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Kansas City-based PayIt already provides services to the St. Louis Collector of Revenue's office and will expand to business licenses.

ALTON - Alton High School Jazz Band, SIUE Concert Jazz Band, Faith Fellowship Church, and Missouri-Illinois Music and Arts Consortium (MIMAC) present an evening of Jazz at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, April 19, at Faith Fellowship Church at 4719 Seminary Road in Alton. Alton High School Jazz Band director Chris Jarden and SIUE Concert Jazz Band director Garrett Schmidt had been planning a joint concert and approached Faith Fellowship Music Team Leader Thomas Pullen. Pullen, an alum of both the Alton Music Program and SIUE Jazz Program, so it was a natural fit. Faith Fellowship has an auditorium that rivals the best performance venues in the Riverbend Area. The concert gives high school jazz students see what the next steps might look like if they continue to pursue music in college. The performance is free of charge but donations can be made to benefit MIMAC, a newly-formed 501c3 Non-Profit whose mission is dedicated to providing a platform for emerging and established musicians, hosting education

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This story was originally published in the Kansas City Beacon.  To learn about Kansas City air quality, a collaboration is seeking local volunteers to place air sensors on their properties. Led by KC Digital Drive and other community partners, the program aims to gather data on climate and pollution along the Troost Avenue corridor. “The main thing […]

The post Here’s how residents along Troost Avenue can help measure Kansas City air quality appeared first on Missouri Independent.

People often talk about some kind of “right to deletion” as an approach to fixing online privacy issues. This construct can create problems, as we’ve seen with Europe’s version, but newer proposals don’t seem to consider these lessons. A recent paper by law professor Tiffany Li looks at another angle on the issue: how data […]

Most people are used to outdoor tornado sirens or alerts coming to their phones, but a new type of warning would result in similar alerts being dispatched.

Hot Box Cookies (multiple locations including 54 N Euclid Avenue, 314-899-0909) hopes to help stoners everywhere satisfy their munchies as the unofficial holiday – 4/20 – approaches. Not only are they rolling out a special menu, but they’re launching special merchandise and promotions to celebrate. The cookie spot is offering a $4.20 menu for four days — April 20 through April 23 — to feed the munchies of St. Louisan stoners and non-smokers alike.

Playwright Colin Healy’s “Big Machine” was inspired by the deadly events at a Standard Oil factory in Bayway, New Jersey, in 1924. He and director Nancy Bell discuss the history of lead poisoning — and what it takes to transform tragedy into musical theater.

A Passover Pop-up at United Provisions! With nearly 20 synagogues in a 20-mile span from the grocery store, the team at United Provisions wanted to find a new way to connect with its surrounding communities. “We treasure the opportunity to celebrate and learn about culture through food each day,” says Shayn Prapaisilp, COO of Global […]

by Stephen Engelberg

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.

On Aug. 26, 2021, a suicide bomber detonated a vest packed with explosives and ball bearings in the packed crowd outside Kabul’s international airport. Shrapnel sliced through the air, killing 13 American service members and an estimated 160 Afghan civilians.

In the hours after the attack, officials reported that a second assailant had sprayed the crowd with automatic weapons fire, increasing the casualty toll in what was one of the deadliest attacks on American forces in the 20 years of war in Afghanistan.

As so often happens in such cases, the U.S. military’s initial account raised more questions than it answered. The Marines scrambling to evacuate civilians as Taliban forces swept into Kabul had been explicitly warned of a possible suicide attack that very day. Yet they seemed to have failed to take basic security precautions. Republicans seized on the bombing as evidence that the Biden administration had bungled its first foreign policy challenge, failing to forsee how quickly the Taliban would overwhelm the American-backed Afghan government.

The story cried out for the sort of investigative reporting we have done previously on the U.S. military, looking into subjects like the spate of fatal accidents involving the Navy’s 7th Fleet. Pursuing such stories can be challenging. They often take longer than expected and the military’s propensity for classifying the details of its missteps inevitably complicates the reporting. The relentless pace of the news cycle can mean that public attention will move on to The Next Big Thing by the time we can explain what really happened in the last one.

So it was with Abbey Gate. The fall of Kabul was followed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We published our grippingly told story on the same day as Western news outlets began reporting that Russian soldiers had committed atrocities in the Kiev suburb of Bucha.

Still, I hope readers will make time to read this unforgettable investigation.

The piece we published is unusual in that it was done in collaboration with Alive in Afghanistan, a nonprofit news agency launched in the days after the fall of Kabul that employs local reporters to give greater voice to Afghans caught up in a struggle of global and regional powers.

Our partnership meant that the story of Abbey Gate was told from the perspectives of both the Afghans desperate to flee the Taliban and the ill-prepared Americans at the airport scrambling to facilitate their escape. Such reporting is unusual in war zones. Typically, correspondents are lucky if they can find and interview a handful of witnesses to a traumatic event like a suicide bombing.

In fact, the idea of taking a hard look at the bombing was initiated by editors at Alive in Afghanistan. Their Kabul-based reporters had heard multiple reports that some of the deaths outside the airport were the result of friendly fire as Western soldiers shot at what they thought were Islamic State gunmen in the crowd. Some of the medical personnel who treated casualties from Abbey Gate said they believed they saw injuries that could only have been caused by bullets.

