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For the second time this month, a bear escaped from the Saint Louis Zoo.

Despite the fact that nearly 83% of the population does not have perfect hearing, most of our spaces are designed to cater, auditorily, to a select few. That’s a problem, according to researchers in the growing field of aural diversity. Producer Avery Rogers takes us through the various ways we perceive sound and how understanding these differences can help us better approach hearing accessibility. Correction: Professor Andrew Hugill works at the University of Leicester.

EDWARDSVILLE – A portion of North Kansas and East Dunn streets is closed to traffic in the area where the two roads intersect after a gas line was ruptured Thursday morning, Edwardsville Fire Chief James Whiteford said. Drivers in the area should use alternate routes to bypass the closure. About 50 homes in the area will be without gas service until Ameren is able to fix the line and restore service, Whiteford said. An Ameren representative will contact all affected properties. The situation does not pose a danger to the public, Fire Chief Whiteford said. Edwardsville fire crews are remaining at the scene to closely monitor the situation while repairs are ongoing. The rupture happened just before 10:30 a.m. during construction at the location.

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We are getting our first real look at the upcoming Disney+ docu-special about U2’s Bono and The Edge, featuring talk show host David Letterman. A trailer for Bono & The Edge: A Sort of Homecoming has just been released, with…

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The UK government has made no secret of its desire to convert providing encryption into a criminal act. The fact that some things are beyond the government’s reach is unacceptable. While lawmakers may suggest this will only target “criminal” purveyors and users, there’s no reason to believe this won’t be expanded every time law enforcement […]

The cause of death has not been determined.

After a Kansas City 4-year-old was found dead and another unresponsive, questions remain about how something like this went unnoticed.

The GameCreators Mega Maker Pack Bundle will help you develop your own dream video game, and publish it on multiple platforms with thousands of royalty-free, 2D and 3D assets. You get AppGameKit Studio, a fully featured game development toolset with two asset packs. The bundle also has GameGuru, a non-technical and fun game maker that offers an […]

The Missouri Attorney General on Thursday filed a petition to remove the St. Louis Circuit Attorney from office because the city prosecutor refused to step down.

As previously reported, a recent article in Variety claimed The Rolling Stones had collaborated with Paul McCartney for their upcoming album, with the Beatle allegedly laying down bass tracks recently at a studio in Los Angeles. Well, it turns out…

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Things are heating up in Taiwan: The U.S. is markedly increasing the number of troops deployed to Taiwan, more than quadrupling the current number to bolster a training program for the island’s military amid a rising threat from China. The U.S. plans to deploy between 100 and 200 troops to the island in the coming ...continue reading "US ramps up troop presence in Taiwan"

The game will be the first international friendly match to be played at CityPark and comes as the two teams who will compete there prepare for the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup.

Embattled St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner let a noon deadline for her resignation pass without action, triggering an effort by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey to remove her from office through the courts. At a news conference Thursday with Gov. Mike Parson, Bailey said he would file a quo warranto petition – an action […]

The post Missouri AG moves forward with effort to remove St. Louis prosecutor from office appeared first on Missouri Independent.

Attorney General Andrew Bailey on Thursday filed a “quo warranto” petition that seeks the ouster of the St. Louis circuit attorney.

Aaron Sorkin knew when he took on the task of adapting Harper Lee's famous, required-ninth-grade-reading novel To Kill a Mockingbird that he was "going to ruin everyone's childhood," he told Datebook when the play was touring San Francisco. The writer of The West Wing and A Few Good Men made so many changes to the original story — expanding the role of Calpurnia the housekeeper, changing Atticus Finch from saintly lawyer into more human man, etc. — that Lee's estate sued him.

University of Illinois President Timothy Killeen was happy when he heard Governor Pritzker's budget proposal.

Founded by Washington University alum Michael Dorf, the nationwide urban winery and entertainment venue concept will serve up wine, food, music, and more.

by Jessica Priest and Perla Trevizo

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.

Without mentioning the Uvalde mass shooting, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott last week declared school safety a priority for the current legislative session and again dismissed calls for more laws that would restrict access to guns.

“Some want more gun laws, but too many local officials won’t even enforce the gun laws that are already on the books,” the governor said during his annual State of the State address. Without providing a source or clear data, he then asserted that “most gun crimes are committed by criminals who possess guns illegally.” Abbott proposed a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence for people who are not legally allowed to have a firearm but have them anyway.

“We need to leave prosecutors and judges with no choice but to punish those criminals and remove them and their guns from our streets,” said Abbott, a Republican.

But Abbott’s speech avoided a glaring reality: The majority of the state’s 19 mass shootings over the past six decades were carried out by men who legally acquired firearms, according to an investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune published before his speech. Guns were legally obtained in 13 shootings, including two in which the shooter was not allowed to have one but took advantage of a loophole in the law that does not require background checks for firearms that are acquired from private individuals. Firearms were obtained illegally in three instances. The rest of the cases were unclear.

The news organizations’ analysis found that lawmakers failed to pass at least two dozen bills that would have prevented people from legally obtaining the weapons and ammunition used in seven of the state’s mass shootings. Such measures included requiring universal background checks, banning the ownership of certain firearms and raising the minimum age to purchase an assault weapon from 18 to 21 years old.

State lawmakers instead have loosened restrictions over the years on publicly carrying guns while making it harder for local governments to regulate them.

Brett Cross, whose 10-year-old son was among the 19 children and two teachers killed last year at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, agreed with Abbott that criminals should not have access to guns. But, Cross said, the governor’s comments ignore the fact that the people responsible for many mass shootings did not previously have a criminal background.

“Before May 24, our shooter was not a criminal,” Cross said. “If this shooter hadn’t been able to just go in and buy those guns literally two days after his 18th birthday, then my child would still be alive.” Abbott, he said, “wants to be reactive instead of proactive, and proactive is what we need to stop these things.”

The governor did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the news organizations’ investigation or about his remarks during his State of the State address.

Little evidence exists to support Abbott’s claim, said Bill Spelman, who worked for a national police association for seven years and has spent the last 30 years teaching and researching criminal justice policy.

“To just say that most gun crimes are committed by criminals who possess guns illegally is a statement you can’t back up,” said Spelman, an emeritus professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

James Densley, who co-founded the Violence Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit research center best known for its extensive mass shooter database, said that Abbott’s 10-year mandatory minimum sentence proposal would do little to deter mass shootings because the shooter does not survive in most of those cases and in others is already facing life in prison. In the vast majority of the nationwide cases in which it is known how the shooters obtained their firearms, they did so legally, Densley said.

Densley said different forms of gun violence require targeted approaches. For instance, restrictions on assault-style weapons and large-capacity magazines could be effective at reducing mass shootings, but less so at curbing “everyday gun violence,” he said.

“And I think politicians actually know this,” Densely said. “They understand it intuitively. But they have to say what is politically convenient to satisfy the needs of their constituents and others. And so they often conflate these different forms of gun violence to be perceived to be talking about one thing when they’re actually talking about something else.”