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Three years after the start of the pandemic, millions of working age people still suffer from long COVID-19 and some lawmakers and advocates, including people with long COVID, say not enough is being done to protect their well-being and ensure they can continue to be employed. Proposed federal legislation, better workplace accommodations, and more federal […]

The post Long COVID is hurting business. Workplace accommodations could help appeared first on Missouri Independent.

In times of a major crisis, discord, division or a crossroads situation where a country or society finds itself at the precipice of what will define its future, a committed leader with a commanding voice emerges. Who will be that leader — that strong, dedicated and unifying voice to lead us to a solution to […]

The post Strong leaders with unwavering voices are required for major changes in our society appeared first on Missouri Independent.

The in-person summit offers leaders a rare opportunity to collaborate on stopping threats to Indigenous lands and lives.

The new apartment project would be called Boulder Springs Elite.

After 18 years, the TransWest Express line receives final approval.

John Fogerty is set to hit the road in late April on what will be his first tour since regaining worldwide rights to all of his music with Creedence Clearwater Revival, and…

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by Brett Murphy

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ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This story was co-published with El Diario.

Senior prosecutors in one of New York’s largest counties have known for years that drunk driving convictions of Spanish-speaking motorists may have been tainted by faulty evidence. But the Westchester District Attorney’s Office failed to investigate until defense attorneys contacted the unit that reviews wrongful convictions.

From at least 2014 to 2018, records show, New York State Police troopers gave some drivers mistranslated instructions about what it means to refuse a blood alcohol test. Legal experts, including three former prosecutors in Westchester, told ProPublica that those incorrect directions could, at a minimum, confuse or mislead drivers and may have pressured some into a decision that resulted in severe consequences.

Westchester prosecutors were alerted to the issue at least three times, in 2018, 2019 and 2021, records show.

“These are folks that are wrongfully convicted,” said Joseph Margulies, a government and law professor at Cornell University. He and others said the district attorney’s office — currently led by Miriam Rocah, who was elected in 2020 — should have been investigating every case that may have included the forms since its prosecutors became aware of the faulty instructions.

Rocah declined requests to discuss what steps she’s taking to address the issue. Spokesperson Jin Whang said the office’s conviction review unit received a list of 263 DWI arrests from the police in February 2022. “We’re still combing through paper,” she said, acknowledging progress has been slow due to the unit’s small staff and more urgent priorities, compounded by tangled police records. Whang added that prosecutors recently decided, amid questions from ProPublica, that they will consider moving to vacate sentences.

When a driver suspected of being drunk refuses a chemical test for alcohol in their system, police in New York, like in many other places, are required by law to explain that the motorist’s license will be suspended, whether or not they are found guilty, and that their refusal can be used as evidence against them. A chemical test typically measures blood alcohol content in someone’s breath, blood or urine.

But some state police troopers in Westchester told Spanish-speaking drivers something different. Officers in Troop K gave those motorists a sheet of paper that described a refusal as tantamount to being found guilty for driving drunk. It told drivers that authorities “will punish you as being guilty” for not taking the test — which is a significant departure from the actual law, which only states the refusal can be used as evidence against them. The warning also falsely stated that officers “are going to examine your blood,” instead of requesting that drivers take the test, which is often a Breathalyzer.

ProPublica consulted with Spanish-language and legal authorities at five universities, who said the mistranslated warning had several deeply flawed passages.

Counterclockwise from top: An accurately phrased warning given to motorists about the consequences of refusing a blood alcohol test; an English translation of the Spanish version that was given to drivers who didn’t speak English; and the mistranslated Spanish version that drivers received, which included several confusing and incorrect passages that do not exist in the original English warning. (Highlighted by ProPublica)

“It looks like they’re really coercing a ‘yes,’” said Amber Baylor, a law professor at Columbia University who reviewed some of the records. She said immigrant drivers may feel especially susceptible to that kind of pressure given the potential consequences: “your job going up in flames, losing your livelihood, being separated from your family or losing your ability to stay in the country.”

In an email statement, Beau Duffy, a state police spokesperson, said the form “was not an official document that was created, distributed or approved” by the agency, which means it cannot easily be tracked in department records. He said he didn’t know when the Spanish warning was first used or where it had come from but said it is no longer in circulation.

“We believe they were used only in Westchester County,” Duffy said, adding that the state police do not currently issue written refusal warnings in Spanish. The agency tells troopers who don’t speak Spanish to use a telephone translation service contracted by the department.

