ST. LOUIS – The St. Louis Police Union has made a change with its business manager.
The sometimes controversial Jeff Roorda is leaving after nearly 12 years with the organization. Effective October 3, retired St. Louis Police Detective Joe Steiger will take over as business manager. He’s held several executive board positions with the officers’ union.
The organization is the area’s main police union and represents about 1,000 officers as well as civilian employees and St. Louis County prosecutors.
ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. – St. Louis County Police detectives are investigating a deadly shooting Monday at an apartment complex in south county.
Investigators responded to Southmoor Apartment on Golf Ridge Lane around 2:12 p.m. They found two women shot inside the building. One of them died. The other victim has been treated and released from a nearby hospital, according to police.
A spokesperson for the St. Louis County Police Department said through a press release, “Preliminary investigation has revealed the shooting to be the result of an argument between familiar parties.”
The release did not provide any information about the identity of the victims or potential suspects.
Several residents said seeing police tape wrapped around the area and investigators on the scene are sights they would never expect at the apartment complex.
“It was scary to me,” said Julia Pozzini, apartment resident.
She said the apartment complex has been an extremely safe place to live.
“I’ve lived here for six years and nothing like this has every happened,” said Pozzini. “I’ve always felt very safe here.”
If you have any information regarding this incident, please contact the St. Louis County Police Department at 636-529-8210. If you want to remain anonymous, call CrimeStoppers at 1-866-371-TIPS (8477).
HAZELWOOD, Mo. – Hazelwood citizens are trying to unseat the three board members of the Robertson Fire Protection District Board of Directors.
They said the fire district is wasting taxpayers’ money and they’re suffering the effects.
“The city of Hazelwood is going bankrupt, and the Robertson Fire Protection District is using our tax dollars as their own personal piggy bank,” said Jennifer Guyton, group leader for the Citizens to Save Hazelwood and Fire Services.
The fire district tried to get a judge to call off the election. They wanted more than 100 names thrown out, claiming the citizens were lied to in order to get them to sign. The judge disagreed and refused to cancel it.
“I was elated,” Guyton said. “I was so happy to hear that the judge heard our arguments and understood that this was just silly. This is something you do when you are too corrupt and too cowardly to hold an election.”
The three fire district directors that are facing recall said they’ve done nothing wrong. They said their actions have been legal and insisted they have not wasted taxpayer dollars.
“I don’t feel like we lost. I feel like it’s going to come out in the wash,“ said Joan, board president for the Robertson Fire Protection District.
Hazelwood Mayor Matthew Robinson said he’s hoping for a change in the fire district.
“We could look at filing bankruptcy as early as 2025. We got in this position throughout the years,” Robinson said. “We’ve had a neighboring fire district, Robertson Fire Protection District, that’s escalated their cost where they’ve out priced themselves in the St. Louis region.”
The fire district claimed it had nothing to do with Hazelwood’s dire finances.
“I think the mayor is behind all this. The mayor and certain people in the City of Hazelwood are behind all this,” Noel said. “They’re making this happen. They’ve never kept their promises. They’ve always treated us like the “red-headed stepchild.”
The recall vote will be on Nov. 8. The election law allowed the fire district directors to put their names on the ballot for open seats from the recall. It’s possible for voters to cast them out of the position and even elect them back in office.
A small camera mounted on DART livestreamed the spacecraft’s steady progress towards the 160 meter-wide asteroid, located about 6.8 million miles from Earth, back to controllers based at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The team cheered as Dimorphos grew closer and closer, before the livestream cut out on impact with the asteroid. The strike was “basically a bullseye,” DART mission systems engineer Elena Adams said. You can watch the livestream for yourself to see the exact moment DART struck Dimorphos.
The mission, which was launched in November last year, demonstrates a way for humanity to protect itself from asteroids. While Dimorphos itself had not been on course to crash into Earth, the project demonstrates NASA’s ability to deflect similar asteroids in the future. Researchers believe the crash could have shortened Dimorphos’ orbit by around 10 minutes, which is enough to make a significant difference to the path an asteroid travels. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson called the mission an “unprecedented success for planetary defense.”
The next step is to study the asteroid using telescopes on Earth to confirm that DART’s impact altered the asteroid’s orbit around a larger asteroid called Didymos.
ST. LOUIS – A staff member at the St. Louis Juvenile Detention Center was severely beaten during an attempted mass escape Sunday night, authorities have confirmed to FOX 2 News. The worker was hospitalized with several broken bones in his face.
