A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction Thursday that favors the request of the National Institute of Family Life Advocates (NIFLA) to block Illinois’ new law targeting pro-life pregnancy ministries.
Judge Iain D. Johnston, of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, issued a preliminary injunction in the case of National Institute of Family Life Advocates v. Raoul to put a halt to Illinois’ new law.
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Ten states and a regional government clean air agency plan on suing the Environmental Protection Agency for allegedly failing to update emission standards for wood-burning stoves, allowing high-emission stoves to still be sold.
The mostly Democratic state attorneys general filed a notice of intent to sue the EPA last week.
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An Illinois children’s hospital is charging school districts thousands of dollars for a sex education workshop that features lessons on how to teach kids about anal sex and gender identity, according to documents obtained through a public records request by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago is charging school districts up to $1,500 for a presentation to educators on “inclusive sexual health ed practices” that promotes the National Sexuality Education Standards (NSES), a K-12 sexual education curriculum, according to a copy of the presentation obtained by the DCNF through a public records request. The presentation recommends that fifth graders should learn several different sexual orientations, while eighth graders should be taught about anal and oral sex.
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Planned Parenthood of Illinois (PPIL) announced Monday that it had seen an increase in abortions by over 50% since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, according to a press release.
The Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022 that abortion was not a constitutional right and left the decision up to the states to enact their own laws on the issue. Nearly a year later, PPIL announced that clinics reported an increase in abortions by 54% with almost a quarter of the patients traveling out-of-state to get the procedure, according to the press release.
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Thirteen attorneys general announced settlements with opioid manufacturers Teva and Allergan on Friday, while 18 states settled with CVS and Walgreens for a total of $17.3 billion.
The attorneys general said settlement funds will start flowing into state and local governments by the end of this year and will be used for prevention and treatment of opioid addiction.
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by Fred Lucas Inmate voting, noncitizen voting, and even mandatory voting have been among the initiatives pushed in Democrat-led jurisdictions this year to expand their voting base. “The Left wants to normalize voter classes that nobody took seriously a generation ago—criminals, foreigners—to help them win elections,” J. Christian Adams, president of the…
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Even as Democratic governors such as California’s Gavin Newsom and Illinois’ J.B. Pritzker slam red state policies, their residents are fleeing in droves for Republican-controlled states.
IRS migration data released late last week shows that California lost more residents than any other state, with a net loss of nearly 332,000 people and more than $29 billion in adjusted gross income in 2021. The state with the second largest population loss is New York, which saw a net loss of over 262,000 residents and $24.5 billion in income. Illinois, meanwhile, suffered a net loss of 105,000 people in 2021 and $10.8 billion in income.
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An organization’s efforts to circumvent states’ rights are “getting desperate” as they try new ways to push their interstate compact through state legislatures, two pro-Electoral College advocacy groups told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The National Popular Vote (NPV) is a group initiative to reform the U.S.’ two-step, Electoral College system by ensuring that the candidate with the most popular votes nationwide becomes the president. Now that NPV has enacted its interstate compact in all of the “easy,” bluer states as a standalone bill, it is getting creative to force the law through in swing states like Minnesota, Nevada, Michigan and Maine, Trent England of Save Our States and Jasper Hendricks of Democrats for the Electoral College told the DCNF.
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The number of people who used to live in Los Angeles County and Cook County in Illinois continues to plummet.
Los Angeles County posted the largest population decline of all counties in the United States in 2022, falling by 90,704 and continuing a downward trend. It lost nearly twice that amount (180,394) in 2021, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Vintage 2022 estimates released Thursday.
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by Madeleine Hubbard While the corruption trial of former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan is still a year away, the depth of his alleged scheme is already starting to be unveiled, as the Chicago Democrat remains a central figure in the corruption trial of four former ComEd officials. Federal…
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Students at DePaul University, a private Catholic university in Illinois, are circulating a petition demanding the elimination of a Christian group after it posted a Q&A on its now-deleted Instagram page denouncing LGBTQ lifestyles, student newspaper The DePaulia reported.
