News

Last month, the news about the 2012 budget for the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department wasn't good.

The department was looking at $2.5 million in cuts it couldn't make up by doing things like freezing salaries, cutting scholarships, and furloughing civilian employees.

Photo by "MzSusanB" on Flickr.com, taken at the St. Louis Zoo.

Join the St. Louis Public Radio Flickr group to see interesting photos from the St. Louis region and submit your own. Each week, we feature on our website one outstanding photo from the group.

Updated 2:12 p.m. March 11, 2011 to include Overstock.com information.

Amazon.com has made good on its threat to cut ties with Illinois affiliates because of a new law requiring the online store to collect sales taxes.

Amazon notified its Illinois partners Friday that it will stop doing business with them on April 15. It calls the tax law "unconstitutional and counterproductive.

Questions are being raised after St. Louis' Paideia Academy closed and kept nearly a half-million dollars in leftover money.

Missouri education officials say state regulators didn't have the authority to take back unspent money. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that a federal investigation is under way, and that the state auditor's office has also asked questions.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is giving a reprieve to southwestern Illinois and other U.S. areas guarded by levees it was to have deemed functionally useless.

FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate told federal lawmakers Thursday that the agency would hold off on decertifying 64 miles of earthen levees protecting St. Louis' Illinois suburbs.

Fugate says the agency would stop using a questioned assessment technique and turn to a more nuanced measure of the actual protection the levees provide.