It’s unclear how many drivers have been impacted. For context, state police troopers arrested at least 56 Hispanic motorists on drunk driving charges in Westchester last year and 79 in 2021, according to state court data. (The state does not maintain local court records from previous years.) The data does not indicate whether or not those drivers spoke only Spanish. Around 65,000 adults in Westchester speak Spanish and limited or no English, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates.

Whang said prosecutors didn’t believe that it was fair to cast all convictions involving the mistranslated form as wrongful.

But blood alcohol content is typically the linchpin of successful prosecutions. Legal experts compared the pre-test warning to a Miranda warning, which allows suspects to make informed decisions. “That’s why we have a process,” said Cornell’s Margulies.

Whang said the conviction review unit, which Rocah created shortly after she took office, first learned about the translation issue in late October 2021, when defense attorneys with the Legal Aid Society asked for help getting a list of potentially affected DWI cases from Troop K.

The unit received information on about 260 arrests made between 2010 and 2019 and has so far reviewed 44 of them, according to Whang, all of which resulted in a conviction. Five of those 44 cases involved the mistranslated form. Prosecutors have not yet notified the attorneys in those cases. But Whang said the DA’s office intends to do that and to come up with a “remedial course of action” once the conviction review unit has gone through the remaining cases.

She noted that there are only three attorneys in the unit, which is independent from the rest of the office and typically focus on cases of egregious misconduct and those where someone may be exonerated by new evidence, including DNA.

In November 2018, a defense attorney for a Hispanic motorist accused of drunk driving discovered the mistranslated warnings and brought them to the attention of Livia Rodriguez, who was a senior assistant district attorney at the time and still holds that role. Rodriguez told a judge she thought the issues were valid and offered reduced charges, according to a transcript of the hearing.

It’s unclear if Rodriguez alerted her superiors or the state police at that time. She declined ProPublica’s request for an interview and referred questions to Whang, who said she had no comment about how Rodriguez handled the situation at the time.

The faulty forms appeared during a hearing in 2019 as part of another of Rodriguez’s prosecutions. Defense attorney James Timko noticed the incorrect language and told the court that his client’s refusal should be inadmissible. “The police have ‘muddied the waters’ by providing a defendant a woefully inartful, inaccurate and affirmatively misleading statement,” he wrote in a court filing.

In an interview with ProPublica, Timko said, “It was a disaster.”

Still, the judge allowed the driver’s refusal into evidence because, she said, he understood English well enough during his 2017 arrest that it didn’t matter whether the Spanish warning was defective.

Timko wrote an email to Michael Borrelli, the DWI coordinator for the district attorney at the time, and said the judge’s ruling would likely be reversed on appeal because the refusal warnings were so badly mistranslated. Borelli agreed and offered less serious charges.

“It wasn’t even close,” Borrelli said in an interview. “Even someone with a fourth grade Spanish would have been like, ‘What?’”

Borrelli said he told state police personnel there that he never wanted to see those forms used again. (Duffy, at the state police, said the department had no documentation of that conversation and could not find anyone who recalled it.) “I’m sure I reported it up the chain of command and I’m sure I got orders,” Borrelli added, but he did not remember any internal effort at the DA’s office to look at past cases that may have been affected.

Whang was also not aware of any such effort at the time. “We cannot speak for the decision making — the why or the how — prior to this administration,” she said, noting that Rocah took office in early 2021.

Two years went by before the issue surfaced a third time. Katie Wasserman, a defense attorney with Legal Aid in Westchester, told the court in July 2021 that the state police had given the wrong translation to another driver in a case that dated back years. Duffy told ProPublica that by then the forms were no longer in use.

“The District Attorney’s Office is aware of the improper warning as it had been brought to their attention on at least two documented occasions in 2018 and then again in 2019,” Wasserman wrote in the filing. The driver didn’t have correct information when he decided to refuse the test, Wasserman argued, so his refusal should not have been allowed to be used against him during the plea negotiations.

“I would never have made the decision to plead guilty to a misdemeanor,” the driver, who has other drunk driving convictions, wrote in an affidavit. He wrote that he feared he may get deported and be permanently separated from his family as a result of the conviction.

In the months that followed, senior officials in the DA’s office held a series of meetings about how to handle the problem. Whang said the conviction review unit didn’t learn of the issue until Wasserman called the division’s chief, Anastasia Heeger, in late October to ask for help getting information from the state police about other cases impacted by the faulty forms. “After [Heeger] got the call, she immediately said, ‘Yes I’ll join you,’” Whang said.

