Free Republic

The annual Little Village Cinco de Mayo parade was rerouted and then cut short Sunday after shots were fired along the parade route, officials said, though paradegoers still reveled the chance to celebrate Mexican culture and history. The Chicago Fire Department responded to the scene near Cermak Road and Washtenaw Avenue, but they found no one with injuries to take to the hospital. Chicago police worked with parade organizers to reroute the celebration, which was scheduled to start at noon, heading west along Cermak from Damen Avenue to Marshall Boulevard. Instead, the parade started closer to 12:30 p.m. south on...

... It was the third papal meeting for Laura, 57, a saucy Paraguayan sex worker who, in her realest moments, described herself as “una travesti,” outdated Spanish slang for “a transgender woman.” She lived by a code: Tough girls don’t cry. But the first time Pope Francis had blessed her, she couldn’t suppress her tears. On their second meeting, they chatted over lunch. He came to know her well enough to ask about her health. On top of her longtime HIV, she’d had a recent cancer diagnosis. During treatment, the church sourced her a comfortable hotel room in the shadow...

(CHICAGO) – Workers at Sunnyside, a subsidiary of Cresco Labs, in River North have voted overwhelmingly to join Teamsters Local 777. “We are thrilled to welcome another Cresco location to Teamsters Local 777,” said Jim Glimco, President of Local 777. “Dispensary workers are seeing their counterparts at other locations organize with the Teamsters and they want to secure the benefits of a union contract for themselves. We look forward to helping these workers get their first contract and continuing to organize workers in the cannabis industry across Illinois.” The River North dispensary is the sixth location to organize with Local...

Northwestern University officials announced Monday that they have reached an agreement with students and faculty protesting against the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, outlining a plan intended to allow demonstrations to continue while preventing the chaos and occasional violence that has engulfed other campuses across the country. The deal — believed to be the first between a major U.S. university and Pro-Palestinian protesters —comes five days after demonstrators established an encampment in Deering Meadow, a popular common area on the Evanston campus. Administrators responded to the protest by banning tents and temporary structures, but they did nothing to enact the new...

The United Nations has decided to exclude the terrorist organization, Hamas, from its blacklist containing states and non-state actors which committed acts of sexual violence in 2023. The UN claimed it excluded Hamas due to lack of credible evidence. The UN report also excluded Russia from the list, despite evidence of sexual violence committed by Russian soldiers against women in Ukraine. Israeli Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, said he was “disgusted” by the report. The UN blacklist and wider annual report, authored by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was debated Tuesday, the first day of Passover. ...

The city and state are in the planning stages to combine Chicago’s legacy homeless shelter system with its system for migrants, according to government officials, and turn it into a unified shelter structure, an idea advocates for the homeless have long championed. The “One System Initiative” will shift a “permanent shelter management to the non-profit workforce,” Illinois Department of Human Services spokesperson Daisy Contreras said in a statement. Currently, the city contracts with Favorite Healthcare Staffing, whose sizable overtime has contributed to tens of millions of dollars in city payments to the firm staffing the city’s migrant shelters. The state’s...

Two jurors in the Donald Trump hush money trial were excused Thursday, one after telling the court she was too scared and intimidated to serve, as prosecutors renewed their request to hold Trump in criminal contempt over alleged gag order violations. The first juror, one of seven initially chosen to serve on the case, told Merchan that she was too scared to proceed after her friends, family, and colleagues guessed that she had been chosen. Merchan has ruled that the panel will be anonymous to protect their safety and privacy. The second juror was excused after prosecutors raised questions about...

The Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) announced it has awarded $2 million to three different organizations to provide training that will increase access to safe, high-quality abortions across the state. The Abortion Provider Capacity Building Grant Program awarded grants to the Midwest Access Project (MAP), Planned Parenthood of Illinois (PPIL), and the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) College of Nursing. The first-of-its-kind in Illinois, state-funded training effort follows the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that eliminated the constitutional right to abortion in the United States and allowed states to restrict access to...

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft took a road trip Tuesday before its May 6 liftoff, moving from the Kennedy Space Center to the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Starliner boarded a transporter at the Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility at Kennedy Space Center on Monday. Final checks were completed Tuesday for the short trip to the United Launch Alliance's Vertical Integration Facility at the Space Force station. "The Atlas V will receive its precious cargo today as the Boeing Space Starliner spacecraft is transported to ULA's Vertical Integration Facility and lifted onto the rocket," ULA said on X. Astronauts Butch Wilmore...

