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Ultimately, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has the final say, but the ad hoc committee is an attempt for owners to find an amicable solution.

The lottery opens Friday for tickets April 12-17.

DUQUOIN – Illinois State Police (ISP) Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) Zone 7 officials were requested to conduct an investigation into the death of Robert Jarden, 38-year-old male of Okawville. On Sunday, March 27, 2022, ISP District 13 was requested by the Okawville Police Department (OPD) to assist with a reported suicidal male subject who was trespassing and then barricaded himself inside the bedroom of a family member’s residence. For several hours, ISP Crisis Negotiators unsuccessfully attempted to resolve the situation peacefully by speaking with the male subject. Troopers were able to enter the bedroom and discovered Jarden was deceased from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. ISP DCI Zone 7 was requested to conduct the investigation into the death of Jarden. The investigation is currently open and ongoing and no further information will be released at this time.

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EDWARDSVILLE – The Southern Illinois University Edwardsville School of Business celebrated academic achievement and expressed appreciation for donor support at its annual Scholarships and Awards Program held Wednesday, March 23 in the Morris University Center Meridian Ballroom. Scholarship awards of over $340,000 were presented to more than 130 students in honor of their meritorious work and commitment to academic excellence. Recipients are pursuing degrees in accounting, business administration, computer management and information systems, economics and finance, and management and marketing. “Awards of scholarship are remarkable investments in the future of SIUE business students especially because they do not have to be repaid,” said Tim Schoenecker, PhD, dean of the School of Business. “It is crucial that we continue to secure additional scholarship funds, both annual and endowed, so that we can continue to attract and retain outstanding students by offering

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Universal contact tracing and individual case investigations will end in Missouri. The state will also update data on its public COVID-19 dashboard less often, officials announced.

Courthouse News Service (CNS) is (again) suing to block court administrators from deliberately withholding filed documents from the press. CNS has sued several other state court systems over the same misbehavior by clerks and the administrators overseeing them. Last summer, CNS — which obviously relies on prompt access to maintain its reporting edge — obtained […]

TabsFolders lets you save, manage, synchronize, and share bookmarks at a lightning-fast speed. TabsFolders sees your countless tabs and raises you one easy-to-use tool that organizes all the information you need. As soon as you add the extension to your browser, you’re on your way to peak internet efficiency. Using TabsFolders’ drag-and-drop interface, you can […]

GLEN CARBON – The Village of Glen Carbon has announced its new initiative, the “Glen Carbon Grassroots” Campaign, which will be a Village organized periodic event or activity to support a wide variety of environmental, green space, habitat and/or energy projects in the Village. The first slated grassroots event is a tree giveaway happening on Sat., Apr. 16, 2022, from 9 am – 12 pm at the Village’s Public Works Department located at 153 N. Main Street, Glen Carbon. The Village will be distributing 500 native, conservation grade, bare-root trees (approximate heights of 2-3’) to Glen Carbon residents and children to plant on their home’s private property. The approximate breakdown of tree varieties include Overcup oak trees, River Birch trees and flowering dogwoods. Trees will be distributed at the Village’s Public Works Department on Saturday as well as elementary schools in the Village. Details about the elementary school tree distribution

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The pop-up event will take place on Fridays and Saturdays through October.

by Abigail Kramer, THE CITY

This story contains descriptions of mental illness and self-harm.

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

New York state has failed to provide children on Medicaid with the mental health care they are entitled to by law, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court Thursday by two adolescents acting on behalf of hundreds of thousands of Medicaid-eligible kids.

As a result, the lawsuit alleges, young people with serious mental health conditions suffer unnecessarily, ending up in hospitals and residential treatment programs because they don’t have access to services that would keep them safe at home.

New York’s mental health system for children “is languishing in a state of dysfunction, providing inadequate, inaccessible, and woefully underfunded mental health services,” according to the complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Central Islip, Long Island, by attorneys from the advocacy groups Disability Rights New York, Children’s Rights and the National Health Law Program, as well as the law firm Proskauer Rose LLP.

THE CITY and ProPublica reported Monday how New York’s vow to transform mental health care for children has left young people with inadequate access to outpatient treatment and hospital care. Under a plan launched in 2014 by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New York cut the number of state-run children’s psychiatric hospital beds by nearly a third. While the plan shifted savings into outpatient and community-based services, it did not reduce demand for hospitalization in the first five years, and it increased the wait time for hospital beds for children with mental health emergencies.

For kids with serious mental health conditions, the stakes are life and death, said the mother of a plaintiff in the case, who lives on Long Island. “If I left it up to the system, my son would be gone already,“ the mother, who is identified by the initials P.K. in the complaint, told THE CITY and ProPublica.

Her son, who is now 15 years old, first showed signs of mental health problems when he was still a toddler. He was hospitalized for a psychiatric emergency when he was 4 years old, then cycled in and out of hospitals approximately 16 times before he was 10 — often as the result of violent episodes in which he hallucinated and tried to hurt himself or his mother, P.K. said. His symptoms grew frightening enough that he spent two years, from ages 10 to 12, in a residential treatment program for kids with very serious mental health conditions.

At the residential program, he learned skills to cope with his symptoms and was taken off of several psychiatric medications, his mother said. Eventually, he was discharged with a plan to receive intensive mental health services that were supposed to help him stay well at home.

