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The owners of Vacancy Gallery will host a grand opening celebration from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday.

This story was originally published by the Missouri Independent. Whether Missouri voters will get a chance to legalize recreational marijuana in November is still in question. The latest incomplete tabulations from Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft’s office, obtained under a Sunshine Law request, show the Legal Missouri 2022 initiative is short of the necessary signatures in four of the six Congressional districts necessary to make the ballot.

With their convenience and high-powered, brain-scrambling effects, cannabis concentrates have seen significant uptake across the industry in recent years, and with good reason. In my experience, straying outside the boundaries of toking flower usually results in the sessions that have the most memorable stories.

The fair will be held virtually from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Friday.

by Jennifer Smith Richards, Chicago Tribune and Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

This story was co-published with the Chicago Tribune.

Newly obtained police records from five Chicago suburbs offer additional details about students getting ticketed at school for minor offenses, a widespread practice documented in a ProPublica-Chicago Tribune investigation this year.

In Naperville, police provided updated records that include information about the race of students ticketed in the city’s two high schools for violating municipal ordinances. At Naperville North High School, only 120 students are Black, or 4.5% of enrollment, but Black pupils received nearly 27% of the 67 tickets police have issued there since fall 2018.

Black students at Naperville North were nearly five times more likely than their white peers to receive a ticket. At the city’s other high school, Naperville Central, police wrote 44 tickets to young people, most of them white students. The ticketing of Black students there was proportionate to school enrollment.

Newly released records also confirm that police have ticketed young people at two other large suburban schools — Schaumburg High School in Schaumburg and Maine West High School in Des Plaines — in recent years for minor misbehavior, adding to the more than 140 districts where reporters already had documented that police had cited students.

(Use our interactive database to look up how many and what kinds of tickets have been issued in an Illinois public school or district.)

The updated information, which also includes new data from South Holland and Bartlett, was added Thursday to an online lookup tool created for the investigation “The Price Kids Pay.” The unprecedented examination of police ticketing at school, published in May, found that police issued at least 11,800 tickets to students in the three-year period examined: the school years ending in 2019, 2020 and 2021. The tickets, issued for offenses such as fighting or using a vaping device, often resulted in steep fines and debt for students and their families.

The investigation also uncovered a pattern of racial disparities in ticketing. In Illinois schools and districts where data on race was available, Black students were twice as likely as their white peers to receive a ticket.

The racial disparity now identified at Naperville North offers context in an ongoing legal battle over a ticket police issued to a Black student there in 2019. The 17-year-old girl was accused of stealing a classmate’s Apple AirPods, which she said she had thought were her own.

Now 19 and in college, she continues to fight the theft ticket in court, saying she did nothing wrong and refusing to pay a fine for what she said was a simple mix-up. She and her family have alleged that the school and police pursued the matter aggressively in part because of the girl’s race. On Thursday, a new attorney working on her behalf asked the city for more records and asked to question individuals involved in the matter. The next court date is in September.

The school district has distanced itself from the case and has said it is the Naperville police who decide whether to ticket students. The city previously denied that race played a role in police decisions to ticket students.

Police records show that students at Naperville’s two high schools were ticketed most often for possession or use of cannabis or tobacco and for fighting. The fines vary depending on the offense; the minimum fine is $100 for possession or use of tobacco or alternative nicotine by a minor. The city’s municipal code allows fines for fighting, cannabis possession and some other infractions to reach $750, the maximum allowed by state law for ordinance violations.

Most of the tickets Black students received were for fighting; white students were usually ticketed for tobacco use or possession.

In addition to the updated Naperville data published Thursday — which excludes tickets issued in the last school year to keep data consistent among districts — the ticketing database now includes several other changes:

Schaumburg: The Police Department initially did not confirm that tickets were issued at Schaumburg High School in Township District 211, the largest high school district in Illinois. The department has since provided data that shows officers issued 27 tickets to students in the three school years ending in 2019, 2020 and 2021. The tickets were for truancy, cannabis or tobacco use or possession, disorderly conduct and “instigating,” part of a local law related to fighting.

The Illinois attorney general’s office is investigating whether District 211 and the city of Palatine, where other district schools are based, violated state civil rights laws when ticketing students.

Schaumburg is not included in the state’s investigation. Village spokesperson Allison Albrecht said that police get involved with school incidents at the request of school officials, parents or other citizens, and that citations are “often a last resort.” The district superintendent has said school officials involve the police when a student violates a local ordinance, when there is a safety threat or when other interventions haven’t worked — regardless of the student’s race or background.

Des Plaines: The Police Department confirmed that officers had ticketed 27 students at Maine West High School, northwest of Chicago, over the three school years examined. Most of the tickets were for tobacco possession. Spokespeople for the city and school district have not responded to requests for comment.

South Holland: The village, south of Chicago, confirmed that debts from student tickets can be sent to collections. Police issued 90 tickets to students at Thornwood High School during the school years examined in “The Price Kids Pay.”

South Holland police wrote an additional 85 tickets to young people at Thornwood this past year. All but one of the tickets were for disorderly conduct, and all were issued to Black students. About 82% of the students are Black. As with the Naperville data, tickets issued last school year in South Holland are not reflected in the online database.