Signees called on DePaul University officials to ban the group “from meeting on campus and promoting discrimination against members of the LGBTQIA+ community,” according to the petition titled “Eliminate Vessel.” Vessel is not an official student organization on campus and appears to have deleted their Instagram page soon after sharing that they are a “non-affirming” group and “do not agree that the LGBTQIA+ lifestyle is supported by biblical text. Below are verses which support this,” according to a screenshot obtained by the DePaulia.
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A coalition of 18 state attorneys general, all Democrats, on Wednesday submitted an amicus brief in support of New York’s firearms industry accountability law.
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The nation’s largest school districts are implementing policies that require educators to keep students’ gender transitions a secret from their parents.
Los Angeles Unified School District, Chicago Public Schools and New York Public Schools are promoting practices and policies that hide a student’s transgender status from their parents. The policies have become a cultural flashpoint amid a battle over the role parents should play in their child’s education, and the extent to which gender ideology has infiltrated K-12 classrooms.
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Chicago school officials this week revealed that the school system recorded nearly 500 sexual complaints over the last year, with investigators stressing their inability to respond to a majority of all complaints they receive.
The Chicago Board of Education Office of Inspector General said in its 2022 annual report that it received 470 “sexual allegation” complaints over the course of FY2022.
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Three high-profile Democratic governors are struggling to stabilize their states’ retirement programs due to a falling stock market and may have difficulties paying out benefits in the coming years, according to Politico.
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Democratic Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, all of whom are considered potential candidates for the 2024 presidential race, have poured billions of dollars into their states’ pension funds, according to Politico. They may struggle to maintain their public images if they’re forced to raise taxes or make budget cuts to keep pension payments flowing.
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Republicans will soon take control of the House of Representatives, but with a margin so narrow it may prove difficult to achieve their legislative and oversight objectives. That margin might have been larger, were it not for egregious errors made by the U.S. Census Bureau in the 2020 census.
Come January, House membership will consist of 213 Democrats and 222 Republicans. A party must hold 218 of those seats to control the House. Thus, Republicans will have only a four-seat majority. That extremely narrow majority means that GOP leadership can lose any vote on any issue if only four Republicans defect and the Democrats stay united in opposition.
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Google agreed to a $391.5 million settlement with 40 states after an investigation found that the tech giant participated in questionable location-tracking practices, state attorneys general announced Monday.
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong called it a “historic win for consumers.”
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A federal grand jury has indicted six people from Benton Harbor on fraud charges.
They are accused of defrauding taxpayers by $1 million via unemployment insurance fraud and small business loans.
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A federal grand jury has indicted six people from Benton Harbor on fraud charges.
They are accused of defrauding taxpayers by $1 million via unemployment insurance fraud and small business loans.
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As the leader of a nonprofit group whose mission is to promote economic freedom, sound public policy, and responsible financial management at the state level, I’m honored to help our nation’s financial officers practice good stewardship of taxpayer dollars. Their work often includes managing pension funds that are vital to millions of Americans’ retirement security. Over the past few years, a growing threat called ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) has been negatively impacting state pension systems, ultimately putting retirees at risk. Sadly, our nation’s state financial officers and the retirees they have a fiduciary responsibility to protect are increasingly under siege by ESG ideologues who are motivated by politics rather than economics.
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Seven Midwest states entered a coalition to pursue clean hydrogen development as an alternative to gas and diesel fuel.
The governors of Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin signed onto the Midwest Hydrogen Coalition. The coalition will accelerate clean hydrogen development, from production and supply chain to distribution in agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, and other industries.
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In October 2020, the Michigan Supreme Court stripped Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of the unilateral powers she was using when she declared a state of emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Whitmer had been using a 1945 law – which was prompted by a three-day race riot in Detroit three years earlier – that had no sunset provision in it and didn’t require approval by the state legislature.