Wasserman said in an interview that too much time has elapsed since then and something substantive should have happened by now. “It’s just not a priority,” she said. “Truth is, they've been sitting on it.”

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by Anna Clark

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As bright green plumes of toxic algae spread over Lake Erie in the summer of 2014, suffocating one of the largest lakes on earth, reporter Dan Egan was there. He had arrived in Toledo, Ohio, to investigate what had sickened the water — and how treatment plants might not be able to purify it.

Indeed, that’s exactly what happened. The day after he returned home to Wisconsin, Toledo warned people to stop drinking, boiling or bathing in tap water. Ohio’s governor declared a state of emergency. And Egan soon published an expansive report in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about how we got to a place where people living by such an abundant source of life-giving freshwater could not drink it or even touch it.

As the Journal Sentinel’s Great Lakes reporter for nearly 20 years, where he was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and now writing magazine stories, Egan has long explored the tension between people and place. From invasive species to the multibillion-dollar recreational fishing industry to Chicago’s fraught relationship with Lake Michigan, he serves as a watchdog for the massive inland seas. The narrative power of his first book, “The Death and Life of the Great Lakes,” helped it reach a wide audience. A New York Times bestseller, it won both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the J. Anthony Lukas Award.

Egan’s new book, “The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance,” tells the urgent story of the 13th element to be discovered. (It’s the 15th element on the periodic table.) The unchecked flow of phosphorus into our waterways — often from farm runoff — contributes to “dead zones” and toxic algae blooms. At the same time, as an essential ingredient in fertilizer, phosphorus turns vast swaths of land green, nourishing crops and animals. It makes life possible for billions of people.

Phosphorus, he writes, isn’t only essential to us; it is us. It’s found in our bones, teeth, even our DNA. In the naturally replenishing cycle, animals eat phosphorus-rich plants and then return the element to the soil when they defecate or die and decay. The soil then grows the next generation of plant life. Thanks to the remnants of long-dead organisms, phosphorus is also found in rare caches of sedimentary rocks on ancient seabeds. But in the 19th century, humans figured out how to break the cycle — systematically taking rocks, guano and even bones from one place to fertilize the soil of another place. Today, the world’s food supply depends on diminishing phosphorus reserves in places like Bone Valley, Florida, and the Western Sahara. At the same time, excess phosphorus from both plant and animal farms spills into our water and spoils it.

Dan Egan (Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Egan’s reporting takes him not only to the Great Lakes, which hold about a fifth of all the freshwater on the face of the planet, but also to Germany, where an alchemist first isolated the combustible element and where traces of phosphorus cast down by World War II firebombers still wash ashore — with alarming results. We follow him to the saltwater beaches of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, once thought safe from the telltale shock of green, and to Ontario’s Experimental Lakes Area, where scientists discovered the connection between phosphorus and algae, much to the chagrin of detergent makers of the era. Along the way, Egan explores the Clean Water Act’s “yawning exemption” for agriculture and how some scientists fear we’ll hit “peak phosphorus” in a few decades.

Egan, now the Brico journalist in residence at the Center for Water Policy in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences, spoke with ProPublica about phosphorus, algae and the perils and possibilities of book-length journalism. This interview was edited for length and clarity.

You’ve spent nearly 30 years covering environmental stories, first in Idaho and Utah and then at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. What are the earliest stories you remember writing about toxic algae blooms?

I come at this without a background in science or environmental studies. But being out in Idaho, I was thrown to the wolves, literally, because wolf reintroduction was a huge issue. I also covered salmon recovery and grizzly bear recovery. That was a crash course in environmental journalism.

But I don’t remember writing about algae until 2014. I was in Toledo the week before they lost their water, doing a story on what would happen if Toledo lost their water.

What did you come across in your reporting that surprised you?

When I was writing about the algae blooms in Lake Erie, I was mostly reading about the algae blooms. I was just introduced to phosphorus along the way. I didn’t put much of it in my first book. But the idea that we need rocks to sustain modern agriculture — somebody was saying, “Yeah, it comes out of Florida, it comes up on trains to the various fertilizer factories.” “Rocks? Any rocks?” “No, special rocks.”

And then, the whole stuff about grinding bones and spreading them on crops. I wasn’t bored writing this book, I will tell you that.

Can you share more about how phosphorus is uniquely lethal and life-giving?

