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Jessey Eagan is a Christian and a mother of two, who works as a children's director at Imago Dei Church in Peoria, Illinois. This year during Lent, she decided to wear a hijab. She kept a diary of her experience in a blog called #40DaysOfHijab, which is sparkling a debate both in the Christian and Muslim community.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has become the latest high-profile progressive to endorse Cook County Commissioner Chuy García's challenge to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D). “I am going to Chicago to support Chuy García and [City Council candidate] Susan Sadlowski Garza. I support them because we need a political revolution in this country and we need the kind of working-class coalitions that Chuy and Susan are pulling together,” Sanders said in a statement.

Republican U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk on Thursday slammed President Barack Obama's announcement of a framework nuclear agreement with Iran, contending it will lead to a "total meltdown" in U.S. relations with Middle Eastern allies. Kirk, a former Navy Reserve intelligence officer, is among the strongest supporters of using economic sanctions against Iran in an effort to force the country to divest any efforts to gain access to nuclear weapons. Under the conditions of the framework reached between the U.S., five other world powers and Iran, United Nations sanctions that have threatened Iran's economy would be lifted. "It looks like they...

Republicans are debating whether their path to the presidency in 2016 runs through the blue-collar Rust Belt states, or the demographically changing new South and Sunbelt states. For Democrats looking to retake the Senate, however, the formula is more clear-cut: Win back white working-class voters, or be consigned to a longer-term minority. Most of the Senate battlegrounds run through the Midwest—Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio—along with New Hampshire, which carries demographic similarities with those older, whiter Great Lakes states. To defeat the vulnerable Republican incumbents, Democrats have a challenging task ahead: Making inroads with blue-collar voters, who have been stubbornly resistant...

President Barack Obama finds Indiana’s religious freedom law and others like it “unthinkable,” the White House said Wednesday. “I do think in the mind of the president, the thought that we would have state legislatures in the 21st century in the United States of America passing laws that would use religion to try to justify discriminating against people for who they love is unthinkable,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said. Critics say Indiana’s law now allows for businesses to discriminate against gays and lesbians.

A group of robbers on the south side of Chicago appear to have taken a page out of the Gulf Cartel or Los Zetas manual for setting up roadblocks in order to carry out violent robberies. Just last week a group of three or four robbers have used a construction area in the city’s south side to set up roadblocks as a trap for motorists. Once the motorists stop, they were assaulted and robbed, UPI news reported. The practice bears a striking similarity to a practice already established by both the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas who set up roadblocks...

A federal judge says he'll decide soon on whether the Chicago Transit Authority must let employees distribute campaign leaflets in break rooms that oppose Mayor Rahm Emanuel's re-election bid. U.S. District Judge Robert Dow began hearing testimony Wednesday on a temporary restraining order that would force the transportation agency to allow the materials in advance of the April 7 runoff election. Dow told attorneys he hopes to rule by noon Thursday. The Amalgamated Transit Union filed a lawsuit in Chicago federal court Tuesday accusing the CTA of violating its members' free-speech rights. It claims the CTA allowed the distribution of...

On a recent Friday, Kwanza Brooks, a $7.25-an-hour McDonald’s worker, climbed into a 14-person van to take a four-hour ride from Charlotte, N.C., to Atlanta. As she and other workers headed south, Ms. Brooks, a short, fiery woman, swapped stories with her companions about unsafe conditions and unfair managers. Upon arriving, they joined more than 400 other people — including home care aides, Walmart workers, child care workers and adjunct professors. The gathering was a strategy session to plan for the fast-food movement’s next big wave of protests, which is now scheduled for April 15. But the meeting was also...

Rep. Tammy Duckworth D-Ill., made it official on Monday and announced her 2016 Senate in a video, largely autobiographical, titled “Tammy Duckworth is running for the Senate.” As first reported in the Chicago Sun-Times, Duckworth, a wounded Iraq war vet, elected to her second term last November, is looking in 2016 to clinch the Democratic nomination and take on Sen. Mark Kirk R-Ill. Kirk is a top target for the Senate Democrats as he seeks a second term. Duckworth does not mention his name in her announcement video. Duckworth describers herself as a wife, a mom and a combat veteran...

White House doesn't dispute it. In an appearance on ABC's This Week, Indiana governor Mike Pence defended his state's Religious Freedom Restoration Act by noting that Barack Obama had voted for the same law as an Illinois state senator. "The Religious Freedom Restoration Act was signed into federal law by President Bill Clinton more than 20 years ago, and it lays out a framework for ensuring that a very high level of scrutiny is given any time government action impinges on the religious liberty of any American," Pence said. "After last year's Hobby Lobby case, Indiana properly brought the same...