There have been multiple escapes and attempts to abscond from the facility, located at Vandeventer and Enright avenues in the city’s Grand Center neighborhood, over the past year.
Restroom access for detainees has been a contributing factor in numerous incidents.
A staff member said there are no toilets in individual cells. So, the unarmed detention officers, who are officially called youth leaders, must unlock the cells to allow detainees to use the restroom.
In the most recent incident, police said a 17-year-old detainee beat a 61-year-old male detention officer after the officer opened his cell. The detainee took his keys and opened the cells of fellow detainees. The members of the St. Louis Police Anti-Crime Task Force happened to be on-site for an unrelated assignment. Officers took three male juveniles, ages 14 to 17, into custody.
They helped detention officers stop what could have been a mass escape. A witness said that nearly 15 detainees were freed from their cells inside the detention center.
“It’s an ongoing issue that’s been going on for years now,” said Dwayne Cutts, who lives near the detention center. “It seems like somebody would step forward and actually make a difference over there and improve the security and living arrangements.”
In December, a 17-year-old was hit and killed as he ran from a crashed car onto Interstate 70 in St. Louis. He had escaped from the detention center about three months earlier, one of at least 10 escapees in less than a year.
The restroom issue heightens tensions, with detainees frequently urinating and defecating on cell floors, a staff member said. Having to unlock cells so detainees can use a restroom puts staff at risk and has led to repeated escapes.
FOX 2 reached out to Missouri’s 22nd Judicial Circuit Court, which operates the facility, about the restroom issues and repeated escape attempts. Chief Juvenile Officer Amanda Sodomka gave the following response via email:
“The court can confirm that there was an incident that occurred in the juvenile detention facility on Sept. 25, 2022, that involved multiple juveniles. A detention staff was injured and hospitalized. Detention staff, with the assistance of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, contained the juveniles within the detention facility.”
The court administrator, Nathan Graves, also responded via email with the following comments:
“The incidences that have occurred at the juvenile detention facility are being assessed on an ongoing basis and addressed as needs are determined. The court’s priority is the safety and security of the juveniles and staff. The court cannot disclose information related to the security of the detention facility.”
Some technologists hope that one day we will develop a superintelligent AI system that people will be able to have conversations with. Ask it a question, and it will offer an answer that sounds like something composed by a human expert. You could use it to ask for medical advice, or to help plan a holiday. Well, that’s the idea, at least.
In reality, we’re still a long way away from that. Even the most sophisticated systems of today are pretty dumb. I once got Meta’s AI chatbot BlenderBot to tell me that a prominent Dutch politician was a terrorist. In experiments where AI-powered chatbots were used to offer medical advice, they told pretend patients to kill themselves. Doesn’t fill you with a lot of optimism, does it?
That’s why AI labs are working hard to make their conversational AIs safer and more helpful before turning them loose in the real world. I just published a story about Alphabet-owned AI lab DeepMind’s latest effort: a new chatbot called Sparrow.
DeepMind’s new trick to making a good AI-powered chatbot was to have humans tell it how to behave—and force it to back up its claims using Google search. Human participants were then asked to evaluate how plausible the AI system’s answers were. The idea is to keep training the AI using dialogue between humans and machines.
In reporting the story, I spoke to Sara Hooker, who leads Cohere for AI, a nonprofit AI research lab.
She told me that one of the biggest hurdles in safely deploying conversational AI systems is their brittleness, meaning they perform brilliantly until they are taken to unfamiliar territory, which makes them behave unpredictably.
“It is also a difficult problem to solve because any two people might disagree on whether a conversation is inappropriate. And even if we agree that something is appropriate right now, this may change over time, or rely on shared context that can be subjective,” Hooker says.
Despite that, DeepMind’s findings underline that AI safety is not just a technical fix. You need humans in the loop.
ST. CHARLES, Mo. – City engineers gear up to submit a request to the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pay for the reconstruction of the Frontier Park Pedestrian Bridge after it was destroyed in the late July floods.
Visitors had just gotten used to the newly reconstructed pedestrian bridge in Frontier Park when late July storms brought historic flooding and sent the city of St. Charles back to square one.
The high waters washed away the bank of the creek and ripped away $300,000 of work in just a matter of days.
“I was just so heartbroken,” said St. Charles resident Mary Barfeild.
Between the erosion, debris, and the broken bridge itself, building back won’t be easy.
