On Monday’s St. Louis on the Air, guest host Jim Kirchherr of the Nine Network discussed ongoing violence in the region, as well as solutions which aim to address it as a public health issue.

Poli Rijos of Washington University’s Gun Violence Initiative and Jessica Meyers of the St. Louis Area Violence Prevention Commission joined the conversation.

Comments from Marcus McAllister of Cure Violence, an organization which treats violence as an epidemic, were included in the discussion. Cure Violence has visited St. Louis recently as one of the violence prevention programs in contention for $500,000 appropriated in the city’s budget for the 2020 fiscal year. The city has not yet announced who will receive this funding. 

Last week, St. Louis Fire Department Chief Dennis Jenkerson said that paramedics see the impact of so much violence that they're quitting faster than he can hire replacements.

“Two to three paramedics a month are leaving the job,” said Captain Garon Mosby of the St. Louis Fire Department on Monday’s St. Louis on the Air. “If you can leave the St. Louis City Fire Department and go to another department where there’s less trauma, or get into a completely different field, that’s what we’re seeing our people do.”

Paul Thiel was on his way toward a master’s degree that would set him up for a career in geology. Then he made a major life choice. 

“I’d rather be a minor poet than a world-famous geologist,” he said. 

Thiel sought his literary fortunes in San Francisco in 1963, where he moved into the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and discovered the burgeoning scene of Beat poets centered around Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore. Allen Ginsberg was a familiar face in the neighborhood, and, for a time, an unknown singer named Janis Joplin rehearsed beneath his poet’s loft. 

Sunday marks the end of service for hundreds of MetroBus stops in Missouri, as the transit agency works to improve efficiency.

Metro Transit is eliminating 450 of its more than 5,000 bus stops in St. Louis and St. Louis County to improve on-time performance. More changes will be coming later this year as part of the Metro Reimagined plan.

In response, Citizens for Modern Transit, a local public-transit advocacy group, is expanding its Try & Ride program to riders affected by the service changes.

The people in charge of deciding what’s on the menu at school cafeterias around the country will converge on St. Louis to consider how to make school lunches better. 

The discussion will happen at the School Nutrition Association's national conference, July 14-16. The goal of the conference is for school nutrition professionals to learn about the latest changes and innovations in the food industry and how those trends can translate into nutritious and tasty meals.

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson vetoed a bill Friday that would have repealed the state’s mandatory helmet law because he disagreed with an unrelated portion of the proposal. 

The law would have allowed qualified motorcyclists 18 and older with proper health-insurance coverage to ride without a helmet. But the provision got tied into a larger, omnibus transportation bill covering everything from left turns onto one-way streets at red lights to motor-vehicle rental fees.

Meandering over more than 400 miles of southeast Missouri is a network of hiking trails that’s been in existence since the 1970s: the Ozark Trail. Its history, along with its natural beauty, fill the pages of Don Massey’s photographic book titled “The Ozark Trail: Images of Missouri’s Longest Hiking Trail.”

Massey is a member of the Ozark Trail Association, and he joined Friday’s St. Louis on the Air alongside the association’s president, Kathie Brennan, for a conversation with St. Louis Public Radio’s Jason Rosenbaum.

The Missouri Supreme Court won’t reconsider an appeals court decision that effectively delays the ACLU of Missouri from gathering signatures to overturn Missouri’s recently passed eight-week abortion ban.

It’s a move that places the ACLU of Missouri’s referendum in serious jeopardy, because there may not be enough time to gather roughly 100,000 signatures to spark a 2020 election.

St. Louis-based hip-hop artist Kareem Jackson, who goes by the stage name Tef Poe, has often traveled across the world to share his musical craft and to also raise awareness about how social justice issues often intertwine across borders. 

His travels will continue next week to the Middle-Eastern country of Jordan as part of Next Level, a cultural exchange program the U.S. State Department is heading alongside the Meridian Center for Cultural Diplomacy and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

The project seeks to use artistic collaboration and social engagement to enhance people-to-people diplomacy, especially among young audiences.

The St. Louis Board of Aldermen approved a tax incentive package Friday, sweetening a plan for Build-A-Bear to move its headquarters ⁠— and 200 employees ⁠— to downtown St. Louis from its current location in Overland. 

After passing on a 22-3 vote, the bill now moves on to Mayor Lyda Krewson for a final signature, which a spokesman said she will provide.