What really caught my eye was how phosphorus doesn’t exist on its own in the environment. It’s always bound with oxygen atoms to make phosphates, which are stable, or noncombustible. But when they first isolated pure phosphorus in the late 1600s, it was magical stuff. It got above 80 Fahrenheit, and it just burst into flames and will not stop. Nothing will stop it. I guess you saw this in the book — a guy that’s burned goes into the water, and then he comes out of the water, and it flares up again.

And then you see that it was used as a weapon. But it’s also this essential fertilizer. Of the three big [elements in] fertilizers — nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus — phosphorus is the limiting [or least available] element.

There’s this paradox of how we’re just squandering these relatively scarce deposits and at the same time we’re overdosing our waters to the point where sometimes you can’t drink them, you can’t swim in them, it kills dogs, it threatens people.

How does the nuance here compare to our relationship with other materials that have proved vexing, such as lead, or PFAS, or even the vinyl chloride recently unleashed on East Palestine, Ohio?

With any toxin or element that we exploit and pollute the environment, there was a reason we did it. But phosphorus is so essential and also just so potentially harmful. Managing this stuff was hard enough when we had a billion people, but now we’re zooming toward 9 billion.

We need to change the way we’re using this, or there’s two consequences, and they’re not exclusive. We’re going to poison the crap out of our waters, or we’re going to run out of easily accessible deposits and have food shortages.

That’s the story. There’s a lot unfolding fast here. And I think it’s only going to accelerate.

What is slowing people down in restoring what you call “the virtuous cycle” of phosphorus?

It’s probably the agriculture lobby. They know there’s a problem, but it’s not being adequately addressed or we wouldn’t have these chronic blooms in every state in the union.

As far as slowing down people, I don’t know. It’s just not something people talk about. People would ask, “Are you writing another book?” I’d say, “Yep.” “What’s it about?” “Phosphorus.” And they’d look at me like I just told them I was diagnosed with something really bad.

And these are your book fans, asking what you’re writing next!

That alone is daunting. On the other hand, when you start telling people about how we mined the battlefield of Waterloo for all the [human] bones to grind them up to throw them on crops to grow turnips in England? That gets people’s attention.

There’s so much that goes into modern food production that we’re just divorced from. There’s been books written about this, and very good books, but I don’t think anybody has written a book for popular consumption that connects the dots between the food on a table and the poisoned waters. And also the lengths we’ve gone to find this precious substance that nobody thinks about.

Your book discusses a number of 20th century wins, such as the revival of Lake Erie after it was virtually declared dead and the pushback against the detergent industry’s overuse of phosphorus. Do you see a blueprint here for how to tackle problems with phosphorus today?

It’s useful to look at when we first tangled with phosphorus as a pollutant in the 1960s and ’70s and solved the problem, largely by banning phosphates in detergents. But it’s not entirely applicable. Today it’s a much bigger problem. It’s more diffuse. When we could plug a pipe or cap a smokestack to stop the pollutants, that’s easy. But now that it’s spread on the landscape, we’ve got these legacy phosphorus deposits. They’re going to be leaching into the water for decades. Even if we clamp down on CAFOs [concentrated animal feeding operations] tomorrow, there’s so much inertia in the system. It’s like climate: Things are going to get worse before they get better.

But it’s also important that we do look back and see that we have been successful. And we also have an obligation to just try. We have a chance to make things better for future generations. We should take advantage of it.

Before we leave off, is there any part of the book that you’d like to underline? Water or fertilizer, mining or politics, what would you like to make sure gets through to the public?

It’s a deep question and requires something of a deeper answer. But I think it’s the circle of life. It’s not just “The Lion King.” It’s real. And the thing that stitches it together in this case is phosphorus. We’ve got to learn that you don’t use it and chuck it. You use it again and use it again and use it again and use it again, if we’re going to stay fed and have waters that are safe enough to fish in and swim in and drink from and have your pets play in. This book is about the circle of life, manifested in phosphorus.

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Bradley Doyle of Fairview Heights, IL joined the Real Rock Army today

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Gather your furry friends and participate in our B.A.R.K. Ranger Photo Contest sponsored by Purina!   To enter, come down to the Arch grounds and snap a photo of your

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The Riverboats at the Gateway Arch award guests one of the best views of St. Louis’ working riverfront, the Gateway Arch and the city skyline.   Narrated by the captain

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A couple hundred people gathered Saturday in downtown St. Louis to support the rights of the transgender community and to protest against a sweeping wave of legislation that seeks to curtail those rights in Missouri and around the country.