Missouri News

Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver Tyreek Hill won’t be sanctioned over an incident in which his 3-year-old son was injured. The NFL's decision comes just days before traning camp starts Tuesday.

Members of Kansas City's art world will gather on Saturday to toast Victor Babu, a Kansas City Art Institute professor who died in April but whose influence will be felt for generations.

Five years after a white Ferguson police officer shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown, a black man, there is no permanent, local display of the art sparked by the protests. 

Designer and activist De Nichols wants to change that. Through a Harvard University fellowship, she will study how to transform the Griot Museum of Black History in north St. Louis into such a space.

Nichols is known for the sculpture the “Mirror Casket,” a reflective casket-shaped piece she created with six other artists. It won such acclaim that it is now exhibited at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. 

If there was a soundtrack for the sculptures on the lawn at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, what would it be like?

Christina Butera thought about that a lot while writing her dissertation in composition at the UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance.

The St. Louis prosecutor says changes she’s made in how the circuit attorney’s office fights crime have made the city safer.

“We have to stop having this rhetoric that we’re going to be able to prosecute our way out of this. That simply cannot be our strategy for crime reduction,” Kim Gardner told a friendly crowd Thursday night at a town hall. “The system is going to do what it’s going to do, and that’s hurt people. And we have to look at how we stop the cycle of victimization.

This interview will be on “St. Louis on the Air” over the noon hour Friday. This story will be updated after the show. You can listen live.

Nearly a decade ago, HandleBar owner Tatyana Telnikova began heading up the after-party for St. Louis’ World Naked Bike Ride. She’s now even more deeply involved as an organizer of the annual event, which gets going at 4 p.m. Saturday in the Grove neighborhood.

Missouri Treasurer Scott Fitzpatrick on Thursday announced a low-interest loan program to help small-business owners and farmers who have suffered losses from storms and flooding this year.

LIFT (Linked Deposits to Invest and Fund a Timely Recovery) offers loans of up to $2 million for those affected by natural disasters. 

A newly released database shows that Leavenworth County, Kansas, had one of the highest concentrations of opioid pills per person in the United States between 2006 and 2012.

While those numbers might suggest a hidden calamity in eastern Kansas, the vast majority of those pills were actually processed by a Veteran’s Administration fullfillment center, rather than distributed locally, according to the data.

A corpse flower on display at the Missouri Botanical Garden likely will not perform one of its stunning and foul-smelling blooms.

The corpse flower, one of the largest flowers in the world, typically blooms within a couple of weeks after it reveals its spadix, the spike in the middle of the plant. The plant, named Octavia, has not bloomed for more than 25 days since the spike’s emergence.

The fight over the Jackson County reassessment mess is dragging on and becoming even more contentious as critics alleged the assessment discriminated against poorer areas.

The county Board of Equalization (BOE) on Thursday had a plan on its agenda that would throw out the assessment and cap property value increases at no more than 14 percent.

State Rep. Derek Grier is the latest guest on the Politically Speaking podcast, where he talked with St. Louis Public Radio’s Jason Rosenbaum about how Missouri is approaching economic development policy.

The Chesterfield Republican represents the 100th District in the Missouri House. The St. Louis County district takes in parts of Chesterfield, Town & Country, Winchester and Ballwin.

This spring, abortion rights supporters scored a massive legal victory: The Kansas Supreme Court ruled that women have the right to abortion under the state constitution.

That means even if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, lawmakers won’t be able to ban abortion in Kansas unless voters amend the state constitution.

This interview will be on “St. Louis on the Air” over the noon hour Friday. This story will be updated after the show.

A bill to make Cahokia Mounds part of a new national park was introduced in Congress on Thursday by Republican Rep. Mike Bost.

The Cahokia Mounds and Mississippian Culture National Historic Park would include Cahokia Mounds, plus ancient mounds in St. Clair, Monroe and Madison counties in Illinois — and Sugarloaf Mound in St. Louis, the last remaining mound in the city.