Alive in Afghanistan pushed to find further evidence in Kabul, a tricky task in a city newly under Taliban control. Two ProPublica reporters, Josh Kaplan and Joaquin Sapien, began the painstaking work of finding and interviewing U.S. service members who were guarding the Abbey Gate checkpoint on Aug. 26.

Corroboration for the friendly fire theory proved elusive. Forensic experts differed on whether it was possible for a doctor, even one experienced in wartime injuries, to distinguish between damage caused by a ball bearing and that caused by a military-grade bullet. U.S. officials acknowledged that a small number of rounds had been fired but insisted they had been aimed over the heads of the civilians.

ProPublica and Alive in Afghanistan tracked down six doctors in three hospitals who believed they had seen bullet wounds. None were interviewed for the Pentagon report that concluded all of the deaths were due to the explosion. In an earlier story on the attack, we interviewed Dr. Hares Aref, a senior surgeon at Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital, who said he had operated on three civilians from Abbey Gate whose legs were wounded by bullets. “We had patients with bullet injury in this attack, it’s clear,” he said. Aref based his conclusion on what he had seen treating victims of countless Kabul bombings. “My proof is my experience.”

While the issue of whether civilians were hit by U.S. fire remains contested, our recounting of the events made clear the extent to which the forces overseeing the evacuation were put in an untenable position.

U.S. officials acknowledged that they did not launch a large-scale evacuation until days before the fall of Kabul. Units that became central to the operation had not been included in the planning process and had not specifically trained for it. And while military officials knew the airport was difficult to defend and susceptible to attack, by the time Marines arrived, it was too late to adequately fortify the airfield.

In the final hours before the attack, U.S. commanders decided to leave open unguarded pathways to Abbey Gate. It is believed the bomber took advantage of such a route to make his way to the site of the explosion.

Our interviews documented the chaos at the airport on the day of the attack. U.S. Marines acted as de facto immigration officers and were left to interpret vague policies with little guidance, struggling to decide who to let into the airport and who to leave behind. They told our reporters that communication breakdowns and a lack of food, water and shelter led to preventable civilian deaths. Afghans perished from heat exhaustion. Some were crushed to death while waiting in line.

In the end, the scene at the airport was a microcosm of America’s experience in Afghanistan. The military’s hasty planning, rooted in optimistic assumptions, proved no match for the reality of a society in collapse.

As you follow the war in the Ukraine, it’s worth taking some time with this grunts’- and civilians’-eye view of how wrong a military operation can go.

In today's A Place to Call Home, you'll meet Brandon. He's a typical 12-year-old with a great smile and a love for all sports.

Five St. Louis-area Starbucks stores have filed for unionization. Two workers discussed what’s driving these efforts, as Wash U’s Jake Rosenfeld gives insight to the wave of unionizations sweeping the nation.

Robert Williams, 58, was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison after admitting to falsely receiving roughly $2.5 million in COVID-19 relief loans.

In addition to the harmful impact on the lives of St. Louisans, our region’s longstanding challenges — from failing schools to troubling crime rates, slow economic growth, and our steady decline in prosperity and national prominence — have placed a significant burden on St. Louis businesses for several decades. These challenges negatively impact the quality of our employment base, our ability to recruit talent from other cities, our region’s overall economy and GDP, and our competitiveness…

ALTON - The Third Annual Easter Ham Giveaway in Alton was once again a blessing to many in the area in need. Hams and side items were distributed on Saturday, April 9, 2022, at Crisis Food Center, 21 East 6 th Street in Alton. Crisis Food Center (CFC) again partnered with Midwest Members Credit Union (MMCU) to give away free Hams and side items for Easter. The two organizations went 50/50 on the hams, and in addition, Crisis Food Center is donating the side items to go along with the hams. This is the third time CFC and MMCU have teamed up for this giveaway. Derrick Richardson, CFC board member and former MMCU board member, said the Easter Ham Giveaway was "a great success." "We gave out all the hams in less than an hour," he said. "MMCU and CFC renewed their commitment to continue to do this annually. We had a fun day. The employees who participated were fantastic in the way they helped set up and engaged with the community. It wouldn't have been a success without them. Easter i

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ST. LOUIS - The area is bracing for the possibility of severe thunderstorms and even tornadoes on Wednesday after a report this afternoon from the National Weather Service in St. Louis. “We have high confidence a significant severe weather event will occur on Wednesday with widespread severe thunderstorms expected,” NWS said on Tuesday. “The greatest threat and most intense severe weather will occur from around midday through the afternoon. There is a high probability of tornadoes, damaging winds, and large hail.” The prediction is that the prime time in the St. Louis region will be 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday, so there will be a concern with school dismissals on the day. The NWS said that widespread wind damage could be a concern over Southern Illinois. The good news is the storms will be gone by Wednesday evening and sunny and cooler weather is predicted for Thursday with a high of 64 degrees. Friday and Saturday highs are predicted at 66 and 61 degrees respectively.

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Gottfried is most well known for his role in Disney's "Aladdin" as the parrot Iago and as Digit LeBoid in the PBS kid's show "Cyberchase."

A St. Louis-based manufacturer of pet foods, treats and supplements has merged with an Italian pet food brand that's a sibling under its new European owner.

The suspect's stolen car was later found abandoned.