In May 2021, Whitmer told a news agency that if she still had that 1945 state-of-emergency law, she would use those powers, but not for anything related to a pandemic.
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The grassroots website Awake-Illinois is reporting that only 23 of 860 school districts in the state have decided to adopt radical sex education standards, based on a national model, while 536 districts have thus far opted out.
Governor J.B. Pritzker (D-IL) signed SB 818 into law in August 2021, with his office claiming the standards are “voluntary” and will “emphasize health, safety, and inclusivity with age-appropriate resources.”
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A coalition of 20 state attorneys general, all Democrats, are backing a federal gun rule in court.
The Final Rule, as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives named it, would enable law enforcement officials to trace any homemade guns used in crimes. In addition, the rule limits trafficking the weaponry.
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A gunman opened fire at a Fourth of July parade in Monday in a Chicago suburb, killing at least five people and wounding several others.
The suspect remains at large, and police are reportedly patrolling the area.
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Construction and mining equipment giant Caterpillar Inc. announced Tuesday it will move its global headquarters from its current location in Deerfield, Illinois, to the company’s existing office in Irving, Texas.
“We believe it’s in the best strategic interest of the company to make this move, which supports Caterpillar’s strategy for profitable growth as we help our customers build a better, more sustainable world,” said Chairman and CEO Jim Umpleby in a press release.
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The Democratic Party’s hopes of gaining seats from redistricting have been crushed as court decisions and an increasingly aggressive GOP produced more Republican-friendly maps.
Democrats were initially optimistic that they could mitigate projected midterm losses in the House when it appeared they were poised to score wins in the redistricting process. However, the party’s hopes have been dashed after key losses in major states erased their redistricting advantage.
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The Evanston-Skokie School District 65 will teach children as young as four years of age to celebrate the transgender flag, to try on different pronouns, and that the “gender binary” created by white “colonizers,” based on male and female sex, must be broken.
Education researcher Chris Rufo obtained the curriculum documents, which he published at City Journal last week.
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Two Democrat incumbent members of the U.S. House are running against each other in a primary for Illinois’ 6th Congressional district, leaving an opening for a possible Republican pickup in November.
Representatives Sean Casten and Marie Newman are set to face off in the June 28 Democrat primary.
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FEC records show that Republican Esther Joy King has a towering financial advantage over the entire field for Illinois’ Seventeenth Congressional district.
Democrat incumbent U.S. Representative Cheri Bustos has announced her retirement, making IL-17 an open seat race.
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Taxpayers could face a costly and lengthy path to justice as federal prosecutors work to convict one of the state’s most powerful politicians on corruption charges.
Prosecutors alleged in a 22-count indictment last week that former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, used his elected office and political operations as part of a years-long criminal enterprise for personal gain. In addition to the criminal charges, the indictment also seeks the forfeiture of $2.8 million in alleged illegal profits from Madigan and his confidante, former state lawmaker and ComEd lobbyist Michael McClain. If convicted of the most serious charge, Madigan could face up to 20 years in prison.
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Prosecutors indicted former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan on 22 counts of corruption Tuesday.
U.S. Attorney John R. Lausch Jr. announced the charges Tuesday afternoon, connecting Madigan to the nearly decade-long bribery scheme utility Commonwealth Edison admitted to in the summer of 2020.
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A public university forced a law professor to take “sensitivity training” that used the very “expurgated slur” he was punished for including in a law exam question, according to a First Amendment lawsuit seeking $100,000 in damages.
The University of Illinois Chicago allegedly violated its agreement with Jason Kilborn not to require such training after the Rev. Jesse Jackson joined black student protests demanding his firing last fall.
Kilborn’s employment discrimination question of 10 years, which the lawsuit claims prompted “one or two” complaints for the first time in 2020, referred to a hypothetical plaintiff whose managers “expressed their anger” at her by “calling her a ‘n___’ and ‘b___’ [sic].”