The United Methodist Church lost one-fourth of its U.S. churches in a recent schism, with conservatives departing over disputes on sexuality and theology. Now, with the approach of its first major legislative gathering in several years, the question is whether the church can avert a similar outcome elsewhere in the world, where about half its members live. The question is particularly acute in Africa, home to the vast majority of United Methodists outside the U.S. Most of its bishops favor staying, but other voices are calling for regional conferences to disaffiliate. At the upcoming General Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina,...

Progressive activist groups from across the country are preparing to protest outside the Democratic National Convention “with or without permits” come August. Coalition leaders have attested their right to be within “sight and sound” of the convention’s center stage at the United Center, citing First Amendment rights in a federal lawsuit filed last month. On Saturday, leaders reaffirmed their commitment to be heard outside the DNC, despite the city’s denial of protest permits closer to the convention’s site. A couple of hundred people representing 78 activist organizations gathered Saturday for a day-long “working conference” hosted by the March on the...

BERLIN (AP) — German lawmakers on Friday approved legislation that will make it easier for transgender, intersex and nonbinary people to change their name and gender in official records. The “self-determination law,” one of several social reforms that Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s liberal-leaning coalition government pledged when it took office in late 2021, is set to take effect on Nov. 1. Germany, the European Union’s most populous nation, follows several other countries in making the change. Parliament’s lower house, the Bundestag, approved it by 374 votes to 251 with 11 abstentions. The German legislation will allow adults to change their first...

Twenty-four years after farm invasions began in Zimbabwe it was time for me to go back to my farm again and have a look. Surely 24 years later, there would be something to see to support the legend that what happened on commercial farms was productive and beneficial to the people and the country. ... So what did I see when I went back to my farm last week? I did not see a thriving, productive farm. I saw houses, lots of houses, built on the most fertile fields, the lushest pastures and the livestock handling pens. ...

KYIV — As Russia steps up airstrikes and once again advances on the battlefield in Ukraine more than two years into its bloody invasion, there is no end to the fighting in sight. And President Volodymyr Zelensky’s options for what to do next — much less how to win the war — range from bad to worse. Zelensky has said Ukraine will accept nothing less than the return of all its territory, including land that Russia has controlled since 2014. But with the battle lines changing little in the last year, militarily retaking the swaths of east and south Ukraine...

Two men accused of trying to lure children into a van where Cicero police allegedly found condoms, lubricant, and a mattress were not detained on the charges because prosecutors and the judge mistakenly believed attempted child abduction is not a detainable offense under Illinois’ cashless bail system. Both men have been detained for other reasons, one for violating parole and the other for violating probation. However, if those holds are released, they will go home on electronic monitoring. During an initial appearance at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse at 26th and California on Sunday, Assistant State’s Attorney Sarah Dale-Schmidt presented the...

LIVERMORE, Calif. -- Most fast food workers in California will be paid at least $20 an hour beginning Monday when a new law is scheduled to kick in giving more financial security to an historically low-paying profession while threatening to raise prices in a state already known for its high cost of living. Democrats in the state Legislature passed the law last year in part as an acknowledgement that many of the more than 500,000 people who work in fast food restaurants are not teenagers earning some spending money, but adults working to support their families. That includes immigrants like...

(NEW WILMINGTON, Pa.) – Cheese processing and manufacturing workers at the Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) plant in New Wilmington have voted 125-9 to ratify their first collective bargaining agreement with Teamsters Local 261. “These workers fought hard for a good contract, and because of that, they secured the strong wages and benefits that other DFA Teamsters across the country have been enjoying for years,” said Peter Finn, Teamsters Western Region International Vice President and Food Processing Division Director. “I’d like to thank the negotiating committee for all of the hard work they did to make this contract possible,” said...

Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann appeared to "hope" that former President Trump would be assassinated in a recent X post that prompted calls for his banishment from the social media platform. Olbermann was referring to the Biden-Harris HQ X account flagging a clip of Trump saying he had been persecuted worse than any president in history, including Abraham Lincoln. "Trump says he has been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated," the Biden campaign account posted on Saturday. "There's always the hope," Olbermann wrote, linking to the post. ...

Fundamentalist Christian churches from the United States are increasingly gaining power and influence in societies and political spheres across Africa. Many of them have been whipping up negative sentiments against LGBTQ+ people and abortion rights. Haley McEwen, a sociologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, has examined some of their influential networks. "US Christian right-wing groups have been very active in the US foreign policy since the early 2000s," McEwen told DW. "There are several organizations that have been around since the 1970s — and in the early 2000s they started to increase their influence internationally." ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYWkuV5FbJM