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They offer fresh, fresh produce, meat, eggs — and a lot of soap.

A man was found dead on the 5100 block of Wells Avenue in north St. Louis' Academy/Sherman Park neighborhood, and an investigation is ongoing.

There are 300,000 people in the footprint of Legal Services of Eastern Missouri who qualify for legal aid. There aren’t enough resources to serve them all.

A bill that would help fund the installation of rescue boxes for parents in crisis to anonymously relinquish newborns to the state is headed to Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe. State Rep. Jim Murphy, a St. Louis Republican and the sponsor of the “Safe Place for Newborns Fund,” called his legislation “a pro-life bill that everybody […]

This weekend will see the performance of a play by St. Louisan Mariah Richardson about blues singer Alberta Hunter, and the Rolla High School musical that was nearly canceled by severe weather.

ST. LOUIS - As a cold front slides off to the south, high pressure is settling in behind it. That will help set up a nice weekend for the St. Louis region. We’ll enjoy a sunny, pleasant day Friday, with highs near 70. It will be clear and cool to start Saturday; we’ll wake up [...]

We all, dog lovers, have our favorites, but there is no question that their presence, companionship and love are, well, irreplaceable.

by Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Two years ago, Texas lawmakers quietly cut millions of dollars in funding for kits intended to help track down missing kids, after ProPublica and The Texas Tribune revealed there was no evidence they had aided law enforcement in finding lost children.

The company that made the kits had used outdated and exaggerated statistics on missing children to bolster their sales and charged for the materials when similar products were available for less or for free.

Now, some Texas legislators are again pushing to spend millions more in taxpayer dollars to purchase such kits, slipping the funding into a 1,000-page budget proposal.

Although the proposal does not designate which company would supply them, a 2021 bill introduced by Republican state Sen. Donna Campbell all but guarantees Texas will contract with the same vendor, the National Child Identification Program. Back then, Campbell made clear that her intent was to enshrine into law a long-standing partnership between the state and NCIDP that goes back more than two decades. Her legislation, signed into law that June, also specified that whenever the state allocated funding for such materials, the Texas Education Agency must purchase identification kits that are “inkless,” a technology that NCIDP has patented.

The Waco-based company is led by former NFL player Kenny Hansmire, who ProPublica and the Tribune found had a history of failed businesses and financial troubles, including millions of dollars in federal tax liens and a ban from conducting certain finance-related business in Connecticut due to his role in an alleged scheme to defraud investors.

Hansmire cultivated relationships with powerful Texas legislators who went on to support his initiatives. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who oversees the Senate, championed Campbell’s legislation funding the kits and later told the news organizations that the state should prioritize anything that can speed up the return of a missing child. Campbell told lawmakers in a hearing that the bipartisan measure, which was brought to her by Hansmire and Patrick, was important to “protect our children.”

Patrick, Campbell and Hansmire did not respond to interview requests for this story. Hansmire previously told the newsrooms that his debts and other financial issues had been resolved. He also defended his company’s kits, saying they have helped find multiple missing children, and instructed reporters to ask “any policeman” about the kits’ usefulness. However, none of the dozen Texas law enforcement agencies that the news organizations reached — including three that Hansmire specifically named — could recall any examples.

Stacey Pearson, a child safety consultant and former Louisiana State Police sergeant who oversaw that state’s Clearinghouse for Missing and Exploited Children, said she has never seen any cases demonstrating that these kits work, including in the last two years since lawmakers discontinued the funding.

“I don’t understand why we’re going back to this,” said Pearson, who spoke with the newsrooms recently and for their previous investigation. “It wasn’t a good idea in 2023 and it’s not a good idea now.”

Despite the lack of evidence, Pearson said companies like NCIDP are able to profit off the kits by marketing them as part of a larger child safety program, a strategy that makes opposing lawmakers look as if they are against protecting children. Texas allocated nearly $6 million for the kits between 2021 and 2023.

Lawmakers did not explain their reasoning when they decided to stop paying for the kits in 2023. Republican state Sen. Joan Huffman, who chairs the high chamber’s Finance Committee, told the newsrooms at the time that both the House and the Senate had agreed to remove the funding “after review and consideration.”

During this year’s budgeting process, Democratic state Rep. Armando Martinez proposed adding $2 million to the House’s budget to provide kits to families with children in kindergarten through second grade.

Martinez did not respond to an interview request.

State Rep. Greg Bonnen, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, did not respond to interview requests or written questions.

Bonnen was among the 33 lawmakers who voted against Campbell’s bill that established the child identification kit funding four years ago. The newsrooms attempted to reach a handful of those legislators, but none responded.

Huffman and the Senate have so far chosen not to restore the program’s funding. Huffman declined the newsrooms’ interview requests.

“The entire budget process is ongoing,” she wrote in an emailed statement. “No final decisions have been made on most issues.”

Legislators from the two chambers will continue hashing out the differences between their budget proposals in a joint committee that operates behind closed doors. There’s no guarantee that the funding will make it into the final budget, which lawmakers must pass before the legislative session ends in early June.

Pearson cautioned legislators to question whether the kits are the best use of state funding, given the absence of documented success.

