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If you use I-55 between Soulard and south county, get ready for backups along the busy stretch of highway. MoDOT is planning multiple lane closures as part of a major ongoing project.

The acclaimed chef also remains the owner of two businesses: Jalea restaurant in St. Charles and Sanguchitos by Brasas inside Perennial Artisan Ales in South City.

With one week left before spring break, Republicans may shift debate to transgender issues instead.

What started as a mere trickle of spam has now grown into great hulking mountains of unwanted calls and internet pitches.

Flood damage at Sew Hope, a community sewing center in the Florissant Meadows Shopping Center, was extensive.

The prospect of a landfill on the edge of Kansas City and a stone’s throw from a golf course community has pitted half a dozen Missouri mayors against a private company with an army of Jefferson City lobbyists. And that’s all before the would-be owners even approach the city with a plan.  For more than […]

The post Outrage over proposed Kansas City landfill sets up showdown in Missouri Capitol appeared first on Missouri Independent.

The recent revelation that multiple hosts on Fox News deliberately misled their audience — reporting and promoting the lie that there was rampant voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election when they knew there was none — may not be surprising but is definitely damning. Every American who cares about the role of the press […]

The post When major news sources report and promote lies, what is the public to do? appeared first on Missouri Independent.

The Black Crowes have spent the past two years celebrating their debut album, Shake Your Money Maker, and now they are continuing that celebration with a new live album. The Black Crowes: Shake Your…

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A grieving son protects his family’s beehives as he steers them home aboard his parents’ ship.

Despite rising seas, a band of coastal-dwelling Goori honor their traditions surfing monster waves.

On the day he is to marry, the son of a Māori chief questions his place in his community.

The State Emergency Management Agency reminds Missourians to prepare for severe weather and learn what to do in case of a tornado.

Warming seas and dwindling sea ice are bringing new species to Arctic waters, a potentially irreversible tipping point for the ecosystem.

by Jeremy Schwartz and Kiah Collier

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.

Texas lawmakers are working to plug a gap in a 2009 law that was meant to keep people with a history of serious mental health issues from legally acquiring firearms.

Bipartisan legislation has been filed in the state House and Senate that would explicitly require courts to report information on involuntary mental health hospitalizations of juveniles age 16 and older after a ProPublica and Texas Tribune investigation revealed that they were being excluded from the national firearms background check system.

Under the current law, county and district clerks across the state are required to send information on court-ordered mental health hospitalizations to the Department of Public Safety. The state’s top law enforcement agency is charged with forwarding those records to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, known as NICS. Federally licensed dealers are required to check the system before they sell someone a firearm.

Elliott Naishtat, a former state lawmaker from Austin who authored the 2009 law, told the news organizations that he intended for it to apply to all Texans no matter their age. But following the May 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, the outlets discovered that local court clerks were not sharing that information for juveniles, either as a matter of policy or because they didn’t believe that they had to.

A bill by state Sen. Joan Huffman, a Houston-area Republican, passed unanimously out of committee last week with bipartisan support.

The legislation aligns Texas with new federal reporting requirements and is “meant to make the background check more thorough and hence make our communities and schools safer,” Huffman at the committee hearing.

Congress passed gun reform legislation in June that includes a requirement that federal investigators check state databases for juvenile mental health records. But such checks would fail to reveal many court-ordered juvenile commitments in Texas because they are not currently being reported.

It’s impossible to say how many Texans with juvenile mental health records have been able to purchase firearms as adults. But the same month Congress passed the reforms, San Antonio police arrested a 19-year-old man who had been placed in mental health facilities twice when he was 16, his father told police. The man, who had recently purchased an AR-style rifle, considered the Uvalde gunman an “idol” and threatened to commit a mass shooting at an Amazon delivery station where he worked, according to an arrest affidavit.

Since the news organizations’ investigation, the Texas Judicial Council, which monitors and recommends reforms to the state judiciary, has called on lawmakers to clarify juvenile reporting requirements, concluding that there was widespread confusion about them.

