Tragedy upon tragedy upon tragedy seems to have overwhelmed the men and women who raise and lower Old Glory in all the places she flies across Kansas City. Indeed, the killings have been coming so fast and furious, coordination has become a problem. Yesterday, for example, the U.S. flag was at half-staff at the Federal Reserve Bank at 1 Memorial Drive. That’s just across the street from the National World War I Museum and Memorial, where the Stars and Stripes remain at full staff. The Federal Reserve had lowered its flags based on a July 15 proclamation by President Obama, honoring the victims of the terrorist attack in Nice, France the day before. They were to return to full staff at sunset yesterday, after five days. But even before that happened, a new presidential proclamation was issued on Monday, honoring the police officers in Baton Rouge who were ambushed by a Kansas City gunman the previous day. Those same flags had just returned to full staff on July 12, after yet another proclamation honoring the Dallas police officers who were killed July 7. [FLEX-CONTENT] Preceding all of those, of course, was Obama’s June 12 flag-lowering proclamation honoring the shooting victims in Orlando. All in all, President Obama has ordered the U.S. flag to half-staff (including for both tragedies and holidays such as Memorial Day) 69 times – more than any other president in modern history. Barring another tragedy, the Federal Reserve’s flags — and those of many other federal facilities — will return to full staff at sunset on Friday. But not…...

When Navy veteran Seth Cavin returned to civilian life in 1997, he used the GI Bill to help pay his way through architecture school, and he depended on the Department of Veterans Affairs to help treat a serious service-related back injury. “Military service gave me the confidence and drive to get through school,” he said. But Cavin never imagined that in civilian life he’d have to do battle with the very government agency — the VA — that helped him heal from his service-connected injury. Ultimately, and against huge odds, he won. And in the process he made it easier for thousands of other companies owned by disabled veterans across the country to benefit from doing business with the VA. It all started when George W. Bush signed the Veterans Benefit Act of 2006. The law lead to the VA’s creation of the Veterans First Contracting Program, which required the VA to give top priority in contracting its work to small firms like Cavin’s that are owned by disabled veterans. Rep. Stephen Buyer, an Indiana Republican who pushed the law, said at the time that “veteran and disabled veteran-owned businesses have not been getting their fair share of federal contracts.” Cavin’s Oklahoma-based firm, Spur Design, which has an office in Kansas City's Westport, bid on just such a contract with the VA in the fall — a contract worth up to $5 million over five years to design and build VA projects in Kansas, Missouri and Illinois. But the VA refused to even consider Cavin’s bid, more or less ignoring the 2006 law.…...

Skeletal remains found by a construction worker last summer at Wheeler Downtown Airport opened up one of Kansas City’s oldest unsolved mysteries. The Hale Center for Journalism’s Mike McGraw found that the more he investigates, the more unanswered questions emerge. Could authorities do more to unravel the mystery? It appears they may be poised to do just that… Just under the Broadway Bridge near Kaw Point, Kansas City’s original airport juts into the Mighty Missouri like a downturned thumb, forcing the river into a u-shaped contortion and roiling its muddy waters into treacherous whirlpools. In the early to mid-1800s, the river swallowed at least 11 steamboats here — fire canoes, the Indians called them — among them the Bennett, the Boonville and the Cumberland Valley. On the north bank of that watery gravesite, a 400-acre floodplain under the airport runways makes up part of our city’s fertile crescent; land near the city’s original settlement, once deeded to some of its founding fathers. Men with names like Chouteau and McCoy. This peninsula-like plot — now frequented by corporate jets, hobby flyers, museums and, occasionally, Air Force One — has been the scene of historic events, including the 1927 dedication of the airport by Charles Lindbergh. It was here last summer, at the edge of Runway 1, that construction worker Jeremy Burke came face to face with a flinty relic of that past. Staring back at him from…...

Airline flights and legal fees in California; rental cars and hotel rooms in Indiana; $19 at Yogurtland in Los Angeles and expert witness fees of $500 an hour, plus expenses. That’s just part of the $83,711.59 that Missouri taxpayers will pony up for Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster’s brief — and failed — legal foray into “the egg wars.” The expenditure records, obtained by the Hale Center for Journalism under Missouri’s open records law, don’t represent more than a blip in the state’s $9 billion budget, but the cost amounts to $73,711.59 more than Koster promised to spend on the case. The money bankrolled a lawsuit Koster filed against the state of California earlier this year in what he said was an effort to protect the interests of Missouri egg farmers and shield the state’s consumers from higher egg prices. Other big egg-producing states — Nebraska, Oklahoma, Iowa, Alabama and Kentucky — were also named as plaintiffs. The California state law Koster was fighting — which was pushed through, in part, by animal welfare groups — will require that egg-laying hens get more room in their cages starting next year. And it applies not just to egg-layers in California, but to hens in all other states whose eggs are California-bound. That’s a lot of eggs — 180 million dozen a year. Koster’s reasoning for bringing the suit was that the rule would cost not just California farmers but all egg farmers millions of dollars to retrofit their cages and result in higher egg prices for consumers. “This is not an agriculture case, and…...