... Warren is best where she is: a valuable and influential senator who pressures the party from the left. No, it doesn’t come with a title, but it isn’t a small thing. In his eight years in the Senate, South Carolina’s former Sen. Jim DeMint was hugely powerful as an ideological leader, using his base in the conservative movement—and later, the Tea Party—to pull Republicans to the right during the 2012 presidential election. He enforced ideological discipline, and it worked. Warren doesn’t have to lead the Democrats—or run for president—to make the party more liberal. She can build power from...

A New York City law firm known for filing class action lawsuits on behalf of chain restaurant workers is going after Dinosaur Bar-B-Que for what it says is the systemic underpayment of tipped workers like servers and bartenders. The law firm of Fitapelli & Schaffer said it has filed a class action lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York involving all six New York state Dinosaur Bar-B-Que locations, including the one opened in Troy in 2010. Dinosaur has made tipped workers spend at least 20 percent of their time doing non-tippable work — like rolling...

Tensions ran high over the weekend when anti-”amnesty” activists showed up to a Spanish-language town hall event featuring Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-IL) and proceeded to shout him down. The event at the University of Southern California was billed as “Keeping Families Together: An Immigration Town Hall” featuring Gutiérrez and fellow Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA), and was delivered in Spanish with the option for attendees to wear headphones for English translations. The event focused on President Barack Obama‘s recent executive action on immigration, and featured materials assisting undocumented immigrants with signing up deportation deferrals under the new policy.

O’Fallon Superintendent Dr. Darcy G. Benway recently sent this letter out to parents. Dear Parents and Guardians:Pursuant to Illinois School Code (105 ILCS 75/15), OTHS is required to notify parents/guardians that we may request or require a student to provide a password or other related account information in order to gain access to the student’s account or profile on a social networking website if the district has reasonable cause to believe that the student’s account on a social networking website contains evidence that the student has violated a disciplinary rule or policy.This email serves as that notification.Thank you.Dr. Darcy G....

Though Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) recently praised Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) for making Chicago the “friendliest” city for immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, pro-amnesty advocates and progressives are lining up beyond his opponent, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, who is in a dead heat with Emanuel in the mayoral runoff. (SNIP) “He told targeted Democrats in tough re-election fights that he wanted them to vote for this anti-immigrant bill,” Gutierrez said then. “That’s a fact, an irrefutable fact. So it’s nice that Rahm Emanuel the candidate is for the DREAM Act kids now, but actions speak louder than words.”

Terrorism: An Illinois National Guardsman sought to fight with Islamic State as his cousin plotted to kill scores at an Illinois National Guard facility. If they had succeeded, would President Obama call it workplace violence? President Obama's "JV" terrorist team has metastasized to the point where its franchisees have spread across continents and oceans, with the FBI investigating ISIS-related activities and plots in all 50 states, including a very dangerous one in the commander in chief's home state of Illinois. One of those FBI investigations involved the arrest Wednesday of Hasan Edmonds — a supply specialist with the Illinois National...

Illinois had the biggest decrease in population according to a new report from the Census Bureau. Between July 1, 2013 to July 1, 2014, the state lost 9,972 people. On the other end, Texas saw the largest population increase adding more than 450,000 people during that time. Cook County saw a very slight decrease in population. It’s one of four counties with a population of more than 1 million to experience a decrease. Others include industrial counties like Wayne County, Michigan; Cuyahoga, Ohio; and Allegheny, Pennsylvania. The rate of people leaving Cook County for other counties has been increasing since...

Mohammed Abdullah Saleem, who faces new criminal charges of sexual assault, tried to ban Zainab Khan from burying her father. Now, she tells her courageous story of standing up to one of Chicago’s most powerful imams. The decision by courageous women in Kabul, Afghanistan, to defy the orders of mullahs and carry the coffin of a young woman, Farkhunda—slain for the false accusation of burning the Quran—took me to a dramatic moment last spring when I faced off against an imam, not in some faraway city in our Muslim world, but in our own backyard, right here in the...

)—An Army National Guard member and his cousin have been arrested in Illinois for allegedly conspiring to provide material support to the terrorist organization ISIS, federal prosecutors said Thursday. The alleged plot included a plan to attack a U.S. military installation in Illinois. In the past 18 months, the Justice Department's National Security Division has prosecuted or is prosecuting 32 cases of people attempting to travel abroad to join or providing support to terrorist groups. Of those cases, 18 allegedly involve support to ISIS.

Could Mayor Rahm Emanuel be thinking about renaming Chicago’s airports, perhaps after President Barack Obama? Emanuel brought up the airports' names during a candidate forum Wednesday night at Chicago State University. The topic came up as the mayor fielded a question on why he quickly proposed, then abandoned efforts to name a new North Side high school after Obama and the South Side’s Stony Island Parkway after the late Arthur Brazier, a revered African-American civic leader who founded the Woodlawn Organization and was pastor of the Apostolic Church of God for 48 years. "We have to, in some way, whether...