The Midwest is home to tens of thousands of immigrants — including refugees from countries like Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Iraq.
It has been a challenge to
USA TODAY and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting spent five months piecing together the pivotal moments in the Triumph Foods outbreak, interviewing more than a dozen current and former workers and examining thousands of pages of government records.
Meat processing workers at Smithfield Foods in Milan, Missouri, were raising concerns about their working environment even before nearly 600 employees of a Smithfield plant in South Dakota contracted COVID-19. Smithfield shut down its South Dakota plant indefinitely Sunday, and some workers in Mila
Bayer has filed post-trial motions in the Missouri Bader Farms case, asking for the $265 million verdict to be overturned in the first dicamba-related case to go to trial. The weedkiller dicamba is at the heart of hundreds of lawsuits against the company from farmers who claim the pesticide drifted
CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo. - A federal jury determined that German agribusiness giants Bayer and BASF will have to pay $250 million in punitive damages to Bader Farms, the largest peach farm
After five years of reported crop damage by the weed killer dicamba, German agribusiness companies Bayer and BASF will head to trial next week to defend themselves against charges that they intentionally caused the problem in order to increase their profits.
Tofurky was suing Missouri over its first-in-the-nation state law banning labeling products with meat names if it doesn't contain traditionally harvested poultry or livestock. A meeting to settle the suit
The lax inspection process led to an incident in summer 2018 where workers lived in a former jail, a motel with bed bugs and a house with a leaking toilet.
During an incident in Kennett, Missouri, in summer 2018, H-2A workers labored through high temperatures while denied breakfast and with little access to water. Their legal status was supposed to protect them.
While Columbia has been proactive about cleaning up its coal ash — cinders that it used to spread on icy and snowy streets in the winter — it still gets 70 percent to 80 percent of its energyfrom coal-fired power plants in the Midwest, and most of that comes from the Sikeston Power Plant in southeas
Communities in Missouri have been fighting the expansion of large-scale livestock operations in the state for years. But a controversial pair of bills moving through the state legislature would make community oversight of those farms even harder.
School district administrators and school boards typically turn to outside advisers and underwriters when issuing bonds. But relying on outsiders puts districts in a vulnerable position, one in which they sometimes get bad deals with high interest rates and fees.
