Free Republic

CHICAGO (WLS) -- A West Side hospital was forced to stop accepting patients on the tail end of a violent weekend that has left 47 people been shot, four fatally, across the city. Saturday night, resources were stretched to the breaking point as officers responded to multiple shootings in Chicago's 10th Police District, which includes West Side neighborhoods such as Lawndale, Douglas Park and Homan Square. The shootings all occurred within a three hour period, resulting in 17 people injured and at least one dead. "Throughout the night, we had multiple incidents where there were large gatherings and it was...

Two women involved with a group called Mothers Against Senseless Killings were shot dead Friday on a South Side Chicago block where moms gather to help curb gun violence. Police say they don't believe the two young mothers were the intended targets. The deaths of Chantel Grant, 25, and Andrea Stoudemire, 35, in the Englewood neighborhood served as a grim reminder of the kind of violence that led them to participate in neighborhood activities organized by Mothers Against Senseless Killings. The anti-violence group launched five years ago following the shooting death of another young mother at the same corner. The...

Vandals recently targeted an Illinois pregnancy center that provides help to families in need, spray-painting pro-abortion rhetoric on its mobile ultrasound van and slashing the tires. The van belongs to The Women’s Centers of Greater Chicagoland, a pro-life organization with three centers in the Skokie area. A spokesperson for the organization told LifeNews that local police are investigating, but they have not identified any suspects yet. The vandalism was discovered Thursday morning in a church parking lot where the van was parked. According to the organization, two tires were slashed, and the words “fake clinic” were spray-painted across the van....

In an interview which aired Friday on Fox Business Network’s “WSJ at Large,” former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel questioned the strategy behind the shots taken at former President Barack Obama during the second round of Democratic presidential debates. Host Gerry Baker said he found it “a little odd” to see candidates take shots at Obama as candidates targeted former Vice President Joe Biden who he said is “the most popular Democrat in the country.”

CHICAGO (Fox 32 News) - A South Side scuffle recently caught on camera shows a nail salon owner kicking a female customer and the manager tussling with her after they say she took off without paying her bill. Community activist Ja'mal Green brought protesters to "Nails Show Design" Wednesday on 103rd and Saint Lawrence. Green says the woman in the video has mental difficulties. He confronted the owners, as police watched the tense talk.

Longtime Chicago union boss John Coli Sr. doesn’t necessarily seem like the type to cooperate with authorities. A politically connected and nationally known fixture in the Teamsters, Coli once told a lawyer in sworn testimony to “go f--- yourself.” He dodged controversy for years — from suspicious appointments to state boards to allegations of organized crime ties — often accusing his accusers of using overzealous investigative tactics. And in 2016, Coli was caught on an undercover FBI recording urging the firing of an executive at a West Side film studio who was purportedly balking at paying him extortion money. “You...

Construction of the $500 million Obama Presidential Center will have an “adverse impact” on historic Jackson Park that must be mitigated, a federal review has concluded. In a report triggered by Jackson Park’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places, the Federal Highway Administration homed in on the negative impact the four-building complex would have on the majestic Midway Plaisance and the Jackson Park Historic Landscape District. The project would diminish the “the historic property’s overall integrity by altering historic, internal spatial divisions that were designed as a single entity” by renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the FHA...

Surely this must be a parody, I thought when I first saw a story on it. A reader here sent me a link to something called FightBack!News. But I read it twice and plenty of other sources confirm it: The Chicago Teachers union has a delegation in Venezuela to show their solidarity with Nicolás Maduro’s socialist regime. Their goals are “to learn what they could from Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, exchange views on effective education and to show solidarity with the students, teachers and social movements of Venezuela,” says the story.

Sitting on the crumbling porch of a small, boarded-up house where Malcolm X once lived, community activist Aaron Sims recalls Inkster as the place where African American workers on Henry Ford’s assembly line settled because they weren’t welcome in the nearby factory town of Dearborn. Sims describes several years of fighting to save the dilapidated home where the civil rights leader lived during part of his formative years, shares his hopes of turning the modest property into a museum for his small, struggling suburb and talks proudly of twice casting his ballot for Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president.

Al Sharpton in reality is America's biggest racist

CHICAGO (WLS) -- Two women who worked as peacekeepers on Chicago's South Side were shot and killed in the neighborhood they worked to protect. Chantel Grant, 26, and Andrea Stoudemire, 36, were both mothers of four children who worked with other moms to stem violence in the Englewood neighborhood. Both women were hit by gunfire at the corner of W. 75th Street and S. Stewart Ave. that is often occupied by members of the group Mothers Against Senseless Killings. The group hoped their constant presence at the corner would help break the cycle of violence.

