Missouri News

This interview will be on “St. Louis on the Air” at noon on Thursday. This story will be updated after the show. Here are some ways to listen live.

The Trump administration’s formal withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate change has members of the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative concerned. The organization is worried that the withdrawal could lead to U.S. commodities producers being taxed or penalized by countries that signed on to the accord, something that the European Union has signaled they would like to pursue.

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

Metro Theater Company’s Julia Flood was looking for a classic holiday show this fall — one that would also speak to Metro’s mission as a theater company inspired by the intelligence and emotional wisdom of young people. Her colleague John Wolbers’ fresh take on the story of George Bailey and the town of Bedford Falls aspires to fit the bill.

Starting treatment with a mental health specialist often requires a wait of several weeks, but many psychiatrists and other specialists in Kansas City have waiting lists stretching over months.

While the need for mental health treatment has been growing in Missouri, many patient advocates say the state’s refusal to aggressively enforce mental health parity may be making the wait times even longer.

Marty Sexton, a 50-year-old disabled grandfather who lives in Peculiar, worked as a firefighter and then an army medic in Operations Desert Storm, Desert Shield and Enduring Freedom.

The 2019 calendar for the U.S. women’s national soccer team is over, but for new coach Vlatko Andonovski, who has strong ties to Kansas City, the work is just beginning.

Andonovski’s coronation by U.S. Soccer as the new coach of the women’s team was held, Oct. 28, in New York. He won his first two matches with the team, beating Sweden 3-2 and Costa Rica 6-0. The international friendlies are helping prepare the team ahead of the Olympic qualifiers.

Incarcerated people can often feel forgotten by the world outside. 

A documentary film that screens at the St. Louis International Film Festival on Saturday amplifies the voices of women at the prison in Vandalia, Missouri, formally known as the Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center.

“The Voice Within” follows a group of women as they worked with playwright Stacie Lentz to create a play partly based on their life experiences. They were participants in Prison Performing Arts’ New Plays Initiative. Lentz is also working with men at the Northeast Correctional Center in Bowling Green on an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 2016 novel, “Hag-Seed.” 

St. Louis Cardinals Manager Mike Shildt was named recipient of the 2019 National League Manager of the Year Award as voted on by the Baseball Writers Association of America.

Shildt, who this season guided the Cardinals to their first National League Central title since 2015, joins Hall of Fame managers Whitey Herzog (1985) and Tony La Russa (2002) as Cardinals past winners of the award.

Starting Wednesday, November 13, St. Louis Public Radio | 90.7 KWMU will offer live coverage of the impeachment inquiry hearings from NPR. The coverage is expected to begin at 9 a.m. Wednesday, continuing into the afternoon and picking up again on Friday, November 15. Additional coverage is expected next week and possibly into next month.

Did you see the bright flash last night? Many home security cameras in the St. Louis area sure did. 

The annual Taurid meteor shower, known to burn more brightly than other meteor events, hit its peak on Monday night. Area residents blasted social media with doorbell camera videos and firsthand accounts about the noise it made.

The American Meteor Society received more than 120 reports about the sighting, from Missouri, Illinois, Kansas and other Midwestern and Western states. 

Members of a board that could recommend big changes to St. Louis and St. Louis County government met for the first time Tuesday, expressing optimism that they can present a plan that city and county residents will accept.

With city members of the Board of Freeholders still unseated, the board spent most of Tuesday’s meeting getting to know each other — and hearing from members of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen.

Raytown’s city clerk “purposefully” violated the law when she spurned a request for public records related to a fatal traffic accident, the Missouri Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday.

The decision has far-reaching implications for citizens' access to public documents covered by Missouri’s Sunshine Law.

The appeals court upheld a trial court's ruling that ordered the clerk, Teresa Henry, to pay $38,550 in attorney fees and a $4,000 civil penalty to the plaintiff in the case, Paula Wyrick.

Starting Wednesday, Nov. 13, at 9 a.m., St. Louis Public Radio will offer live coverage of the impeachment inquiry hearings from NPR. During this special coverage, listeners can still stream "St. Louis on the Air" by clicking the drop down on the site-wide player and selecting "KWMU-1 Regularly Scheduled Programs." This story will be updated after the show.

Bush honeysuckle isn't native to Missouri, but the species is flourishing in the state. The infestation has impacted the diversity and abundance of native plants, eliminated essential habitats for the insects that rely upon native plants, provided poor nutrition for birds, among other issues. The honeysuckle also escalates human exposure to Lyme disease and Ehrlichiosis, a tick-borne bacterial infection, by increasing the activity of the tick host, white-tailed deer. 