“My advice would be for lawmakers to ask themselves, ‘If this was your personal money and not the taxpayers’, would you spend it on this program?’” Pearson said. “And the answer is going to be no.”

NXS is celebrating the 40th anniversary of their fifth studio album, Listen Like Thieves, with a new deluxe box set that is out now, featuring plenty of bonus material.Founding member and…

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Police said the young siblings were found safe Thursday night.

The president’s lunatic tariffs are jacking up prices all over the place.

Public officials at all levels are propping up a Texas Bitcoin mining boom that’s threatening water and energy systems while afflicting locals with noise pollution.

The Musk-damaged agency is unlikely to investigate whether Trump and his allies are profiting from advance knowledge about tariff changes or meme coin shenanigans.

by David Armstrong

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

In the U.S., the price of Revlimid, a brand-name cancer drug, has been increasing for two decades. It now sells for nearly $1,000 a pill. In Europe, the price has been consistently lower — in some countries by two-thirds.

I started reporting on Revlimid after I was prescribed the drug following a diagnosis of multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer. Stunned by the high price, I found that the drugmaker, Celgene, had used Revlimid as its own personal piggy bank for more than a decade, raising the price in the U.S. whenever it saw fit.

Even with lower prices in Europe, Celgene still made a profit there, a former executive told Congress. That added to the more than $21 billion in net earnings the company made after Revlimid was introduced in 2005.

Of course, Revlimid isn’t the only drug with a price disparity. Americans pay more in general for prescription drugs than people in other wealthy countries. And costs keep going up, saddling patients with crippling debt or forcing them to choose between filling prescriptions or buying groceries. So why do we pay so much more? And is anything being done about it?

In most other wealthy countries, governments set a single price for a drug that is usually based on analysis of the therapeutic benefit of the medicine and what other countries pay. In the U.S., drug companies determine what to charge for their products with few restraints. Insurance companies can refuse to cover a drug to try to negotiate a lower price, but for some diseases like cancer, that poses a risk of public backlash. Cancer is a “very politically charged disease,” said Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a Harvard Medical School professor who studies drug pricing and regulation. Some states also mandate that insurers cover certain cancer drugs.

Pharmaceutical companies have consistently argued that American drug prices reflect the cost of research and development. Americans may pay more, but they also benefit from having first-line access to cutting-edge treatments. (Celgene has since been acquired by Bristol Myers Squibb, which says its price for Revlimid, which it increased in the U.S. last year by 7%, “reflects the continued clinical benefit Revlimid brings to patients, along with other economic factors.”)

Dr. Hagop Kantarjian, a leukemia specialist at MD Anderson Cancer Center who studies drug pricing, said that pharmaceutical companies often overstate the cost of developing drugs and that many drug discoveries originate in hospital and academic labs funded through government grants. Funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health contributed to all but two of the 356 drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010 to 2019, according to a Bentley University study. Companies also don’t spend all their profits on innovation: The 14 largest drug companies in the world spent more on stock buybacks and dividend payments to investors than on research and development, according to a 2021 analysis by the U.S. House Oversight Committee.

One possible solution to bring down costs: tie American prices to what drugmakers charge in other wealthy countries. The Congressional Budget Office found last year that this would have the biggest impact on reducing costs of seven proposals it studied. It’s an idea with bipartisan support.

Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Peter Welch, D-Vt., introduced a bill this week that would penalize pharmaceutical companies that sell their drugs at higher prices than the average of the prices in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Italy and the United Kingdom. Companies that sell above the average would face civil penalties equal to 10 times the difference between the U.S. list price and the average price in those other countries.

President Donald Trump has advocated for similar actions. During his first term, he issued an executive order directing the Medicare program to employ a “most favored nation” approach in paying for drugs. The administration later developed a rule directing Medicare to select the lowest price from a basket of similar countries and make that the maximum amount the agency would pay for 50 drugs administered by doctors. A court blocked the rule from being implemented in the last days of the first administration.

Now, according to reports this week, the administration is pushing plans to tie Medicaid and Medicare prices to lower prices charged in other countries.

Linking U.S. prices to those in other countries is opposed by industry groups who say it would leave decisions on medications to the government rather than doctors and patients.

“Government price setting in any form is bad for American patients,” said Alex Schriver, a spokesperson for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry group. He said efforts should be focused on fixing “the flaws in the U.S. system,” including money that flows to intermediaries such as pharmacy benefit managers.

Some critics also warn so-called international reference pricing can be gamed and allows foreign governments to essentially set the value of medicines sold in the U.S.

The Trump administration is expected to announce drug pricing plans as early as next week, according to a report. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The Rhode Island project to create local jobs, launch compost hubs, and reduce emissions was years in the making.

First, the administration laid off all of the program's staffers. Now the White House is proposing cutting its funding.

Gary Shade of Virden, IL joined the Real Rock Army today! Gary loves listening to KSHE and the DJ’s! Gary has been listening since HIGH SCHOOL and is now retired!...

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Bruno David Gallery is pleased to present Upended, a sculpture installation by multi-disciplinary artist Judith Shaw. This is Shaw’s second solo exhibition with Bruno David Gallery. ‘Upended’ is part of […]

The post Judith Shaw: Upended appeared first on Explore St. Louis.