The National Park Service and state and local agencies would manage the park.

TOPEKA — Kansas schools will require two new vaccines come August, including one against a virus that’s hospitalized 13,000 people and killed 200 across the country since 2016.

During a week when President Donald Trump continued attacks on four members of Congress after tweeting that they should "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came," people of color in Kansas City are reacting with anger, frustration and sadness.

One emotion that's less common is surprise.

CHESS Cops was launched in February 2017. What began as a simple breakfast with officers and students enjoying chess over coffee and orange juice ultimately expanded into a multifaceted community outreach program.

The St. Louis Chess Club, St. Louis schools, St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department and the St. Louis County Police Department partnered to start St. Louis CHESS Cops — or Chess Helping Enhance Student Skills. CHESS is currently comprised of city and county police officers who utilize chess to teach lessons on critical thinking, planning and logic.

About 6,000 nutrition professionals gathered at the America’s Center Convention Complex in St. Louis. They came from all over the country to sample ramen noodle, Parmesan-crusted Alaskan pollock nuggets and low-sodium seasonings that can be used on a variety of meats.

But these foods won’t be served to adults. They’ll be consumed by kids in many of the country’s school cafeterias.

Before Kenneth Wilson became a Missouri House member, he worked his way up the ranks in the Platte County Sheriff’s Office. It was there, he said, his view of crime went from “bad guys go to jail” to seeing dads lose their jobs because they were jailed for not being able to pay child support.

And that’s when Wilson, a Republican from Smithville, thought there must be another way. 

The St. Charles County Planning and Zoning Commission voted Wednesday night to reject a housing development near the Katy Trail, a decision likely to be reversed by the St. Charles County Council.

It was the second time in less than two years the commission has voted down the Missouri Bluffs development, a project that would include more than 200 homes overlooking the Katy Trail and Missouri River in St. Charles. 

When the National Women’s Political Caucus picked St. Louis to host its convention, it was well before the Missouri Legislature passed a ban on abortion after eight weeks of pregnancy — a move that drew national attention and controversy to the state.

Some members of the caucus, which seeks to elect women to office who support abortion rights, wanted to move the convention out of downtown St. Louis. But NWPC President Donna Lent said the furor over the abortion measure solidified the urgency to be in Missouri.

Several years ago, judges at the St. Louis Circuit Court came up with a simple idea: get everyone who handles criminal cases — from prosecutors to public defenders to police officers — together to share ideas about making improvements.

Now, legislation awaiting Mayor Lyda Krewson’s signature looks to turn an informal gathering into a professional endeavor with paid staff.

While many writers pen memoirs because of something particularly distinctive or unusual about their lives, the reason Chavisa Woods gives for writing hers is pretty much the opposite.

“I felt that it was incumbent for me to put this on the page ... because my life is not exceptional,” Woods, the author of “100 Times: A Memoir of Sexism,” said on Wednesday’s St. Louis on the Air. “And I think when people hear that you’ve experienced 100 formative incidents of sexism, maybe the first reaction is, ‘Oh, I can’t believe that it influences your life so much.’ But I think when most women stop and think about discrimination, harassment, groping, sexual violence and also microagressions, you’ll see that you could easily compile [such a list]. ”

More than two millennia after the ancient orator Demosthenes refined his speaking style by talking with pebbles in his mouth, great speeches continue to play a significant cultural role. That enduring impact on public life – as well as the value of public-speaking skills for everyday contexts – is in the spotlight during the Optimist International Oratorical World Championships.

Taking place at St. Louis University, the competition runs Thursday through Saturday, with several sizable scholarship awards awaiting the winners.

On Thursday’s St. Louis on the Air, guest host Jim Kirchherr talked with a past winner of the competition, Justice Hill, who is now a SLU student, as well as Rebecca Butler Mona, the president of Optimist International. Also joining the discussion was Wayne Fields, the Lynne Cooper Harvey Chair Emeritus in English at Washington University.