Untitled Document Springfield activist Will Reynolds was part of a Sierra Club team that negotiated cleaner air from the city utility’s new coal-fired power plant, but his environmental concerns don’t involve birds and fish, nor is he well versed in the causes and effects of global warming. Instead, Reynolds is fighting for his health. Suffering […]
Joan Villa
Freelance journalist Joan Villa lives in White Heath. She’s written for Variety, Video Business, Video Store Magazine, the Hollywood Reporter, and the Los Angeles Times, as well as other publications.
Posted inNews
Outward bound
Untitled Document What do Illinois, Florida, and California have in common? More folks left those states last year than moved into them, says St. Louis-based United Van Lines after tracking 227,254 household shipments in 2006. United’s 30th annual Migration Study illustrates the kind of mobility pattern the country’s been shifting toward for years — an […]
Posted inNews
Opportunity’s risk
Untitled Document Abuzz with Friday’s news that corn had hit near-record prices, a small group of farmers and curious investors gathered at 1st Farm Credit Services in Normal last weekend to hear a pitch for shares in a new corn-to-ethanol plant in Gibson City. If it’s approved, the facility won’t be fired up until the […]
Posted inNews
The New Wind Rush
Terry Gutshall was amazed for the second time. Back when he was principal of Bureau Valley’s shiny new high school, he was amazed to face electricity bills totaling a whopping $150,000 in the school’s first year. The amount was way more than the tiny district had projected, budgeted, or could even afford. Gutshall scratched his […]
Posted inNews
State of the poor
More than one in four people barely make ends meet in Illinois — a state where the poverty rate for adults and children is the highest in the Midwest, according to the 2006 Report on Illinois Poverty released today, Feb. 2, by the Heartland Alliance in Chicago. With a median household income of $45,787, the […]
Posted inNews
Slim pickings
Mal Freeman graduated from high school 10 years ago and still dreams of becoming a registered nurse. She’s looked into a nursing degree at Lincoln Land Community College that would take two years of full-time classes, but she’d prefer to spread the program out and study more carefully if the care of patients is to […]
Posted inNews
Right of refusal
As soon as the morning-after pill Plan B came on the market several years ago, downstate-Illinois pharmacist Peggy Pace knew that she’d never dispense it. “It has the effect of ending the life of an embryo,” she insists — flat-out rejecting the drug’s classification as contraception: “A contraceptive works by preventing ovulation or fertilization; this […]
Posted inNews
Consider the alternative
Like many communities, San Antonio, Texas, has a split personality, says Latina student activist DeAnne Cuellar. Although Hispanics account for 70 percent of the population, they show up time and again in local news not for their achievements or leadership but in stories portraying crime, drugs, and violence. “We felt misrepresentation is erasing our history, […]
Posted inNews
The next BIG thing
When Liz Nichols first heard about alpacas three years ago, she weighed the potential income against the money she was making from the corn and soybean crops she raised on a spare three acres of her seven-acre farm just west of Bloomington. But while visiting an alpaca farm, Nichols set aside numbers and, she says, […]
