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Janes and Pang Atelier offers weekly open figure sessions to people with all levels of experience. There will be a live model on every Tuesday evening from 5:30pm to 8pm, […]

The post Weekly Open Figure Session appeared first on Explore St. Louis.

February is setting up 2024 to be one for the heat history books.

Missouri state Treasurer Vivek Malek endured a bipartisan beatdown Tuesday as members of a House subcommittee spent two hours telling him it was a big mistake to put decals advertising the Unclaimed Property program on unregulated gambling machines. A few hours later, Malek gave in to demands from members of the House Subcommittee on Appropriations – General Administration and removed the ads from machines owned by Wildwood-based Torch Electronics. “I have today revoked permission for Torch…

Political candidates who make national headlines — and those who may only be known in their hometown — descended on Jefferson City Tuesday morning for the first day of a month-long window to file to run for office in Missouri. To run for office, candidates have no choice but to show up in person. Some […]

The post Missouri candidates head to Jefferson City for first day to file for 2024 elections appeared first on Missouri Independent.

A Girl Scout troop in St. Louis County made bracelets to raise funds for child war victims in Gaza. Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri told them to stop — or face legal action. The troop’s co-leaders, and one of the scouts, discuss what happened next, why they’ve decided to disband from the organization to create their own group, and their continued efforts to fundraise for the Palestine Children's Relief Fund. (Correction: Mariyah Abdelbaset is in fifth grade, not sixth grade, as mentioned in this episode.)

Editor’s Note: John Bartee, an SIUE  business student, wrote this article while interning at Korte Company in marketing.  Macy Morley worked as a project management intern at Korte Company while pursuing dual master’s degrees in architecture and construction management from Washington University in St. Louis. It all started with an interest in architecture at the […]

The Supreme Court recently held oral arguments in two cases that could reshape the internet — and impact the press. File:Panorama of United States Supreme Court Building at Dusk.jpg by Joe Ravi is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Should the online platform Substack be allowed to ban Nazis? Not should it ban Nazis. But should it be legally allowed to ban Nazis?

I’m asking on behalf of nine justices of the Supreme Court, not to mention the billions of people who use the internet. On Monday, the court heard oral arguments in two cases, NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice, that could dramatically reshape online speech by determining whether the First Amendment protects the content moderation decisions of social media platforms.

At issue in the cases are two state laws — one from Florida and one from Texas — that constrain online content moderation decisions. Roughly speaking, the Florida law prohibits social media companies from permanently banning politicians and “journalistic enterprises,” while the Texas law prohibits them from banning users on the basis of viewpoint.

That means, for example, that the Florida law would prohibit a platform from permanently banning a politician running for office in the state as a literal Nazi. The Texas law would bar a platform from banning pro-Nazi speech as long as it allowed anti-Nazi speech.

In addition to impacting online speech, the NetChoice cases could reshape First Amendment law in ways that matter to the press. Based on Monday’s argument, journalists should watch the court’s decisions for two things: First, to see if the court limits the ability to challenge laws that violate First Amendment rights as facially invalid, that is, unconstitutional in all circumstances; and second, how it treats a landmark press freedom decision, Miami Herald v. Tornillo.

First Amendment faceoff

Several justices unexpectedly raised a legal issue during Monday’s arguments — about the plaintiff’s “facial” challenge to the Florida law — that could have implications for the press.

In a facial challenge, a plaintiff argues that a law can never be applied in a way that is constitutional. But the justices asked whether the Florida law might have some applications that are actually constitutional. If so, the justices asked, should the court reject the plaintiff’s claim and require it to bring an “as-applied” challenge, arguing that the law is unconstitutional in more specific ways?

The problem with that is that it’s easy to think of potential constitutional applications of broad and ambiguous laws, precisely because no one understands exactly what they mean.

A decision rewarding bad statutory drafting by allowing otherwise unconstitutional laws to survive based on hypothetical scenarios could, as the lawyer for the platforms argued, be “the worst First Amendment case in this Court's history.” It would allow legislatures to put one constitutional provision in an otherwise totally unconstitutional law and avoid having the law struck down wholesale.