A recent Missouri law meant to protect farmers may be making it harder to report alleged animal abuse, as animal welfare organizations have feared. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) on Wednesday asked law enforcement in Mercer County to investigate allegations of abuse at Murphy-Brown’s Badger-Wolf pig-breeding operation in northern Missouri. But PETA says it could not reveal who gave PETA the photos that captured the abuse, as the source of the information “is afraid of reprisals.” Missouri’s law requires recordings of suspected farm animal abuse to be presented to a law enforcement agency within 24 hours. Proponents of Missouri’s law say it allows authorities to deal with suspected animal cruelty quickly. But PETA and other animal advocates are fighting to overturn such laws, saying that they chill whistleblowing activities. “This law, with its 24 hour rule, is like a muzzle on good people who want to expose violations of animal cruelty laws,” said Kathy Guillermo, a senior vice president at PETA. “People who see apparent abuse and neglect like this are often so fearful of losing their jobs and the ability to work in the same field again, that even in states without ‘ag-gag’ laws they come to PETA instead of to law enforcement.” In this case, PETA won’t disclose when the information about the alleged abuse was gathered, but says it believes that Missouri’s “ag-gag” law stood in the way of…...

Canadian food safety officials have outpaced their U.S. counterparts in requiring meat companies to label meat that is potentially hazardous to consumers. It’s called mechanically tenderized beef, and it has caused illnesses in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere. And in most cases, consumers, restaurants and grocery stores had no idea they were buying it, because there was no requirement that the process be acknowledged on labels. The process is problematic because automated needles or blades used by meat companies to tenderize tougher cuts of beef can also force pathogens, such as E. coli, into the interior of the meat. Those pathogens could survive inside solid cuts of beef, such as steaks, because they are less likely to be fully cooked throughout. Harvest Public Media, in a joint project with the Kansas City Star, reported on the process in December 2012, featuring the case of Margaret Lamkin, a Sioux City, Iowa, grandmother who was forced to wear a colostomy bag for the rest of her life after she ate a contaminated mechanically tenderized steak at a restaurant. After Lamkin’s and other cases were publicized — and after a 3-year battle by consumer groups — the U.S. Department of Agriculture last year proposed requiring labels for the products. Officials in Canada, where consumers have also been harmed by the products, required labeling on those cuts beginning Aug. 24 this year. The U.S. proposal is still wending its way through the federal bureaucracy here. A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Agriculture said last week that a revised labeling rule is now in…...

A Sept. 6 investigation of the USDA’s meat inspection division by the Hale Center for Journalism prompted a record number of hits on the station’s website, a political cartoon and editorial in The Kansas City Star and numerous comments and tweets.   [View the story "Commentary on meat inspection story from the Hale Center for Journalism" on Storify]    ...

A group that advocates for food safety went to federal court Thursday to try and stop the U.S. Department of Agriculture from implementing new rules for poultry inspection that they say would put consumers at risk. The new rule — the biggest change in meat inspection in the last half century — was featured in an investigative story last week by the Hale Center for Journalism. Among other things, the investigation found that preparations for the new rule, scheduled to go into effect in late October, have caused disarray, inspector shortages and other problems in the nationwide food inspection system. Food & Water Watch, the food safety advocacy group that filed the suit, said in a press statement that turning over some food inspection duties to poultry plant workers – as the new rule would do – would hurt consumers. Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, said the rule would "reverse 100 years of effective government regulation of the meat industry." “It’s essentially a return to Upton Sinclair’s 'The Jungle,'" she said. "It’s a huge step backwards for our food safety system.”      ...

In one of the most far reaching changes in U.S. meat inspection history, federal regulators this fall will allow poultry plant employees — instead of USDA inspectors — to help determine whether chicken is contaminated or safe to eat, a move critics fear could spread to beef and pork processing plants. Indeed, a severe shortage of federal inspectors in slaughterhouses is so widespread that critics and some inspectors claim some meat in supermarkets stamped as "USDA inspected" may never have been inspected at all. HOOKER, Okla. – Other girls dreamed of being doctors or teachers, but Jennifer Brdar’s dream job was to be a meat inspector for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Her father and uncles had worked in meat plants, and Brdar made it her self-appointed mission to watch out for unwary consumers, making sure the meat on their dinner tables was clean and disease free. After earning an associate’s degree in meat science, Brdar (pronounced Ber-dar) was hired in March as a temporary federal meat inspector at a big beef packing operation — Plant M208A, the USDA calls it — just up the road in Liberal, Kansas. She lasted barely a month. The meat inspection agency wasn’t doing its job, Brdar explained, allowing problem meat that could sicken consumers to enter the marketplace. Brdar said her training was so poor that she was not told how to deal with abnormalities that could lead to illnesses. She added that her bosses often told her to ignore such problems. In the end, she walked away frustrated and dispirited. “It was…...

Like millions of other Americans, I exercised my right to vote today, but it took three tries – thanks partly to my own ignorance and partly to the fact that our pervasive fear of gun violence in this country has finally invaded the voting booth. My early morning trek began at a small elementary school just a few blocks from my home in the Clay County portion of Kansas City, Missouri. No election signs; no activity. I drove on to another church four blocks further away, where election signs were popping up like mushrooms. I parked, walked inside and handed the cheery volunteer poll worker my driver’s license. Not on the list, she said. Sorry. My last stop was a megachurch at a busy intersection another four blocks away. I parked and walked up a steep hill along with an older man struggling to make it to the top as he teetered on his cane. I was finally able to cast my ballot: number 138 of the morning, according to the machine that swallowed it as I left. My patriotic odyssey would have been less frustrating had I received the voter identification card the Clay County Election Commission said it sent me in May, telling me precisely where to cast my ballot. If it came at all — and it might have — it probably got recycled. But what about my old polling place, the small elementary school just a half mile from my house? Dave Reinhart, Republican director of the Clay County Election Commission, patiently heard my complaints later…...