Emily Woodbury

This interview will be on “St. Louis on the Air” over the noon hour Friday. This story will be updated after the show. You can listen live.

The XFL is a planned professional U.S. football league with the mission of reimagining America’s favorite sport. The league originally debuted in 2001, and only lasted one season. XFL games are set to begin again in February 2020.

The St. Louis BattleHawks were one of the league’s eight teams announced this week.

Ballerina Vanessa Woods came up with the idea for Vitality Ballet when she was looking for a side hustle that involved making a meaningful impact through movement. 

The founding principle of the organization is that no one is too old to learn to dance.

“I actually got the idea from my mom,” Woods said. “She’s an occupational therapist, and she works with older populations ... and I loved that idea. It immediately captured my imagination.”

For Woods, the major question was, “How could I create a dance program that would allow seniors to experience ballet?”

A U.S. District Court recently ruled that the Missouri Parole Board had been violating the U.S. and Missouri Constitutions in its handling of cases involving juvenile offenders.

“I sat in on a couple of these parole hearings and got to see firsthand what they were like,” said Amy Breihan, director of the MacArthur Justice Center. “They largely focus, if not exclusively focus, on a detailed accounting of what happened at the crime, [instead of asking,] ‘What have you done in the 30 years since you were convicted, how have you matured over time, and how have you demonstrated that you are ready to be released into the community?’ which really should be the relevant question here.”

During the first week of the school year, St. Louis Public Schools didn’t just deal with summer learning loss – it started classes without several of its students.

“We have a 7-year-old who will not be starting school today,” said the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department’s Mary Warnecke, who spoke with reporters on Tuesday. “We have a 10-year-old murdered not that long ago, in the city of St. Louis, who will not be starting school today. We have a 2-year-old murdered on Ferris not so long ago. We have a 3-year-old who was murdered on Michigan not so long ago.”

The chancellor is the chief academic, administrative, and budgetary officer of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and Tom George has held the post for the past 16 years. He is retiring Sept. 1.

On Thursday’s St. Louis on the Air, host Sarah Fenske talked with George about what he hopes to see in the university’s future.

Last week, St. Louis attorney Michael Kahn won over a federal jury in a case looking at whether the Katy Perry song "Dark Horse" infringed on the copyright of a 2009 rap song “Joyful Noise” by St. Louis artist Marcus Gray, who is known as Flame. The jury decided that Katy Perry and Capitol Records must pay Gray $2.78 million in damages.

“There’s an old joke [that] when you say, ‘This is not about money, it’s about principle,’ it’s really about money,” said Kahn. “But for our clients, it was really about principle. They almost didn’t care about the money part of it. They felt that they’d been mistreated, and they wanted their day in court.”

Young adults throughout the St. Louis area make up the St. Louis Story Stitchers artists collective. They aim to showcase the region’s culture through performance art, and they work to curb gun violence, which many members have grown up with.

Tylea Wilson is a storyteller with the group, and she regularly performs her poem, “Guardian Angel,” about a friend who was shot and killed.

Paying for day care is one of the largest expenses per month for families. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average cost of infant child care in Missouri is about $800 a month.

In the early 1990s, a man abducted and murdered at least three women from south St. Louis. This man is known as the package killer, and the three murders remain cold cases nearly 30 years later.

Ryan Krull, Riverfront Times contributor and University of Missouri-St. Louis assistant teaching professor, investigated the details of these cold cases over the past year. His reporting found that there are a lot of factors that make it harder to solve a murder when the victim is a sex worker, which was the case for two of the three package killer murders.

The St. Louis County Pet Adoption Center was once celebrated for lowering its euthanasia rate, but a recent audit found that the rate was only lowered after the shelter implemented the practice of labeling the “owner requested euthanasia” checkbox as simply “ORE” on animal surrender forms. 

“This box was encouraged to be checked as a default,” said Danny Wicentowski, who covered this story as a staff writer for the Riverfront Times. “And in many cases, according to the audit and those that I've spoken to, the people who were bringing their animals in were either not told what that acronym actually meant, or were even pressured to check it as a matter of course.”

Over the weekend, the National Women’s Political Caucus convened in St. Louis to give women the chance to network, recruit, train, and provide support for political campaigns. The conference included sessions on things like how to effectively use social media, fundraise, and target specific voters.

On Monday’s St. Louis on the Air, guest host Jeremy Goodwin talked with St. Louis Public Radio political correspondent Jason Rosenbaum and University of Missouri political analyst Hanna Brant about the convention and the representation of women in American politics.

Saturday marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, when humanity took its first steps on another planetary body via astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

On Friday’s St. Louis on the Air, guest host Jim Kirchherr remembered that day in history with the manager at the James S. McDonnell Planetarium, Will Snyder, and Linda Godwin, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Missouri and retired NASA astronaut. 

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.”