Free Republic

Another Planned Parenthood has closed its doors, this time in Illinois. The abortion chain’s Effingham facility closed on Aug. 30 and posted a note on its door directing patients to the Planned Parenthood in Champaign, Illinois, the Effingham Daily News reports. A spokesperson for the Illinois abortion affiliate said they decided to consolidate the two centers because business “continued to drop” in Effingham. Local pro-lifers said the news was a good sign. Rob McKerrow, one of a small group of pro-lifers who stood outside the facility every week to offer women life-affirming information and support, said they noticed how Planned...

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Election 2014 displayed one of the most incredible switches of U.S. Senate control in recent memory. The Republicans did not just take back the upper chamber—they wiped the floor with the Democrats. They bested some of their pettiest political tricks, including three different Democratic candidates in Montana, plus three-way races in other states. Nothing can top Election Day 1980, which produced a Republican majority with 12 Senate wins. Election Day 2014 produced nine seats, but could have been 11 if not for the intense infighting in Republican primaries. So, will 2016 turn into an epic landslide of the Democrats and...

August 31, 2016 PHOENIX (KSAZ) - A newlywed couple raised in Arizona created a successful YouTube business. Then they decided it was time to leave the valley and explore life, so they moved to Chicago. But one day after arriving in the "Windy City," their big move turned into a big nightmare. "It's one of the most amazing cities in America," said Brianna White. "Hey, why not, we're doing okay. We can go there and be okay financially, so why not go and see what happens," said Jaelin White. But what happened next terrified the Whites. All unpacked, the couple...

The minute long video features “walking tour” organizer Kevin Fergus who is addressing “Whitey’s” or in other words, fans of the couple. The tour takes you to the Granville red line platform “complete with a sketchy guy” and shows you the popular spots Brianna and Jaelin visited including Subway and the CVS parking lot! Facebook originally removed Kevin’s event page after it was reported, probably by Brianna and Jaelin, but has since restored it. ... The meetup will be at Berger Park and so far, 2.9K are going with 5.3K interested. ... The Whites also told DNAInfo that they hope...

The CEO of AMMO Coding Systems, Matt Harrington, says his technology would allow ammo manufacturers to easily code the millions of bullets they sell every year. After recovering bullets at a shooting, police could enter those codes into a database, learn where the bullets were purchased, then visit the seller to obtain the name of the buyer. “You're going to have to explain, Mr. Smith, why is the bullet you bought at Walmart now in this five year old's head, on the West Side of Chicago. Explain that,” Harrington said.

CHICAGO (CBS) — A 24-year-old man was killed and a 23-year-old man was grazed by a bullet in a shooting in the West Lawn neighborhood late Wednesday night, capping off the most violent month in Chicago in 20 years.Chicago police said there were 90 homicides in August, and a total of 472 people shot in 384 separate attacks. The city has not had that many murders in one month since August 1996.As he has several times before, Police Supt. Eddie Johnson said a relatively small group of repeat gun criminals are responsible for the the vast majority of gun violence...

Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson wants Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to reveal his "magic bullet" for combating the spate of murders here. Johnson has a point — what exactly is Trump's secret plan to end the gun violence? The GOP candidate should answer this challenge. Here's a simple plan: Chicago should "Al Capone" its killers. When the notorious Chicago gangster finally went down in 1931, it wasn't because of his complicity in scores of murders or bootlegging that brought him outlandish wealth. The mob boss was taken down because he did not pay his taxes — and that brought...

We turn our attention once again to the city of Chicago, where, as of this writing, 2,858 people have been shot and 487 have been killed so far this year (both numbers will surely be higher by the time you read this). The website HeyJackass.com tabulates these and other figures related to crime in Chicago, and it reports that on average someone is shot every two hours and murdered every twelve. But these averages are for the year overall; we are now in the prime shooting season of summer, and the averages for August approximate to someone being shot every...

... more than 400 shot, 78 killed ...

