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A billionaire philanthropist is backing a pilot program to help fight poverty in his hometown. Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and current CEO of Block (NYSE: SQ), formerly Square, gave $1 million to help kickstart the city of St. Louis' Guaranteed Basic Income Pilot Program. Forbes estimated Dorsey's net worth at $3.1 billion earlier this month. The city launched a website on Tuesday where parents of school-age children can sign up to receive notifications about the $500 monthly cash…

"There [are] so many people dying. This truly is like another 9/11," the Parkway West High School senior said.

A Jennings man on Tuesday was sentenced to 51 months in prison for preparing at least 23 fraudulent tax returns.

You can enjoy one more concert at Norman Myers Park in Overland this year.

Gateway Christian Church in Town and Country is hosting a meal donation event on Wednesday.

by Jonathan D. Salant, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., has expanded his call to take action against medical device powerhouse Philips Respironics, sending a letter to federal regulators demanding aggressive enforcement against the company for withholding thousands of warnings about a dangerous defect in its breathing machines.

In the letter on Tuesday to Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert M. Califf and Attorney General Merrick Garland, Blumenthal cited a ProPublica and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigation last month that revealed the company sold millions of sleep apnea machines and ventilators even after finding that an industrial foam placed inside them was breaking down and emitting chemicals at dangerous levels.

Calling the investigation “explosive,” Blumenthal told the officials that their agencies “must urgently use all of their authorities to protect current and future patients by investigating these allegations thoroughly, taking the strongest enforcement action possible, including criminal charges, if the allegations are substantiated.”

Last week, Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and chairman of a subcommittee that probes potential violations of laws and regulations impacting national health and safety, also called on the Justice Department to take swift action.

In the letter, he urged the two agencies to “deter future wrongdoing and hold the company accountable for past violations.”

FDA spokesperson Carly Kempler said the agency received the letter and will respond to the senator. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A yearlong investigation by the news organizations found that Philips kept secret more than 3,700 complaints about the faulty devices over the course of 11 years before launching a massive recall.

When the recall was announced in 2021, Philips said the foam could release chemicals or break into particles capable of causing life-threatening injuries.

Since then, the company has changed course, saying recent testing on the DreamStation continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, machine and similar devices shows that chemical emissions fall within safety thresholds.

The FDA challenged the company on its test results, saying in a statement last week that the studies were not adequate and that Philips had agreed to conduct additional tests.

The foam was placed inside more than 15 million machines since 2009, prompting a recall that affected patients in the United States and around the world.

“We may not know the full impact of Philips’ negligence for years to come,” Blumenthal said in his letter.

Philips has said it evaluated complaints about the foam on a case-by-case basis and launched the recall shortly after the company became aware of the potential significance of the problem. Philips also said it regrets any “distress and concern” caused by the recall and is cooperating with prosecutors and regulators.

Help ProPublica and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Investigate the Recall of Philips Respironics Breathing Machines

Update, Oct. 11, 2023: This story was updated with comment from the FDA.

Debbie Cenziper of ProPublica and Michael D. Sallah of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette contributed reporting.

Laumeier Sculpture Park’s 2023 Visiting Artists in Residence are Pittsburgh-based artists Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis. This collaborative duo utilizes innovative approaches to conceptualism and minimalism to realize their […]

The post A Number of Tragedies appeared first on Explore St. Louis.

The money will be used to find and fix weaknesses in the county's systems and make other upgrades.

The 'International Day of the Girl' returns to St. Louis. The all-inclusive event has been celebrated worldwide for 11 years now.

St. Louis Actors’ Studio is presenting the local debut of Liza Birkenmeier’s play “Dr. Ride’s American Beach House.” It takes place on a St. Louis rooftop, as women question their own identities after learning astronaut Sally Ride was gay.

Marijuana prices in St. Louis County could soon be cheaper. That's if a new lawsuit is successful.

St. Charles County is hosting a job fair on Wednesday.

Ten months ago, Paige Bell’s mom went missing.

Seven pounds of drug contraband were kept out of the St. Charles County Jail just in the last three months, according to the jail director.

A busy intersection downtown reopens after a deadly crash near Enterprise Center.

The St. Louis County Council approves spending millions of dollars to help improve the county’s cybersecurity systems. This comes after hackers breached an important law enforcement system last month.

For Azra Selimovic, the opening of Azra Tattoos last month feels like nothing short of a miracle. She knows the shop wouldn’t exist, much less in a strip mall in Affton, without escapes from concentration camps, close calls with hostile officers in the war-torn Balkans, and stops in multiple foreign countries.

by Jeremy Schwartz

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

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.

As a new Texas law further restricting what books students can check out of school libraries takes effect, local bans are gaining steam in districts across the state — in some cases going in startling directions.

In Katy, a growing Houston suburb, school officials recently bought $93,000 worth of new library books and promptly put them in storage so an internal committee could review them. The district then banned 14 titles (bringing its total since 2021 to 30), including popular books by Dr. Seuss and Judy Blume, as well as “No, David!” an award-winning children’s book featuring a mischievous cartoon character who at one point jumps out of a bathtub, exposing a cartoon backside. (This wasn’t the district’s first foray into regulating cartoon nudity; over the summer, a book about a crayon that lost its wrapper, becoming “naked” in the process, was flagged for review but ultimately retained.)