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A professor who was targeted and suspended after using censored language in a test question to make an example of employment discrimination just filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC).
The controversy began in 2020 when Jason Kilborn, a law professor at UIC, posed a hypothetical question in an exam surrounding illegal discrimination in the workplace. The question referenced anti-black and anti-women slurs, but were not fully spelled out. Instead, they were simply displayed by their first letters, “n” and “b.”
Despite keeping the words censored, a petition was launched against Kilborn condemning him for the contents in question. A short time after, UIC suspended Kilborn and announced he would be forced to take a five-week diversity training course in order to return to teaching.
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A Chicago Public Schools (CPS) training program tells teachers that sex is a “socially constructed” phenomenon and instructs them to hide students’ gender pronouns from their parents, Fox News reported.
CPS told teachers that “gender and sex” are social constructs that have been “created and enforced” by society and threatened retaliatory measures if they didn’t use students’ preferred pronouns during a required teacher training program, Fox News reported.
A 104-slide PowerPoint titled “Supporting Transgender, Nonbinary, and Gender Nonconforming Students” asserted that “everyone has multiple, overlapping identities” and that “gender & sex are socially constructed, meaning they’ve been created and enforced by the people in a society,” Fox News reported.
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The Union League Club of Chicago, a highly selective private civic and social club in the windy city, invited Nikole Hannah-Jones to give a keynote speech in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Jones, a professor at Howard University, is notable for having authored the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a long-form journalistic work that falsely argues America’s true foundation is in the institution of slavery.
Prior to Jones’ speech, a series of emails were leaked in which club members voiced their opposition to hosting Jones at their club. In one email Brian Daley, a Public Affairs Committee member for the club, pointed out that Jones’ 1619 Project had been criticized by historians and that the New York Times issued a “humiliating update” following widespread criticism of her work, according to reporting by Chicago City Wire.
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The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) voted Tuesday to move to remote learning Wednesday, citing concerns over safety amid the rise in COVID-19 cases, the union said in a press release.
The CTU’s elected House of Delegates voted in favor (88%) of a resolution to return to remote education amid the surge of COVID-19 cases and the rise of the Omicron coronavirus variant, citing a lack of safety guarantees, a union press release said. In the membership-wide vote, 73% of CTU’s members voted in favor of virtual learning, passing the two-thirds threshold required to enact the resolution.
The resolution outlines plans to work remotely until Jan. 18 or until the current COVID-19 wave falls below last year’s threshold for school closures, according to the resolution.
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Over half of the states in the U.S. will institute a minimum wage increase in 2022, according to a report.
A total of 26 states will raise the minimum wage in 2022, with 22 of the states starting the pay hikes on Jan. 1, accordingto payroll experts at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S.
“These minimum wage increases indicate moves toward ensuring a living wage for people across the country,” Deirdre Kennedy, senior payroll analyst at Wolters Kluwer, said in the report. “In addition to previously approved incremental increases, the change in presidential administration earlier this year and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic have also contributed to these changes.”
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A recent FOIA request filed by Campus Reform revealed that the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC) spent $80,000 on a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training created by the Kardia Group, LLC. The agreement was signed in 2018 and included two series of meetings and workshops for the Fall 2018 and Spring 2019 semesters.
The Kardia Group was founded in 2004 and describes themselves as a “leading strategic partner in the transformation of the culture, functionality, and success of the academic endeavor.” Its website lists resources and services ranging from Diversity, Equity and Inclusion to “transformational change for groups.”
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The Illinois Association of School Boards voted Thursday to end its membership with the National School Boards Association after the national group sent a letter to President Joe Biden asking for federal intervention to investigate unruly parents who protest at local meetings.
“The decision follows previous attempts by IASB to initiate changes to the governance structure, transparency, and financial oversight of the national association,” a news release from IASB says. “IASB suspended payment of dues to NSBA for 2021-2022 but continued to work to try to bring about needed changes.”