But when the mother contacted the mental health agencies in her area, she was told that all the programs were full. “I’m calling everyone, and there’s nothing,” she told THE CITY and ProPublica. Her son went months without getting any home-based mental health services at all, according to the lawsuit. When providers were finally assigned to his case, they disappeared after a session or two, moving on to other jobs, the mother said. “It’s just: Boom, they’re gone. They never even really got started.”

While she struggled to find help for her son, she watched him become dangerously ill. He started cutting himself, she said, and ended up in emergency rooms and hospital beds after multiple suicide attempts. “I worry every day that I’m going to go home and not find my son alive,” she said. “I check on him at night like he’s a newborn. Is he breathing? Is he OK? It’s heartbreaking. I still cry every day.”

“I honestly feel if he had those services when he came home, he’d be in a whole different place today,” she continued. “I know he’s been failed by the system. I’ve been fighting and fighting. But my heart also says, if something happens, it’s my fault. Ultimately, I’m his mother. That’s my child.”

“Too Late for Us”

New York has long known that its mental health system fails to meet kids’ needs, according to the lawsuit, which names as defendants the commissioner of New York’s Department of Health, Mary Bassett, and the commissioner of the state’s Office of Mental Health, Ann Sullivan.

Both DOH and OMH declined to comment on pending litigation.

Under federal rules, the state is required to provide intensive mental health services to any child with a medical need who is enrolled in Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program that covers more than 2.2 million people under age 21 in New York. The services are supposed to be delivered in kids’ homes, schools and other places a child would naturally be — a model that mental health care providers say works better for many kids with serious challenges than requiring them to sit in clinicians’ offices like small adults.

In 2011, a Medicaid Redesign Team established by Cuomo acknowledged that the state’s mental health system was underfunded and inadequate, with “little accountability for the provision of quality care and for improved outcomes for patients/consumers.” As a result, the work group found, “harmful and costly developmental trajectories continue to be formed early in life.”

In response, the state created two new sets of services that were supposed to become available to hundreds of thousands of children. The first, called Children and Family Treatment and Support Services, would provide clinical help to any child on Medicaid who had a medical need. Kids would have access not only to in-home therapy, but also to providers who would take them out into the community so they could work on coping skills in public and to mental health professionals who could respond to a crisis, making it less likely that a family would have to call the police for help with a violent or suicidal child.

The second package, called Home and Community Based Services, would offer intensive support to kids at imminent risk of ending up in a hospital or residential program.

But, the lawsuit alleges, while the state “purports” to make these services available, they aren’t intensive enough to meet the requirements of federal law. And even if they were, the programs aren’t available to anywhere near the number of kids who are entitled to them.

The state does not track the number of kids who sit on waitlists for mental health care, but data from OMH shows that community-based services reach a tiny fraction of the kids who are supposed to receive them.

In 2017, OMH projected that more than 200,000 children and adolescents in the state Medicaid program have a medical need for Children and Family Treatment and Support Services. In 2020, fewer than 16,000 children received those services. That’s less than 8% of eligible kids, according to OMH data cited in the complaint.

Similarly, the state estimated that 65,000 children and adolescents would need its more intensive Home and Community Based Services. As of July 2020, approximately one-tenth of that number was enrolled in the programs, according to the complaint.

Without the care they are entitled to, young people’s “mental health conditions continue to deteriorate, causing disruption and harm to the children, their education, their families and relationships, their future adulthood, and their very lives,” the lawsuit charges. The plaintiffs are asking that a judge require the state to provide kids with the mental health services mandated by federal law.

The mother of the 15-year-old plaintiff said she thinks her son may have missed his chance to benefit from the kinds of services he was supposed to receive when he came home from the residential treatment program three years ago. “Those were prime years for him,” she said. “He missed all those years of developing, when he should have been learning social skills and how to cope.”

“I just hope this lawsuit gets up there and makes a difference,” she said. “It’s a little too late for us, but hopefully it’s not too late for others.”

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For the past few weeks the most extreme members of the anti-gay right have been busily trying to resurrect panic over the idea that gay people try to "groom" kids into becoming gay. This is an ancient fear that was popular in the '70s and '80s but had mostly subsided since then. So how is ...continue reading "The whole disgusting “gay grooming” panic is already fading away"

Three more warehouse buildings will be built to fill out the new business park at the former Carondelet Coke Corp. site, in a partnership between a St. Louis developer and an investor new to St. Louis.

Members of the Missouri Senate’s conservative caucus made it clear on Wednesday that they would once again derail the chamber with procedural maneuvers in order to block negotiations with the …

ST. LOUIS COUNTY - St. Louis County Police Department Crimes Against Persons detectives are currently investigating a homicide in the 3700 block of Colonial Avenue in the City of Northwoods which resulted in the death of an adult male. On March 30, 2022, at approximately 10:29 PM, Police Officers from the City of Northwoods responded to a call for service for a check the welfare in the 3700 block of Colonial Avenue. Officers later discovered an adult male deceased inside the residence. St. Louis County Police Department Crimes Against Persons was requested and are now leading the investigation. The investigation is very active at this time. Additional information will be disseminated as it becomes available.

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Normally, the inflation rate of goods and services are roughly similar. But no longer: The inflation rate of durable goods has skyrocketed, and instead of being a few points below the inflation rate of services it's now 14 points above the inflation rate of services. One way to think about this is that the inflation ...continue reading "Raw data: Inflation rate of goods and services"

Democratic state Sen. Steve Roberts, D-St. Louis, is challenging Congresswoman Cori Bush, D-St. Louis County, to represent Missouri’s 1st Congressional District.