Naishtat also reached out to current legislators to request that they file legislation to clarify the requirements after learning about the gap from ProPublica and the Tribune.

“I just want to get this fixed,” Naishtat said.

A sold-out crowd of more than 22,400 soccer fans packed CityPark on Saturday for St. Louis CITY SC’s inaugural home match.

President Biden may nominate Janice Eberly, former deputy to the mastermind of America’s foreclosure crisis.

With the company pausing construction on its ‘second headquarters’ in Virginia, we can see the HQ2 bidding war for what it was: a mass intelligence-gathering operation.

by Evan Robinson-Johnson for ProPublica

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

A former Lebanese diplomat sanctioned by U.S. authorities for allegedly funneling money to the terrorist group Hezbollah was arrested last week in Bucharest, Romania, and U.S. officials are seeking his extradition.

Mohammad Ibrahim Bazzi, 58, is accused by federal prosecutors of attempting to evade sanctions by trying to launder and move more than $800,000 from the United States to Lebanon, according to the Department of Justice.

Bazzi was one of 500 current or former diplomats identified last year in an investigation by ProPublica and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that revealed widespread abuses in a little-known and poorly regulated system of international diplomacy.

So-called honorary consuls work from their home countries to represent the interests of the foreign governments that appoint them. In exchange, the volunteer diplomats are afforded some of the same legal protections offered to career diplomats, including travel benefits and political connections unavailable to most private citizens.

The “Shadow Diplomats” investigation found that a number of consuls have stood accused of crimes or were embroiled in controversy — many while they held their posts. Thirty current and former honorary consuls have been sanctioned by the United States and other governments; nine have been linked to terrorist groups by law enforcement and governments, including Bazzi.

Bazzi was appointed honorary consul in Lebanon by the government of Gambia in 2005 under the regime of then-Gambian President Yahya Jammeh, according to court records. The Gambian government terminated his appointment in 2017.

A year later, the U.S. Treasury Department designated Bazzi a “global terrorist,” accusing the businessman of funneling money to Hezbollah, a militant group that has attacked U.S. service members, civilians and others in countries including Israel, Argentina and Iraq. The designation blocked Bazzi’s interests in domestic real estate and prohibited American citizens from conducting any business that would benefit him.

In 2019, Bazzi sought to overturn the U.S. sanction. In court records, he said the government failed to provide evidence that he had financed Hezbollah. The sanction is still in place.

Bazzi’s attorney could not be reached for comment.

In a three-count indictment unsealed last week in New York, Bazzi and a second man were charged with conspiring to launder money and to cause U.S. individuals to conduct unlawful transactions involving a global terrorist. Recorded communications revealed that the men proposed numerous strategies to move money, including transferring funds through a fake restaurant deal and a family loan scheme in Kuwait, according to the Justice Department.

“The defendants in this case attempted to provide continued financial assistance to [Hezbollah], a foreign terrorist organization responsible for death and destruction,” Daniel Kafafian, acting special agent in charge at the Drug Enforcement Administration’s New Jersey division, said in a statement.

John Marzulli, a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in New York’s Eastern District, declined to comment on Bazzi’s prior status as an honorary consul. Marzulli said he could not say when the men will arrive in the United States; the government is seeking extradition. Each count in the indictment carries up to 20 years in prison.

The Eastern District U.S. attorney, Breon Peace, said in a release: “Mohammad Bazzi thought that he could secretly move hundreds of thousands of dollars from the United States to Lebanon without detection by law enforcement.” This “arrest proves that Bazzi was wrong.”

Matthew Levitt, a counterrorism expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Bazzi was especially skilled at finding ways to establish relationships with people in power.

“This is someone who is a player for senior Hezbollah operatives and senior Iranian leadership,” Levitt said. “His arrest and extradition is significant.”

Evan Robinson-Johnson is a student at Northwestern University's Medill Investigative Lab.

Debbie Cenziper contributed reporting.

ESG and sustainability are the latest manifestations of a tried-and-true strategy for the consulting industry.