Following the latest removals, the Katy school board decided that cartoon butts would be exempted from a district policy that called for removing books showing nudity. “Explicit frontal nudity,” on the other hand, would not be allowed.

“The board’s intent was never to remove well-known cartoon-like children’s books just because they showed a little drawing of a little boy’s rear-end,” its president, Victor Perez, said, according to the Houston Chronicle.

One hundred miles to the east, a school district near Beaumont made headlines last month after removing a substitute middle school teacher who had read students portions of an illustrated adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary, which detailed her hiding from the Nazis and was published after her death in the Holocaust.

The graphic novel version includes descriptions of Frank’s attraction to other girls as well as her clinical descriptions of her private parts.

The book, which had not been approved as part of the district’s curriculum, had been included on a reading list sent to parents at the start of the school year, according to television station KFDM.

The district is investigating whether administrators knew the book was being used in the class, according to news reports.

And just south of Houston, the private Friendswood Christian School announced it was canceling its Scholastic Book Fair, barring the nation’s largest children’s book publisher, which has put on book fairs at schools around the country for decades.

In a letter to parents, obtained by ABC13 in Houston, the school made clear the decision was aimed at books featuring LGBTQ+ themes and characters.

“The book fair is one of our biggest fundraisers, but unfortunately, we have seen more and more books that promote and support LBGTQ+ views,” the school wrote. “We’re at a crossroads where we share different values and beliefs, especially when it comes to exposing young children to adult topics. Friendswood Christian School is a private institution devoted to creating a complete learning environment for children by incorporating Christian principles into the academic framework. We want to provide an environment where children can hang on to their innocence as long as possible.”

Kasey Meehan, the Freedom to Read program director for the New York-based free speech organization PEN America, said that as Texas enters what is essentially its third consecutive school year of book banning activity, efforts have taken some troubling directions.

“Even after that first removal of books, what we see is a continued chilling effect that happens across schools,” she said in an interview. “There are these ripples that are going to extend beyond simply removing a book to just read, erring on the side of caution and bringing a bit more scrutiny to any availability of books and any opportunities that students can have to access books.”

The local censorship efforts come as courts wrestle with a new Texas law that requires booksellers to rate public school library books based on their depictions of or references to sex. Books in which such references are deemed “patently offensive” by the vendors will be issued a “sexually explicit” rating and can’t be sold to schools and must be removed from shelves of school libraries. Books that reference or depict sex generally will be rated “sexually relevant” and require parental permission to read.

Texas schools would be barred from buying books from vendors who don’t use the ratings.

On Sept. 18, a U.S. district judge in Austin issued a written order blocking the law, which was passed this spring, from taking effect. Judge Alan D. Albright, a Trump appointee, ruled the law would impose “unconstitutionally vague requirements” on booksellers and “misses the mark on obscenity.”

“And the state,” he wrote, “in abdicating its responsibility to protect children, forces private individuals and corporations into compliance with an unconstitutional law that violates the First Amendment.”

A week later, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the judge’s ruling, temporarily allowing the law to go into effect while the court considers the case, which it is expected to take up this month.

Book bannings have increased precipitously in the state since ProPublica and The Texas Tribune started reporting on the issue in rural Hood County two years ago, where a fight over library books foreshadowed the intense partisanship that has come to mark many Texas school board races. The U.S. Department of Education launched an investigation into the Granbury Independent School District after the superintendent was secretly recorded ordering librarians to remove library books with LGBTQ+ themes.

The federal probe, which followed a ProPublica-Tribune investigation with NBC News, remains open, according to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. Last year, in response to the outlets’ investigation, the district said it was committed to supporting students of all backgrounds.

The issue continues to roil Granbury, as some community members and trustees don’t believe the district has gone far enough to remove books. Last month, the school board censured a trustee who wants additional titles removed after she was accused of sneaking into a school library to examine books with a cellphone flashlight.

According to a report from the American Library Association, Texas was home to the most attempts to ban or restrict books in 2022.

Of the 1,269 documented attempts to remove books from school or public libraries across the nation in 2022, 93 took place in Texas, affecting over 2,300 titles, the association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom found. The ALA said book challenges nearly doubled nationally in 2022 and are “evidence of a growing, well-organized, conservative political movement, the goals of which include removing books about race, history, gender identity, sexuality, and reproductive health from America’s public and school libraries that do not meet their approval.”

The American Library Association itself has come under fire among conservative circles in Texas. In August, Midland County commissioners voted to withdraw from the association. Days later, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission pulled out.

A similar report by PEN America found 3,362 instances of book banning at K-12 schools during the 2022-23 school year, up 33% from the previous year. According to the organization, Florida schools accounted for the most removals, 1,406, followed by Texas with 625.

What’s been your experience with school library book bans in Texas? Email Austin-based reporter Jeremy Schwartz at jeremy.schwartz@propublica.org to let him know.