrepatriated remains of more than 3,000 ancestors. There may also be more that the department has not yet accounted for, Interior’s chief of staff, Rachael Taylor, said in one memo.

She sent a Sept. 21 directive to agencies — including the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service — to prioritize compliance with NAGPRA “with the clear intention” of completing repatriations. She noted that the department has a “critical leadership role” in complying with the law that it also administers and enforces.

A month later, Interior officials said in a follow-up memorandum that the department would centralize its repatriation policies and efforts rather than leave compliance decisions to a patchwork of agencies. These agencies maintain their own inventories of ancestral remains and items, which obscured the breadth of the Interior Department’s holdings under NAGPRA.

The new mandates mark a shift at Interior. Earlier this year, a spokesperson told ProPublica that Interior’s agencies were not required to consult with tribes about the possibility of repatriating human remains for which no tribal connection had been determined unless a tribe or Native Hawaiian organization made a formal request for them.

Now, the Interior Department says it will ensure “proactive compliance” with NAGPRA.

Emily Palus, who leads the Interior Department’s division of Museum and Cultural Resources, told the National NAGPRA Review Committee last month that the proposed new action plan is a “game changer.”

“I am saddened that it has taken this long,” she said.

Here’s a snapshot of 10 inspiring reads

We reached out to Michele Wright, owner of Orange Pop Design, for her insights.