In an effort to upset honeysuckle infestation, the Missouri Botanical Garden has organized public events and volunteer removal days to raise public awareness about the need for bush honeysuckle removal and the benefits of replacing it with native plants. 

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

In 2012, Rita Csapo-Sweet and her husband, the late Frederick Sweet, jointly published a paper on the ghastly but little-known legacy of Carl Clauberg, a German physician who conducted mass sterilization experiments at Auschwitz during World War II. Clauberg would use his work in the concentration camp to develop a pioneering fertility test. 

“Clauberg’s name needs to be placed next to [Josef] Mengele’s in its rightful place in infamy,” the two scholars concluded, emphasizing that Clauberg’s medical crimes against humanity “must be disclosed whenever the test bearing his name appears” in modern biomedical texts.

As Csapo-Sweet and Sweet dug into their research, filmmakers Sylvia Nagel and Sonya Winterberg also began a documentary about Clauberg — and the St. Louis-based couple’s academic article filled in key gaps in the filmmakers’ story. Nagel and Winterberg reached out to Csapo-Sweet in 2015, and she joined the documentary as its American producer. 

Now complete, “Made in Auschwitz: The Untold Story of Block 10” will be screened this weekend as part of the St. Louis International Film Festival.

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

The weather outside may be frightful, but Patrick Horine, co-founder of the popular Tower Grove Farmers Market, isn’t exactly closing up shop for the colder months these days. As he looks toward the final market of the season this weekend in the south St. Louis park, he’s also gearing up for its wintry equivalent — which is growing.

Initially launched in 2007 as a monthly affair, the Winter Market this year will take place weekly beginning Dec. 7. And it’s moving to the spacious Koken Art Factory in St. Louis’ Fox Park neighborhood to accommodate dozens of local vendors.

On Wednesday’s St. Louis on the Air, Horine will join host Sarah Fenske for a sneak peek at the wintry offerings, which also will feature a holiday theme the first three Saturdays of the season. He’ll also discuss farmers market trends in the region as a whole.

Missouri has already approved more than 17,000 patients for its yet-to-be-launched medical marijuana program — a stark contrast to neighboring Illinois, which had fewer than 3,000 patients in the first 10 months. 

Licenses for Missouri’s dispensaries are expected to be awarded by January, and cannabis should be available for medical card holders by spring. 

At their core, Missouri and Illinois programs do the same thing: They allow doctors to certify patients to use cannabis if they have a qualifying condition. But there are significant differences in the details of each law, including who has access, how they’re getting access and how the programs can be changed in the future.

GRANITE CITY — An undisclosed number of non-union employees at Granite City’s U.S Steel plant have been laid off.

In a statement U.S. Steel spokesperson Amanda Malkowski said the layoffs were due to “challenging market conditions.”

In Kansas City and across the country, performance venues and artists have had to make adjustments due to more extreme weather events.

And when it comes to climate change, there's one thing arts organizations need to do: "Prepare." That's according to Karin Rabe, properties master at the Alley Theatre in Houston, where flooding is a growing concern. 

Members of a board that could reshape how St. Louis and St. Louis County are governed plan to meet for the first time on Tuesday morning in St. Louis City Hall.

But without representatives from the city, some of the members of the Board of Freeholders aren’t expecting the first gathering to feature a lot of definitive action. That likely won’t occur until an impasse is resolved over St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson’s appointees.

St. Louis Public Radio’s Julie O’Donoghue and Jaclyn Driscoll welcome state Rep. LaDonna Appelbaum to Politically Speaking for the first time. The discussion includes the Democrat's efforts to improve health care.

Appelbaum represents Missouri’s 71st House District, which takes in portions of Chesterfield, Creve Coeur, Maryland Heights, Olivette, Overland and unincorporated St. Louis County. She was first elected in 2018.

The St. Louis County jail will now provide inmates with better menstrual pads and tampons free of charge.

County Executive Sam Page last week signed an executive order making the change after a survey from the nonprofit Missouri Appleseed found inmates couldn’t afford the products they needed.

Mo Dehghani, who has led Missouri University of Science and Technology for 100 days, already has ambitious plans to increase the size and impact of the school.

He laid out his vision for the campus in Rolla during a State of the University address last week. 

Democrats in Virginia claimed big wins in the Tuesday election, fueled in no small part by big investments from gun control advocates.

The historic blue wave marked the first time Democrats seized control of the state’s government in a generation.

A group of Florissant veterans will honor the service of the men and women in the U.S. Armed Forces on Veterans Day.

Ten members from the American Legion Florissant Valley Memorial Post 444 will perform military honors at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery. The tight-knit group is known as the honor guard.