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A St. Louis man reached a plea deal with city prosecutors and avoided going to trial next week for a 2021 fatal shooting in the city's Bevo neighborhood.

UPDATE: The man has returned home, according to police. JEFFERSON COUNTY, Mo. - The Jefferson County Sheriff's Office has issued an Endangered Silver Advisory for an 81-year-old man. He left his home in the 6000 block of Ozark Drive in High Ridge around 11 a.m. Wednesday. According to police, he fled his residence in a [...]

Parkway School District Superintendent Dr. Keith Marty has announced his retirement at the end of the 2024-25 school year, after 14 years in the role, during which he oversaw the passage of three bond issues and the introduction of programs like Spark! and Early College.

Fine dining typically isn’t synonymous with cannabis cravings, but a pop-up dinner series is bridging those two worlds. Celebrated St. Louis chefs Nick Bognar (iNDO, Sado) and Alex Henry (El Molino del Sureste, Sureste Mexican) talk about creating elevated edibles and why participating in Swade Cannabis’ canna-culinary series was a no-brainer.

Marty, 71, came to Parkway in 2011 after leading the Menomonee Falls School District in suburban Milwaukee.

Donald Trump was convicted of a felony last week, but today he got better news. In Georgia, a state appellate court halted Fani Willis's election fraud trial while it decides whether she should be removed from the case. In Florida, judge Aileen Cannon has delayed proceedings once again while she considers a bunch of ridiculous ...continue reading "Donald Trump’s two-tiered justice"

Nolan Arenado homered, Alec Burleson added an RBI double to back up a solid start by Miles Mikolas and the St. Louis Cardinals beat the Houston Astros 4-2 on Wednesday.

Laura Poitras / Praxis Films, licensed under CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Today marks 11 years since Edward Snowden — a longtime board member of Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) — blew the whistle on mass surveillance by the National Security Agency.

FPF and others wrote about the enduring impact of Snowden’s revelations in 2023, at the tenth anniversary. But this year, the uphill battle against surveillance encountered a serious setback. Congress not only renewed Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law that enabled much of the surveillance Snowden exposed, it expanded it.

As Snowden himself put it, "In my opinion no country that has something like this to enter into force can still be considered to be free."

Under the newly enacted “spy draft” provision, the government can not only enlist telecom providers like Verizon to hand over information about their subscribers’ contacts with foreigners it is investigating, as it has in the past. It can conscript any American service provider to spy on its behalf. Sen. Ron Wyden noted that cleaning services could be compelled to insert a USB thumb drive into a server at an office they clean.

Although lawmakers claim they’re only planning to use these powers against a particular class of businesses, they won’t publicly identify the target (even after The New York Times reported that it’s data centers). That means that whatever the government’s current intentions are, it has no control over how future administrations will apply the law.

The law carries a terrifying potential for abuse against journalists, in particular. Reporters constantly communicate with foreign sources, including people who aren’t on the National Security Agency’s good side. Given that existing surveillance authority under Section 702 has been repeatedly misused to surveil reporter-source communications, it would be naive to believe expanded authorities won’t be similarly abused.

In addition to expanding the kind of surveillance that Snowden exposed, the government is also escalating its retaliatory prosecutions of whistleblowers like Snowden, as well as others who disclose government secrets.

Former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn received the maximum sentence of five years’ imprisonment earlier this year after pleading guilty to leaking Donald Trump’s returns to The New York Times. Littlejohn also leaked a tranche of ultrawealthy Americans’ tax documents to ProPublica, but prosecutors and the judge did not consider the public good his disclosures served when throwing the book at him. Compare that to the kinds of tax fraudsters he exposed, who often get slaps on the wrist if they’re even prosecuted at all.

Shortly after Littlejohn was sentenced, Joshua Schulte, who leaked CIA secrets known as the Vault 7 leaks to WikiLeaks in 2017, was sentenced to 40 years in prison – six years and eight months for child sexual abuse images and the remaining 33 years and four months for the leaks themselves. Schulte is far from a sympathetic figure and deserves to be in prison, but the imbalance of his sentence is a disturbing reflection of the government’s priorities.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has steadfastly refused to drop the Trump-era prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for communicating with a whistleblower — Chelsea Manning — and publishing government secrets he obtained from her.

Snowden has joined press freedom and civil liberties organizations, law professors, leading newspapers, and plenty of others in calling on everyone who values First Amendment freedoms to loudly oppose the unprecedented and highly dangerous prosecution.

In addition to its alarming implications for journalists’ First Amendment freedoms, the case has become an embarrassment to the United States on the world stage, especially after the U.K. High Court rejected supposed assurances by the U.S. that the First Amendment would adequately protect Assange if he’s tried in an American court.

And Assange’s case isn’t the only troubling use of the Espionage Act in the news — The Dissenter reported this week that the government is prosecuting a student for flying a drone near a naval shipyard. A news photographer could be next.

Those are only a few of many recent examples of the government overstepping, both in surveilling Americans and in punishing people like Snowden who embarrass officials. Legendary whistleblower and FPF co-founder Daniel Ellsberg often highlighted the increasingly dire situation faced by modern-day Espionage Act defendants, no matter how pure their motives or how important their revelations.

Times have changed since the Snowden revelations, and these days many take for granted that corporate and government actors regularly invade their privacy. That might be true, but it shouldn’t diminish our outrage. We should remember the sense of alarm we felt when Snowden showed us the scope of the government’s illegal surveillance of Americans and we should continue fighting back, even more aggressively than in 2013.

Merry is very curious, loving, playful and friendly. She needs a home with no other cats

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Good news! I get to go through menopause. Really. I met with the oncology team about my prostate cancer today and they recommended a treatment plan of hormone therapy plus radiation. The hormone in question is testosterone, which is the main feedstock of prostate cancer. So basically the idea is to suppress testosterone and starve ...continue reading "Health update"

A Collinsville, Illinois, man is due in court next month to face charges that he and another man stole tens of thousands of dollars from a pair of ATM machines in Spanish Lake.

Mayor Liz Gibbons would like to see the speed limit dropped down to 20 or 25 mph but 30 is a start.

Trevell M. Warren, 31, faces charges of second-degree murder, robbery, unlawful possession of a firearm and two counts of armed criminal action after prosecutors say he shot John Christmas, 51.

Ray Bradley was indicted in 2022 on charges of murder-for-hire and conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire in the death of Titus Armstead in April 2022.

WASHINGTON — Progressive lawmakers and organizers on Wednesday urged U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito to recuse himself from cases related to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and to testify before Congress about two flags sympathetic to insurrectionists that were displayed outside his two homes. With the Supreme Court as their backdrop, […]

The post Progressives urge Alito recusal from Jan. 6 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court appeared first on Missouri Independent.

Beau is a sweet, chill and loving boy. He loves toys, treats and catnip, but loves attention more than any of that. He's front declawed and cat friendly

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The leading candidates to be Missouri’s next governor disagree on whether the state should offer incentives to keep the Kansas City Chiefs from relocating to Kansas.  On Tuesday, the top Republican lawmakers in Kansas announced that they had reached out to the Chiefs organization to urge the team to consider moving across the state line. […]

The post Candidates for Missouri governor split on offering incentives to keep Chiefs from moving appeared first on Missouri Independent.