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Sampson was headed to East Illinois High School to play football in the Fall. Community members brought balloons in the school's colors, orange and blue.

A double shooting Thursday night left two men wounded in the Ville neighborhood.

GREENFIELD - Firefighters were called to the 1000 block of Green Street in Greenfield for a house fire at 12:26 p.m. Thursday, March 31, 2022, and tragically two individuals died in the blaze. The two were an 11-month-female and a 77-year-old female, Greene County Coroner Danny Powell said Thursday night. Powell said that when firefighters arrived at the scene the home was engulfed in flames. Three of the five people were rescued. One of those individuals suffered from smoke inhalation. Coroner Powell said he was called to the scene at 1:15 p.m. and pronounced the two victims dead at the scene. Two law enforcement officers attempted to rescue those involved in the fire and were also taken to hospitals for further treatment. Coroner Powell said he wasn't prepared to release the names of the victims because of notification of next of kin. He described the fire deaths as "tragic," and "very sad." Coroner Powell said the deaths riveted not only all of Greenfield but Greene County. "Ou

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St. Louis County police said that a shooting death in Northwoods appears to be a murder-suicide.

A Missouri family has been haunted for 32 years by the disappearance of their loved one.

The EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market contains two spectacularly bad ideas. One is the upload filter of Article 17, which will wreak havoc not just on creativity in the EU, but also on freedom of speech there, as algorithms block perfectly legal material. The other concerns the “snippet tax” of Article 15, more […]

Sewage seeping from a drain into the basement of a St. Louis-area home left a young mother looking for help.

ty members expressed their concerns over a shooting that left two people dead and another injured in the Central West End Thursday morning.

Police were unable to identify the victim initially, but on Thursday, he was identified as 64-year-old Tyrone Bisch.

A St. Peters couple has returned home from a trip to Eastern Europe to help with the Ukrainian crisis.

Here's more good news on the inflation front: Consumer spending was down slightly in February, which keeps it right on the pre-pandemic trendline. It's yet another indication that consumer demand isn't spiraling ever upward. On the contrary, it remains well anchored.

The victim's adult son drove up hours later, after medical examiner's technicians carried the body out. "My daddy's gone, my ... daddy's gone," he wailed.

Patricia Cottner, 69, of Moscow Mills, Missouri was pronounced dead at the hospital.

EP Release Show, Grip Slime with Inner City Witches, Horse Magik.

The post Grip Slime appeared first on Explore St. Louis.

We all respond to crises in different ways but when lockdown hit, Todrick Hall knew right away what he needed to do. Which of course

The post Todrick Hall appeared first on Explore St. Louis.

Hitchcock meets hilarity in this madcap comedic thriller. Richard Hannay is an everyday bloke looking for a little more excitement in his life. But he

The post The 39 Steps – Repertory Theatre St. Louis appeared first on Explore St. Louis.

Family and friends will gather Thursday in St. Louis to remember 14-year-old Tyre Sampson, who fell to his death from an amusement park ride last week in Orlando, Florida.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse asks a question of Director of the DOJ Office of Information Policy, Bobak Talebian.

Senate Judiciary Committee

Senators from both sides of the aisle took representatives from the executive branch to task at a Judiciary Committee Freedom of Information Act hearing this week. At the first hearing on FOIA since 2018, lawmakers raised serious issues with compliance and backlogs that have ballooned since the COVID-19 pandemic started.

FOIA requests as a transparency tool are available to everyone, but they are especially popular for journalists, who can use the responsive records as leads or to provide primary source support for reporting. For a working journalist, the glacial pace of document production found in some government departments is a non-starter — and clearly out of compliance with the text of the law, which requires results in weeks, not months or years.

Questions from senators focused on those long timelines and the resulting backlog, which a Government Accountability Office witness said was up 18% in September 2020 over a year before, after six months of pandemic working conditions. (We wrote in April 2020 about the collapse in government compliance with its transparency obligations as the pandemic began.)

Data journalists also frequently require records that are up-to-date and readily available in a machine-readable format — an issue that was raised by Senator Jon Ossoff, who asked the witnesses about the digitization of record storage and how it affects the government’s ability to produce those records digitally. Ossoff argued that this should be a fundamental consideration, calling it "a basic question about how FOIA is operating in the context of new technology."

Several senators also raised questions about legislative record requests, which have suffered many of the same foot dragging and excuse making as FOIA. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse asked a Department of Justice witness about the agency's position in CREW v. DOJ, an ongoing FOIA case concerning a Justice Department memo on whether President Trump's conduct described in the Mueller Report constituted obstruction of justice.

Whitehouse and a group of six other senators have filed a brief in that case, arguing that the department should not be allowed to withhold the memo. The litigation began during the Trump administration but the Department of Justice has continued to fight the memo's release after President Biden took office.

Senator Ossoff also asked about DOJ guidance on requests from individual lawmakers, which currently are treated differently than requests from committee chairs. That guidance in particular comes from a 1984 memo that, Ossoff suggested, should be revisited. This kind of internal DOJ guidance has major influence on policy and isn’t always even public — the Knight First Amendment Institute has challenged that secrecy for Office of Legal Counsel memos and, through FOIA litigation, has gotten hundreds of such memos released.

The Freedom of Information Act remains a critically important transparency tool — look no further to the stories surfaced by @FOIAFeed every day for evidence of that. But the senators are correct that it needs significant fixes to be a useful and modern one.