On Sunday, convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh, a key organizer of anti-Trump marches who was responsible for the murder of two Israelis and lied her way into the United States, gave a defiant address to a Chicago conference. Odeh will soon leave the U.S. after filing a guilty plea to avoid prison under an agreement with the Department of Justice, which she claims is too “racist” under Attorney General Jeff Sessions to bother resisting in open court. The most shocking aspect of the Odeh saga is not that the mainstream Arab-American community backed her in her bizarre fight. Nor is...

A Palestinian immigrant convicted of hiding an Israeli terrorism conviction from U.S. authorities when she moved to the Chicago suburbs in the 1990s should be locked up for at least five years, federal prosecutors say. Anything less would be a “slap on the wrist” for Evergreen Park activist Rasmieh Odeh, and could encourage terrorists fighting with ISIS to come to the U.S., they argue. But lawyers for Odeh — who was convicted by an Israeli court of taking part in a Jerusalem supermarket bombing that killed two students in 1969 — say she was a freedom fighter, not a terrorist,...

‘Louder and more hateful’: Big-city leaders say Trump’s attacks on Baltimore are escalation of his strategy to denigrate diverse, liberal areas President Trump’s denunciations of Baltimore as an uninhabitable city are the latest in a string of disparaging attacks on diverse, liberal enclaves as violent, dirty and outside the mainstream — rhetoric that paints those areas of the country as fundamentally less American than whiter, more conservative strongholds. Trump denigrated Maryland’s largest city over the weekend as “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” and blamed it on Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), who is black, and claimed on Sunday...

BALTIMORE, MD – Charm City is once again among America's "Rattiest Cities," according to a new report from pest control company Orkin, although it has shown progress in each of the past two years. Baltimore comes in at No. 9 on the company's 2018 rankings released Monday.This is the fourth year that Orkin has compiled the rankings, which are based on the number of rodent treatments the company performed from Sept. 15, 2017 to Sept. 15, 2018. It includes both residential and commercial treatments.Baltimore dropped one slot from last year, when it was ranked eighth; two years ago it was...

Three teenage girls in Illinois were charged Thursday in connection with the beating of a 15-year-old special-needs girl, which was recorded in a video that went viral, police said. Chicago Police Lt. Ozzie Valdez told reporters that two of the girls were charged with aggravated battery, while the third was charged with mob action. The girls are 13, 14 and 15, and they were charged as juveniles. The charges are felonies. In the video, which was recorded on Monday and posted to social media the next day, the victim could be heard screaming and seen waving her arms as she...

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot says she is sorry she insulted a police union leader aloud on Wednesday. It's no secret that Mayor Lightfoot does not get along with the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP). However, it was still surprising when, during the City Council meeting, she was caught on a microphone insulting the group's second in command. As Patrick Murray got up to speak, Lightfoot could be heard saying, “oh, back again, this FOP clown."

The 15-year-old girl savagely beaten by group of teen girls in a horrifying viral video shared in Chicago had been missing for five days and may have been sexually assaulted, police said Wednesday. Officer Jose Jara said detectives are trying to piece together basic information, including where and when the attack caught on video occurred as he revealed the victim was not reported missing for nearly a week. Jara said the girl indicted that she had been sexually assaulted and that she was treated at a hospital and released. The police unit that investigates sex crimes has been called in.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot rejects claims gun control has failed her city and instead blames states without as many gun laws. In an interview posted by New This News only days removed from a weekend in which 41 were shot, nine fatally, in Chicago, Lightfoot blamed Chicago’s gun crime on Indiana. She described Indiana’s laws as too lax, and suggested the laws allow criminals to travel out of state, acquire guns, then return and use those guns criminally on the streets of Chicago. Lightfoot then suggested more federal gun control is the central solution for Chicago gun crime, that universal...

On 14 July, 2019, there was one of the frequent shootings on Chicago's West Side, in the Austin Neighborhood. A 22-year-old was killed. Bullets also hit State Representative La Shawn Ford's car. Representative Ford (D-Chicago), has been ambivalent about concealed carry in the City. He has been a representative for the past 12 years. He ran for mayor in 2019 but lost the election. In 2011, he was ambivalent about a concealed carry permit bill. He eventually voted present rather than vote against it. Representative Ford sponsored and passed a bill creating a Violence Prevention Task Force in 2013.La Shawn...