The fines from tickets issued to young people at the high school during the past four school years totaled $47,950, of which $10,800 has been paid, records show. No tickets were issued in spring 2020 or during the entire 2020-21 school year, when the school was closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The village administrator has not responded to requests for comment.

Bartlett: The Police Department, which has jurisdiction at Bartlett High School, west of Chicago, had previously included some tickets that were issued before or after the three school years specified in the reporters’ records request. The correct number of tickets written during this time period is 167.

Bartlett High School is one of several schools in the large U-46 District based in Elgin. Since the publication of “The Price Kids Pay,” several schools and communities have changed their ticketing or policing practices. Bartlett Deputy Chief Geoffrey Pretkelis said that in the coming school year students will be referred to a smoking-cessation program instead of being ticketed for tobacco use or possession.

“What would happen going forward is, if you caught someone with tobacco or vaping we’d say, ‘Hey, listen we have this program,’ and if they complete it, we would not issue the citation,” Pretkelis said. “We were very successful in years past when we did have that diversion program.”

Help ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune Report on Police Issuing Tickets at Schools

Police are ticketing students at schools across Illinois for behavior such as vaping, littering and disorderly conduct. Many students are forced to appear at hearings, which means missing school time, and the cases almost always result in judgments against the students, which carry fines as high as $750. We have found students as young as 10 are being ticketed, and Black students are disproportionately impacted.

To continue with this important reporting, we need to hear from people who have been affected by tickets handed out at school. Are you a parent, school worker, researcher or attorney? Please fill out this brief survey.

We take your privacy seriously. We are gathering these stories for the purposes of our reporting and will not publish your name or information without your consent.

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Haru Coryne contributed reporting.

Alex Donley's first bite of solid food as an infant was a piece of hot salami from Gioia's Deli. That early taste may well have sealed his fate. Nearly 40 years later, Donley, now the owner of Gioia's, is still inseparable from the famous sandwich that he says represents his hometown.

For Christa (Jackson) Edelen, president of the Holly Hills Improvement Association, the public planter is proof of what’s wrong in her south St. Louis neighborhood — and what’s right. The city erected the concrete planter in the roundabout between Lyle House and Carondelet Park years ago, but no one bothered to maintain it. “It was just an eyesore,” Edelen says.

Finally, there’s a solution for people who want to try beer from across the U.S. without spending too much time in the car. The Factory STL (17105 North Outer 40 Road, Chesterfield; 314-423-8500, thefactorystl.com) will kick off its inaugural beer festival Brewski Kicks on Route 66 on Saturday, July 30.

Everything locked down during Maxine Thirteen’s 25th year — but she kept painting. One of her first works during that time was a self-portrait on a large, 25-by-25 inch canvas.

Since 2011, enforcement budget has declined by nearly 30 percent.

Experts call on U.K. officials to prepare for periods of extreme heat or risk thousands of excess deaths.

ZZ Top's latest album, Raw, hit stores Friday. As previously reported, the stripped-down collection of live performances is dedicated to the band's longtime bassist, Dusty Hill, who died in July…

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As we age our eyes so often see others, particularly ones we care for, at a much different age and in some ways, not who they really have developed into.

It was only when it became clear that the January 6th coup wouldn’t succeed that Trump told his insurrectionists to stand down.

He’s running on a track record of transpartisan success in fighting militarism and corporate power.

For a few years in the mid-1990s, AFSCME President Gerry McEntee (1935-2022) repositioned American labor and restored some of its clout.

by Will Sennott, The New Bedford Light

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

Three U.S. senators, including two members of a Senate subcommittee that oversees the fishing industry, are calling for greater federal scrutiny of private equity’s incursion into East Coast commercial fishing.

Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Massachusetts Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, all Democrats, condemned lax government antitrust policies and weak enforcement of restrictions on foreign ownership in the fishing industry. They were responding to an investigation published July 6 by ProPublica and The New Bedford Light, which reported that companies linked to private equity firms and foreign investors now control an outsize share of the market for groundfish such as pollock, haddock and ocean perch and are pushing to expand into other parts of the industry. Under this new regime, the investigation found, labor conditions for local fishermen have deteriorated, as they work longer hours and bear a larger share of costs such as vessel maintenance.

“This alarming investigation raises serious concern about possible violations of federal law,” Blumenthal said in a statement. “A powerful foreign private equity giant has gained huge power over a vital American industry. This apparent dominance raises antitrust questions, which should be reviewed by the U.S. Department of Justice.” Both Blumenthal and Markey sit on a Senate subcommittee with jurisdiction over the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Coast Guard.

Warren said she is dismayed that federal enforcement of a cap on foreign ownership of fishing vessels in U.S. waters largely relies on the companies’ own assurances that they are in compliance. “Predatory private equity billionaires have bought into nearly every sector of the economy, generating huge profits for insiders while leaving workers out in the cold,” Warren said. “I’m deeply concerned by this report regarding the lack of federal oversight of foreign ownership limits and that some hardworking fishermen in New Bedford are not being treated fairly.” She added, “I intend to work with federal regulators to address these issues and protect Massachusetts fishing families.”