<p>CHICAGO (AP) — Police say a woman walked into U.S. Rep. Danny Davis’ office on Chicago’s West Side, drank out of a bottle of hand sanitizer, poured the sanitizer over herself and set herself on fire with a lighter.</p> <p>Authorities haven’t identified the woman who was taken to a hospital in serious condition with burns. Police say her condition has stabilized.</p>

The dead multiply in Chicago, the fruit of the gang wars ripening in August. With at least 78 killed so far, August is the deadliest month in nearly 20 years, according to a Tribune analysis. It's all but certain that the city's homicide total will push beyond the 491 dead of last year. August most violent month in Chicago in nearly 20 years August most violent month in Chicago in nearly 20 years And people in those Chicago neighborhoods that have become killing fields look with dread toward the Labor Day weekend. So do City Hall and the police. Twenty-five...

The roads in Illinois are in decay. This may be the first state to go bankrupt. The question is not if, but when. State unions are so greedy that they are destroying the very state. This is exactly how Rome fell — government employees against the people. Seven states have constitutional provisions that state employee pensions must come BEFORE everything, including debt payments. Since the legislature in New Jersey was Democrat, they fought Governor Christie on pension reform. Their solution? On the ballot in November, there will be a provision to amend the state Constitution to put employee pensions before...

Chicago is launching a creepy new campaign to blanket the mega-city in more surveillance through its Array of Things, creating a network of (at least) 500 sensors devices that will be shared in a growing Big Data cloud. As The Chicago Tribune reports: The first of a network of data-collecting sensors that could one day blanket Chicago are now live. The city installed two nodes containing computers and sensors including low-resolution cameras as well as air quality sensors last week. They went up on traffic light poles at Damen and Archer avenues in the McKinley Park neighborhood on the...

A cousin of NBA basketball star Dwyane Wade was shot and killed by a pair of serial offenders in Chicago on Friday because the two thugs didn’t like it when a taxi driver dared to make eye contact with them. A pair of brothers released from jail on parole have been charged with fatally shooting Nykea Aldridge, cousin of NBA star Dwyane Wade, in Chicago. Darwin Sorells, 26, and 22-year-old brother Derren, who are both documented gang members, were charged with first-degree murder Sunday over the death of Aldridge, 32, a mother-of-four. Both are repeat gun offenders, Chicago Police Superintendent...

Says they’re all orphans and widows because the men are 'all dead' Democratic Rep. Tammy Duckworth from Illinois blatantly misled attendees at a forum this week when she claimed that the United States does not accept military-aged male Syrian refugees into the country. Duckworth, who is running against incumbent Republican Sen. Mark Kirk for his Senate seat, said Wednesday at a roundtable event with the Illinois Farm Bureau that the U.S. predominantly accepts Syrian women and children who are widows and orphans. Duckworth went on to imply there are “no men of military age” brought into the United States under...

After threatening to sue, the Chicago Tribune has obtained data from the city’s police department that tracks every time an officer has opened fire in the city over the past six years. The vast majority of those hit were black men or boys. There were 435 police shootings from 2010 through 2015, in which officers killed 92 people and wounded 170 others. In all, officers fired 2,623 bullets. The newspaper’s findings show about four out of every five people shot were African-American males. It found that about half of the officers involved were African-American or Hispanic and most of them...

If you want to be unquestionably affirmed and unchallenged in all your beliefs and views, don’t go to the University of Chicago. In a letter published by Intellectual Takeout, John Ellison, dean of students at the Chicago college, warns incoming students that there is no tolerance for the kind of student demands that have trended in recent years: Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from...

Students at the University of Chicago have been warned not to expect safe spaces or trigger warnings in the wake of several disrupted events at the institution at the hands of protesters. University officials are said to have told first-year students starting in the fall of its commitment to freedom of expression, saying it wanted civility and mutual respect but that it would still seek out ideas or opinions that were unpopular. The move comes after three high-profile incidents this year in which speakers invited to the university were interrupted or shut down and amid a trend of increasing political...

Gov. Bruce Rauner’s administration says a pending move by Illinois’ largest public-pension fund would increase the state’s required payment by hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially leading to higher taxes or massive cuts to education and social services already suffering amid a budget crisis. The board of the Teachers Retirement System, which serves more than 400,000 teachers outside of Chicago, is scheduled to vote Friday on whether to lower its expected rate of return on investments. A reduction would trigger a larger contribution from the state, where the Republican governor and Democrat-led Legislature have gone more than a year without...