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It's taken "The Longest Time," but Billy Joel is now on TikTok -- and he's using the social media platform to tease ... something. Billy's first post shows him onstage at Madison…

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The high school elective courses Black History and Black Literature would effectively be dropped by fall 2024, teachers said.

So much for ringing in 2024 with Mötley Crüe. The rockers just announced the cancellation of their December 31 concert at the Acrisure Arena in Palm Springs, California, citing production issues. “It is…

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Jason Kuhl, CEO of the St. Charles City-County Library District, said the move would affect an "exceedingly small number" of the 700,000-plus books in the library's collection.

One of the largest urgent care chains in Missouri will pay $9.1 million to settle allegations that the company submitted false claims for medical services, including COVID-19 testing.

It looks like we may soon be getting some new music from Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. Polly Samson, Gilmour’s wife and occasional lyricist, has shared several photos on Instagram of Gilmour in the studio,…

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Most highways out of the City of St. Louis are networks that cross a river in the city or St. Louis County. There's at least one exception to that norm: Missouri Route 100.

NSC spokesperson John Kirby, pictured above, said the Biden administration needs more information to determine whether Israel is targeting journalists. But he made clear that the administration has no intention of actually seeking that information. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from Washington D.C, United States, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Last month, we wrote about how journalists need to ask the Biden administration pointed questions about the record pace of journalist killings in the Israel-Gaza war. The good news is that the press has started to do its part by asking questions. The bad news is that Biden administration officials aren’t doing their part by answering them in good faith. 

Case in point: recent remarks from National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby, after an Al Jazeera reporter asked him about the killing of one of its photographers, Samer Abu Daqqa, in an attack that also injured its reporter and Gaza bureau chief Wael al Dahdouh. (Virtually all of al Dahdouh’s family had been wiped out in an Israeli airstrike weeks before.)

The reporter noted that witnesses said Abu Daqqa was killed by a drone, and asked if the incident had led Kirby to rethink his prior statements that the administration had seen no evidence of Israel targeting journalists. 

It’s a fair question, especially considering Israel’s history with Al Jazeera, which includes targeting Al Jazeera journalists, and multiple recent investigations that conclude Israel intentionally targeted other reporters during the current war. 

After offering condolences, Kirby reiterated the administration’s public position that “journalists need to be able to have the freedom to cover conflicts around the world. … And it’s never acceptable to deliberately target them as they do such vital, dangerous, dangerous work.” Sounds good so far. 

But then came the dodge. “I don’t know all the details about his tragic killing, so I’m not in a position to say that the operation which killed him was of a certain flavor or not,” Kirby said. Asked what kind of evidence he’d need to change his mind, Kirby said the U.S. would need to gather more information. “We’d have to have more specific knowledge than we do right now about the purpose of the strike, the origin of the strike, the targeting process, the selection process,” Kirby stated. 

But then in virtually the same breath, Kirby seemed to indicate the U.S. has no intention of trying to extract any of that information from Israel’s government or investigate the eyewitness claims at all:  “We are not going to make ourselves judge and jury over every single airstrike and every single kinetic event that happens on the battlefield.”

Kirby added that “we stay in touch with our Israeli counterparts every day. We still don’t have any indications that they are deliberately targeting journalists. And that’s where I’d have to leave it.” 

So let’s get this straight: The administration says it cares deeply about journalists’ freedom to cover the war without being targeted. It needs more information to figure out whether Israel, its ally that it continues to finance, is, in fact, targeting journalists. But it’s not going to bother seeking that information, at least until unnamed Israeli counterparts voluntarily confess during one of their daily check-ins.  

Of course, the administration does investigate specific instances when it wants to. For example, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said this week that officials are posing “specific” and “tough” questions to the Israeli government about the recent killings, condemned by the Pope, of two Palestinian Christian women as they walked to a convent of nuns. And the administration is eager to get specific about Hamas’ atrocities. 

But, apparently, dead journalists aren’t as important. 

“We will, however, continue to talk,” Kirby continued. And that pretty much sums up the administration’s response to the (at least) 68 journalists killed to date in this war. All talk.

You may be surprised to learn exactly how many beauty products qualify for use with your tax-free dollars. Shop these best FSA- and HSA-eligible beauty products now.

We've all heard about the replication crisis, right? It turns out that lots of well-known results in the social sciences are the result of crappy, small experiments that fail when researchers try to reproduce them. But that's social science. An article in Nature a few months ago says we have the same problem in clinical ...continue reading "Lots of clinical trials are just faked"

A man was shot and killed early Wednesday in a parking lot.

Happy winter solstice! This is the mesa after which Mesa Verde National Park is named.

The inmate was sent to the hospital after his cellmate repeatedly bit him early Wednesday.

Thousands hit the roads and skies on Thursday to get ahead of the holiday rush.

People keep accusing me of criticizing Elon Musk because I “hate” him. But I don’t hate him, nor do I criticize him out of any personal feelings at all, beyond thinking that he often is hypocritical in his decision making, and makes decisions that defy common sense and logic. But when he does the right […]

The St. Louis Business Journal recently spent part of a workday at a local warehouse subject to a recent safety complaint. Leaders there stressed the steps that Amazon takes to maintain a safe workplace. The tour and interview came at an intense time as Amazon hired about 2,800 full-time, seasonal, and part-time workers in the St. Louis metro area to handle the estimated 16 million orders for the holidays.

ALTON – The Alton Dispensary has requested the City of Alton's help in its search for a new home. At a Wednesday night meeting of the Alton City Council, President and CEO of IllinoisCannabis49, Inc., d/b/a The Alton Dispensary, Jeremy Wysocki, asked the council for its assistance in changing an ordinance to allow an adult-use cannabis dispensary to be allowed in an E-5 zone/district. Currently, the City of Alton only allows such facilities to be positioned in E-2 zones/districts. However, ownership of The Alton Dispensary has found a suitable building in an E-5 zone/district. The need to move locations comes after a Monday, Dec. 18 ruling to evict The Alton Dispensary from its current location at 1400 E. Broadway in Alton. The eviction is the latest in a line of what the dispensary considers “retaliatory efforts” from its former management company, Subsero Alton Ops, LLC and its affiliates. The building itself is owned by Subsero Alton RE, LLC. However, the cannabis

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