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The former personal sanctuary of a local businessman has been transformed into an oasis that can be enjoyed by all.

A U.S. House panel renewed the decades-long fight Wednesday over how standing waters on farmland and other private property should be defined and regulated by federal authorities, with Republicans calling for a pause until the U.S. Supreme Court can provide more clarity. The definition of so-called Waters of the United States, or WOTUS — wetlands […]

The post Longtime tensions over federal wetlands rule return in U.S. House WOTUS hearing appeared first on Missouri Independent.

From riot gear to PR to Dairy Queen, records detail every expense Enbridge reimbursed after the Line 3 protests.

Federal rules for mining haven't been updated since Ulysses S. Grant was president.

Police found a man dead in a vehicle early Thursday near Ashbrook and Golden drives.

by Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Alejandro Serrano, The Texas Tribune

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.

A Texas state senator announced a slate of bills this week that aim to better prepare schools and law enforcement for mass casualty events, including one that seeks to improve emergency medical response.

Flanked by several family members of victims of the Uvalde massacre and of the 2018 Santa Fe, Texas, shooting, Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a San Antonio Democrat, on Tuesday called for more robust training to improve coordination among public safety agencies. The proposed measures include establishing a clearer chain of command and better preparing emergency medical responders so that they can minimize casualties.

The legislation comes two months after an investigation by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and The Washington Post revealed that communication lapses among medical crews further delayed treatment for victims.

Nineteen children and two adults died in the May 24 shooting at Robb Elementary.

Nearly 400 law enforcement officers responded to the shooting, but police did not confront the gunman for more than an hour. While experts said that law enforcement’s failure to do so was the most serious problem in getting victims care, the news organizations’ investigation revealed for the first time communication flaws and unclear lines of authority in the medical response that further hampered lifesaving efforts. An earlier story by ProPublica and the Tribune found failures to take charge at all levels of law enforcement.

Since the shooting, several local and state police officers who responded that day have been terminated or suspended. Others remain under investigation. Law enforcement leaders have defended most officers’ actions as reasonable under difficult circumstances.

Eric Epley, executive director of the Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council, a nonprofit that helps coordinate trauma care in Southwest Texas during mass-casualty events, previously told the news organizations that medics encountered challenges, including a faulty radio system, and did the best they could in an “inherently confusing” situation.

Gutierrez said the problems in the Uvalde response require thoughtful and far-reaching action from the Legislature.

“Everybody in Texas needs to examine the complete and utter failure that happened on this day,” he said. “It must not ever happen again.”

As part of the investigation, ProPublica, the Tribune and the Post detailed medical responses for multiple victims who emerged from the school with a pulse but later died.

Gutierrez said those victims and others “might have lived” had the response been more in line with the average length of a mass shooting, which he said was about 12 to 14 minutes, compared to the 77 minutes children waited in Uvalde before the shooter was killed.

“We do not know how many of the other kids that didn’t have a pulse, at what time did they expire?” he said. “We do not know that.”

Gutierrez introduced other measures that sought $2 billion for school hardening, such as bulletproof glass and fencing at campuses, and another $2 billion to expand mental health care access. He said he wants about $750 million to fund 10,000 additional state police officers, who would be assigned specifically to school security efforts.

The state senator also pushed for legislation that would bolster rural communication tools. Emergency radios faltered on the day of the shooting, in part because Uvalde’s frequency was designed for rural terrain rather than inside buildings, according to Forrest Anderson, the county’s emergency management coordinator who oversaw its radio system’s implementation two decades ago.

Gutierrez called the fact that the radios did not work a “complete and utter failure.”

“Imagine that. 2022, and everybody in Texas should be very afraid. 2022, not one damn radio worked inside of that building. Not one radio. Cops were out there playing telephone for 77 minutes, trying to figure out what was going on inside and outside and who was talking on one side of the hallway and who was talking on the other.”

He took aim at Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security initiative, saying that if Texas is going to spend billions of dollars on Operation Lone Star, the state should also increase funding for improved emergency communications in border counties. Under the governor’s program, thousands of National Guard members and state police have deployed to the region.

“This story, yes, is a story about terror. It’s also a story about rural neglect, neglect in Texas,” Gutierrez said.

A spokesperson for the governor did not respond to questions about Gutierrez’s proposals or his criticisms of the border security program. Neither did representatives for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick or the Department of Public Safety.

At the news conference, Christina Delgado, a Santa Fe mother who has become an advocate with the Community Justice Action Fund, a nonprofit focused on ending gun violence, said that in the coming weeks she and others impacted by gun violence would meet with lawmakers to discuss legislation related to mass shootings.

“We have got to take a stand. Now,” she said, pleading for lawmakers to listen and act. “This is coming up on five years of zero action, of showboating, of putting out legislation and allowing it to die just as we let our Texans and our children die in classrooms and in communities.”

In 2019, Peter Frampton announced he was retiring from touring after being diagnosed with inclusion body myositis, a degenerative muscular disease that affects his ability to play guitar. COVID forced him to cancel the…

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The Homes Guarantee Campaign got the attention of policymakers at the highest levels. Now these tenant organizers want to get the policy.

The economy is not about money; it’s about people.