For example, an Oklahoma lawmaker recently proposed a totally unconstitutional law that would require journalists to be licensed and subjected to criminal background tests and drug tests. There’s nothing constitutional about this bill. But a more shrewd lawmaker in a state intent on harming the press could cause mischief by writing ambiguous and possibly constitutional provisions into an otherwise completely unconstitutional bill, just to make it harder for courts to strike it down. Imagine, for instance, that the Oklahoma law required drug testing not just for reporters and editors, but also for delivery truck drivers.

It’s not clear if the court plans to go down this road in its decisions in NetChoice. But based on the questions at oral argument, journalists should at least be concerned that the court may be thinking about creating barriers to First Amendment facial challenges that could impact cases involving the press in the future.

Press precedent holds up

In contrast, journalists can be reassured by the court’s treatment during Monday’s argument of Miami Herald v. Tornillo. In Tornillo, the court held that the First Amendment protects newspapers’ choices about what to publish or not publish, also known as the exercise of editorial discretion or judgment. In the NetChoice cases, the social media platforms argue that their content moderation decisions are the exercise of editorial discretion and therefore protected by the First Amendment.

It may seem odd for the platforms to rely on a press freedom decision to make their case before a Supreme Court that talks about the news media in increasingly hostile terms. But thankfully, most discussion of Tornillo during Monday’s oral argument was positive. Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett, in particular, returned again and again to the First Amendment’s protections for the editorial discretion exercised by news outlets. Even justices that seemed hostile to the social media companies, like Justice Alito, seemed to accept that the First Amendment protects newspapers’ editorial judgments.

However, the devil may be in the details of whatever opinion the court ultimately writes. Even if the court applies Tornillo to content moderation, there’s a risk that it could weaken the First Amendment protection for editorial discretion by saying that the government has to meet only a low or middling burden to overcome it. There’s no specific indication from the oral argument that the court plans to do that, but journalists should watch out for any tinkering with Tornillo in the court’s decisions here.

Whatever the outcome of the NetChoice cases, states will almost certainly persist in trying to punish social media companies for hosting content that lawmakers dislike. Journalists should be wary. While social media is the political punching bag for now, there are plenty of politicians who want to go after the press using similar legal theories and complaints. If First Amendment precedent falls in social media cases, it will make it easier for lawmakers to target journalists next.

Schnucks brings a new element to the grocery shopping experience. Some stores around the St. Louis area are now testing out AI-powered smart carts.

The good ol' Wall Street Journal reports today on the travails of the hotel industry: Even after clawing back hundreds of thousands of jobs during the past two years, the industry is still light on staff and often struggling to adapt.... At the same time, hotels across the U.S. have held their daily room rates ...continue reading "Here’s the non-fantasy story of how hotels are doing"

Lutheran Senior Services, a nonprofit provider of housing, care and support services for older adults, has acquired a service program and related property from another locally based nonprofit.

A country music legend, a songwriter so good at writing songs they gave him a Nobel Prize, and a man who used to go by the name Cougar are all coming to St. Louis for a show in September. Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan and John Mellencamp will all take the stage of the Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre on September 8, a show that is a part of Nelson's Outlaw Music Festival Tour.

He pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in January.

He was charged with a violation related to the escape.

John Ulett started as a DJ at KSHE-95 in 1976 when he was just 19 years old. He’s never left, and he’s about to begin his 40th full season as the Cardinals’ PA announcer at Busch Stadium. Ulett reflects on his long career in his hometown in advance of Thursday evening's event at the Sheldon, “Life, Death & Other Scary Things: An Evening with KSHE-95's John Ulett.”

John Fogerty wants his fans in Australia to know that he did not cancel a planned appearance at Country Fest Queensland.The festival is scheduled to happen March 30-31, with the…

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Derek D. Brown, 50, pleaded guilty Tuesday to one count of assault of a federal officer and two counts of discharging a firearm during a crime.

To You, I Go (2023) is Jessica Page’s visual love letter to St. Louis. Although St. Louis is rarely romanticized, Page aims to showcase the softest purest side of her […]

The post To You, I Go appeared first on Explore St. Louis.