“I hope we get it back soon,” said St. Charles resident Will Hackmann.
The bridge has been closed off to the public for months, but city officials gave FOX 2 behind the scene access where much of the bridge is still intact.
The question for city engineers: will they be able to reinforce the bridge once it’s reconstructed?
“Within the next month or so, we’ll be pulling the existing steel and composite bridge out to inspect it and make sure it’s safe to reuse and then we’ll have to have a geotechnical engineer come out to take soil samples to determine what kind of foundation have to go back to hold that bridge up,” said Brad Temme, City of St. Charles director of engineering.
Officials estimate a new bridge will run half-a-million dollars.
“There’s always a lot going on in downtown St. Charles, so it is a priority to get this back up and operational,” Temme said.
The city will submit a final request to FEMA in the next two months, hoping they will approve most of the cost.
Bridging tourists and locals alike back together come spring 2023.
If organization is your forte (or something you want to dive into), don’t overlook your bathroom. It’s one of the most high-traffic areas in a home, especially if you have a large family with plenty of items that require smart storage solutions. It’s where you start and end your day, so it’s important for it to look as polished as possible. When it comes to finding the best organizing tips for the tidiest home ever, we’re not new to showing you how to declutter large or small spaces in your home (feel free to check out our 2022 Best Cleaning & Organizing Awards). That’s why we’re sharing some of the best and most stylish bathroom organization ideas tokeep your hair products, body washes, face washes, towels and more well-arranged (and easily accessible).
Our practical tips range from under-the-sink storage ideas (such as woven baskets and Lazy Susans) to creative yet simple purchases (such as a bath caddy and perfectly arranged towel hooks). Regardless of your bathroom’s size, these picks are the right mix of style and function. The perfect example? A durable bar cart, which you can buy in just about any style or color you see fit.
Albert Pujols recently achieved a level of greatness only three others in Major League Baseball history have matched as home run number 700 flew out into the dodger stadium seats Friday night.
St. Peters native Julie Deters and her family were there to see it all. They were sitting in left field section 305. Home run number 700 landed just feet in front of them.
“I mean, it happened so fast,” Julie said. “I’m thinking, oh my god, it’s going to hit me in the head. My husband jumped up on their bench seats there at dodger stadium. As soon as he could figure out that it was just coming straight towards us, he actually got pushed off the bench, and at that time, it was over. We could actually hear the w of the ball coming.”
The fan who caught Albert’s 700th home run left dodger stadium with the baseball after Major League Baseball officials authenticated it. Julie admits It would have taken some convincing for her to give the ball back as well.
“We’re huge Cardinal fans,” Julie said. “Hopefully, we would’ve gotten to meet Albert.” “Grabbing that ball was a life-changing event,” Julie continued. “We would love to have it, of course. You’d be crazy not to.”
But as cool as it would have been to snag the historic baseball, it was even better to be a witness of history.
“It was the best day ever,” Julie said. “It was, it was amazing. We’re so happy to be able to have traveled, and got to see it in person and just been there. Even my 22-year-old daughter, that’s not really a big sports person, she’s like, this is the best vacation I’ve ever had.”
An increasing number of Americans are unhappy with how President Biden is handling the economy compared to when the president first took office, according to a new poll.
The ABC News/Washington Post poll released on Sunday shows 74% of Americans say the economy is in bad shape, up from 58% in the spring of 2021.
As the U.S. Federal Reserve increases interest rates to combat record-high inflation, 84% of respondents called the economy a top issue, while 74% said the same for inflation going into the midterm elections in November.
Meanwhile, 62% say abortion is a top issue.
According to the poll, Republicans hold a 16-point lead over Democrats in trust to handle the economy and a 19-point lead in trust to handle inflation.
Fears of a recession loom after the U.S. Federal Reserve last week raised interest rates in a move to curb decades-high inflation.
Last week, the Fed lifted its benchmark rate, which affects many consumer and business loans, to a range of 3% to 3.25%. It was near zero at the start of the year. The Fed also released a forecast suggesting its benchmark rate could be 4.4% by the year’s end, a full point higher than envisioned in June.
An increasing number of Americans are unhappy with how Joe President Biden is dealing with the economy.Chris Kleponis – Pool via CNP /
On Monday, the average price for a gallon of regular gasoline in the U.S. climbed for the sixth-straight day to $3.725 after declining for nearly 100 days in a row during the summer driving season.