Big Oil has its eye on the EV charging infrastructure sector.

by Marjorie Childress, New Mexico In Depth, and Steve Myers, ProPublica

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with New Mexico In Depth. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

This is a follow-up to an investigation into high discipline rates of Native American students in New Mexico. Read the article: “This School District Is Ground Zero for Harsh Discipline of Native Students in New Mexico.”

At New Mexico in Depth and ProPublica, we practice “no surprises” journalism: No one should read anything about themselves in our articles without first having had a chance to respond.

So journalists in our newsrooms were surprised to read in the Gallup Sun, a weekly newspaper, that the superintendent of Gallup-McKinley County Schools had criticized our story about his school district. We had given him ample opportunity to respond to our reporting, but the Sun did not give us that opportunity in turn.

Superintendent Mike Hyatt told the Sun and school board members that he ignored our requests to talk to him because he believed we had a predetermined narrative.

That’s not the case. ProPublica, a national nonprofit investigative news outlet, partnered with New Mexico In Depth, a state-based nonprofit news organization, to look at school discipline across New Mexico. We wanted to understand what was driving high rates of discipline for Native American students in the state.

We found that Gallup-McKinley County Schools was responsible for a disproportionate amount of the disparity. It has a quarter of the state’s Native students, but it accounted for at least three-quarters of Native student expulsions in the state during the four school years ending in 2020.

Our Dec. 21 story was republished by the Albuquerque Journal, the Gallup Independent and the Gallup Sun.

We had reached out to the school district months earlier, in February 2022, to ask about disparities in discipline between Gallup-McKinley and other school districts in New Mexico. We called and emailed repeatedly over the following months, reiterating our desire to talk to district officials and asking for additional data. Hyatt was copied on almost 100 emails with district staff.

We emailed Hyatt a 10-page letter on Nov. 11, a month before publishing our story, to detail our findings, ask again for an interview and seek clarifications or corrections. We never heard from him.

Hyatt disputed our findings at a school board meeting on Jan. 9 and elaborated in the Sun article on Jan. 27.

He said most of the 211 expulsions we found in the district’s own data for the four academic years ending in 2020 should be reclassified as suspensions because those students were not permanently removed from school. Under that definition, he said, the district had expelled just 15 students over the most recent seven years.

The Sun sent us an email on Jan. 25 to say it planned to publish a story in response to ours, which would include an interview with Hyatt. When we asked for the opportunity to respond to claims about our work, the reporter refused, saying we could respond afterward. Gallup Sun publisher Babette Herrmann later told us that was her call. She didn’t think it was necessary for the reporter to interview us, she said, even though the story quoted Hyatt criticizing our reporting.

Here’s what we would have said if the Sun had given us the opportunity to respond.

After a careful review of the data, we stand by our conclusions. Our analysis relied on the district’s own data as reported to the state, and the vast majority of expulsions we analyzed fit the district’s definition at the time. Before this school year, the district’s handbook defined an expulsion as a removal from school for at least 90 days and up to 365. Now it says an expulsion is a “permanent” removal from school.

Our original reporting found that Gallup-McKinley was responsible for at least three-quarters of all Native expulsions in the state over four years. That held true when we counted all removals from school of 90 days or longer, regardless of whether they were called suspensions or expulsions.

Download the Data

We’ve compiled enrollment and discipline data on all New Mexico school districts. Download it here.

We also reported that Gallup-McKinley’s expulsion rate for those four years was at least 10 times as high as the rest of the state. When we counted all removals from school of 90 days or longer — again, regardless of whether they were categorized as expulsions or suspensions — Gallup-McKinley’s rate was just as high.

In addition, we looked at suspensions and expulsions longer than 10 days. Gallup-McKinley still reported far higher rates of these removals than the rest of the state.

Our findings remain unchanged: Gallup-McKinley County Schools is responsible for an outsized share of serious punishments of Native students in New Mexico. Revising the definition of an expulsion does not alter that fact.

Hyatt’s comments come after months of denials and delayed responses to many of our public records requests. When we asked for enrollment data broken down by race, the district at first claimed the data didn’t exist. Then they said they couldn’t provide it. We eventually got it from the state, which had received it from the district.

That pattern continues. When we asked to see the documents that Hyatt read from during his presentation to the school board, the district responded that they’d need at least another 30 days to provide them because doing so within the 15-day legal deadline was too onerous.

A principal even called the police when we came to the school to drop off a document saying a student’s guardian had given us permission to review the student’s school discipline records. (We dropped off the form without incident and only later learned, as we reviewed emails obtained through a public records request, that the principal had called the police.)

According to Gallup-McKinley’s own numbers, the district bears significant responsibility for the disparity in harsh punishments faced by Native students in New Mexico. We worked hard to understand that data. We engaged with the school district at every turn. And we believe it was in the public interest to share what we found.

Marjorie Childress is managing editor at New Mexico In Depth. Steve Myers is a senior editor at ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.

Dan Pree of St. Louis, MO joined the Real Rock Army today

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Pike County couple hopes ruling will lead to their son coming home.

The debate over defunding police may be giving way to ‘funding prosecutors’ in the St. Louis area and across the United States.

FOX 2 continues to dig for answers about who is responsible for the water contamination in St. Charles. Five of the seven water wells in St. Charles are shut down, and while local leaders work out a plan to move forward, the city continues to buy water daily from St. Louis.

"I don't want her to be in jail, but she needs help,” Fatima Suarez said. "If she is threatening my family, she can do it to other families as well."