Larry Rice arrested at new homeless camp

The Rev. Larry Rice was among four people arrested last night at the site of a new homeless encampment in south St. Louis.

 A Missouri state senator was being examined at a Jefferson City hospital after becoming light-headed during a debate on education issues.

Jane Cunningham (R, Chesterfield) was driven to St. Mary's Health Center by her chief of staff Wednesday afternoon.  The aide said Cunningham underwent tests in the emergency room Wednesday evening, then was admitted to the hospital and planned to stay overnight.

Sen. Rob Schaaf (R, St. Joseph), who is also a family physician, says Cunningham complained of being light-headed but did not appear to have more serious symptoms.

Plans to re-route Interstate 70 over the new Mississippi River Bridge are facing a roadblock from stakeholders in the Metro East. The $55 million project includes eliminating the east-bound ramp that connects Interstates 70 and 44 to the Poplar Street Bridge.

St. Clair County Board Chairman Mark Kern told the East-West Gateway Council of Governments Wednesday that cutting access to the bridge would strangle an already struggling economy.

“East St. Louis certainly needs this access," he said. "And, it’s a community that has historically relied on access from highway 70 to the south end of their community, to their business district.”

MoDOT engineers maintain, however, that the ramp is not feasible and only creates more congestion.

The St. Louis Board of Commissioners have approved a plan to reduce the number of city police districts.

The city currently operates a total of nine districts that were established back in 1962.

But Police Chief Dan Isom says the department had twice as many officers back then and more than twice the number of citizens to serve.

“In the last 30 years we’ve lost about 1,000 officers,” Isom said.  We used to have 2,200 officers, now we’re down to about 1,300 officers.  But the slots for those command structures are still the same.”

Isom says the process of combining several districts will happen this year and make it easier to allocate resources across the city.

A new report from the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and the Natural Resources Defense Council shows that the frequency of severe storms across the Midwest has doubled over the past 50 years.

The report analyzed precipitation data from more than 200 weather stations in eight Midwestern states.

It found that for the period from 1961 to 2011, the frequency of days with more than 3 inches of rain increased by upwards of 80 percent in both Illinois and Missouri, and by more than 100 percent across the Midwest as a whole.