The ProPublica/New Bedford Light investigation found that a federal regulatory system known as “catch shares,” which was adopted in 2010 to reduce overfishing, has fostered private equity’s consolidation of the industry at the expense of independent fishermen. The single largest permit holder in the New England groundfish industry is Blue Harvest Fisheries, which has rights to catch 12% of groundfish, approaching the antitrust cap of 15.5%.

Blue Harvest, which was established in 2015 by Manhattan private equity firm Bregal Partners and is based in New Bedford, Mass., owns more than 15.5% of the permitted catch for certain types of fish, but stays below the aggregate cap by owning smaller shares of other species. It boosts its market share by leasing fishing rights from other permit owners. There are no antitrust restrictions on leasing. Blue Harvest has charged captains and crew on its vessels for maintenance, electronics and wharfage fees, among other expenses. The investigation traced Blue Harvest’s ownership to a billionaire Dutch family.

Blue Harvest said in a statement that it has honored the “historically significant role that the region’s fishermen and fisherwomen play in our groundfish business” by investing more than $10 million to promote the health and welfare of employees and crew members. Overall payments to crew increased 36% over the last three years, the company said. Blue Harvest plans to launch several state-of-the-art vessels by 2024, reflecting its commitment to “setting higher standards and benchmarks for the seafood industry,” it said.

Blue Harvest added that the Coast Guard had approved its “ownership and capital structure.” The company said it “remains dedicated to acting as a responsible steward of the vitally important domestic U.S. fishing industry and actively supports regulation for the benefit of the industry at-large and the communities in which we serve.” Bregal Partners did not respond to a request for comment.

Like Warren, Markey decried foreign ownership and its effects on independent fishermen. “Our working waterfronts should work for local communities, and our laws on local ownership should be implemented and upheld, not undermined or evaded,” Markey said. He vowed to “ensure that we have a robust federal oversight system” and that “the private equity industry can’t take advantage of companies or their workers.”

A spokesperson for the head of NOAA’s fisheries division said that it would “work directly with our partners in Congress to respond to any inquiries they may have.” Michael Pentony, the division’s Northeast regional administrator, said that NOAA’s goal is to “ensure a sustainable future for our fisheries and the communities that depend on them.” He declined to address specific questions.

The current antitrust cap “fails to prevent excessive consolidation in the fishery,” said Geoff Smith, one of 18 members of the New England Fishery Management Council, which advises NOAA. “We certainly don’t believe that Blue Harvest or any other entity should be able to own excessive shares in the fishery to the detriment of fishing communities.” Other council members declined to comment or did not respond to messages, and its executive director declined to comment.

The council is considering whether to support a controversial industry-backed proposal authorizing the leasing of rights to catch scallops. Current scallop regulations allow one permit per boat, up to a total of 17 vessels, and leasing is prohibited. Many local fishermen fear that implementing the proposal would hasten consolidation and enable private equity to make the same inroads into the lucrative scallop market that it has with groundfish.

“I hope the New England Fishery Management Council recognizes that the South Coast was built on the backs of the hardworking fishing families, and that upcoming decisions reflect the respect they deserve,” said U.S. Rep. Bill Keating, a Democrat whose district includes New Bedford.

Fishermen, former regulatory officials and community activists recommended various reforms. They called for lowering the 15.5% permit cap for groundfish, for greater transparency in permit ownership and leasing, and for NOAA and the Coast Guard to enforce the American Fisheries Act, which limits foreign ownership to 25% of a U.S. fishing vessel. The Coast Guard’s National Vessel Documentation Center, which is responsible for monitoring compliance with foreign ownership restrictions, did not respond to written questions.

The way regulations are currently designed, “a handful of businesses can come in” and buy up “the entire fishery,” said Ben Martens, who heads the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association. Lack of transparency in ownership and leasing “creates a murky marketplace,” he added.

Blue Harvest purchased some of its fleet and permits from New Bedford fishing magnate Carlos Rafael, known as “the Codfather,” after he pleaded guilty to 27 counts of fraud in 2017 and agreed to sell his empire.

“Rafael’s fishing days are over, but manipulation of the fishing industry is alive and well, just with fancier suits and offices and less interesting but more polished white-collar types,” Joshua Amaral, who heads a community services program in New Bedford, wrote to the Light.

Brett Tolley, who leads the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, which advocates for independent fishermen, said that the influx of private equity firms was the “inevitable outcome” of the catch shares system. “The warning signs were always there,” Tolley said. “They have become so dominant, with such influence and leverage over our local economy, that they have essentially become too big to fail.”

David Goethel, a New Hampshire fisherman who served on the New England Fishery Management Council from 2004 to 2013, said that the industry’s problems are deeply rooted.

“NOAA is afraid of what they might find once they really start rattling the whole rotten tree,” he said.

While on the council, Goethel cast the lone dissenting vote against catch shares. “We knew then that someone was going to buy up the whole fishery,” he said. “Well, now that has happened.”

Over half of incarcerated people in the survey have mental health issues and nearly half have substance use disorders.

Which progressive media has been on to for a very long time, but hey—welcome to the club.