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An Illinois judge granted a temporary restraining order to nurses who sued Riverside Healthcare over the hospital system’s vaccine mandate.
Kankakee County Judge Nancy Nicholson granted a temporary restraining order until Nov. 19. She will then hold a hearing on a motion for a preliminary injunction requested by the nurses.
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With the promise of no vaccine mandate and lower property taxes, Indiana officials are trying to lure jilted police officers from Illinois.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced a vaccine mandate for police in August. They must show their vaccination status or take the option of testing on their own time and dime. If they don’t, they can be placed on “no pay” status.
Indiana Republican Sen. Mike Braun tweeted that his office is ready to help connect police officers to an Indiana department that is hiring now.
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Democrats in Illinois’ state legislature Friday released a new map that would shore up all of their party’s incumbents in Congress and likely eliminate two of the state’s five Republicans.
The proposal would give Democrats a 14-3 advantage in the state, compared to the current 13-5 map. Illinois is one of several states losing a congressional seat this upcoming decade, and the new map, if adopted, would shore up Democrats in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs and create a winding Democratic seat that stretches from East St. Louis up through the middle of the state.
That district includes much of what is now held by Republican Rep. Rodney Davis, and includes Springfield, the state’s capital, Decatur and Champaign, home to the University of Illinois. The new map also shores up Rep. Cheri Bustos’ northern Illinois seat by having it encompass Bloomington, home to Illinois State University.
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The number of homicides in six major cities across the country has increased compared to last year, disproportionately affecting black people, according to crime data.
Black people have represented a massive share of murder victims in six major cities through the first six months of 2021 compared to last year, which itself saw a large crime surge, according to data analyzed by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The DCNF analyzed both police department data and homicide reports compiled by local news outlets to determine how black people have been victimized in the wake of the 2020 crime spike.
“We are seeing an uptick in violent crime across the country, specifically gun violence,” Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told The New York Times earlier this month.
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Texas and Florida are slated to gain congressional seats during the decennial redistricting process, while California and New York are set to each lose one, the U.S. Census Bureau announced Monday.
The U.S. Census Bureau released the decennial state population and congressional apportionment totals Monday, outlining how many districts each state will have for the next decade. The data also determines how many Electoral College votes each state will have through 2032, and allocates how federal money is distributed to each state for schools, roads and other public projects.
The release was originally scheduled for December, but faced delays due to the coronavirus pandemic and the Trump administration’s unsuccessful effort to exclude non-citizens from the count.
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Illinois high school student athletes and their parents who are tired of COVID-19 delays in sports are taking matters into their own hands — some are protesting, while others are moving out of state to play elsewhere.
Student athletes, coaches and students’ parents rallied in the dozens in McCook on Sunday to demand fall sports to resume, ABC 7 reported. Only golf, cross country, girls’ tennis and girls’ swimming and diving are playing for now.
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The leftwing Democrat running against Rep. Jefferson H. “Jeff” Van Drew (R.-N.J.) has put her money where her mouth is , and is raising money to bail out rapists and at least one defendant facing terror terrorism charges at the same time she is challenging the one-time Democrat, who switched parties after voting against impeaching President Donald Trump.
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Left-wing prosecutors have implemented soft-on-crime approaches to criminal justice across America, in some instances making it a matter of policy in major cities not to prosecute specific crimes, a Daily Caller News Foundation review found.
A common, though not universal, feature of prominent left-wing district attorneys is the backing of political organizations funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros. The New York Times has credited Soros with pioneering the “push to overhaul prosecutors’ offices” across the country.
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Fourteen people were injured, one person was in custody and additional suspects were being sought after gunfire erupted outside a funeral home on Chicago’s South Side where at least one squad car was present, police officials said Tuesday.
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Dozens of sheriffs across the country are refusing to enforce stay-at-home orders because of their unconstitutional nature.
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