PHOTO BY METRO CREATIVE CONNECTION “What’s your favorite cuisine?” It’s a question I’m frequently asked – and one I’m never comfortable answering. Do I really have to choose? My answer at any given moment may depend on the season, a cookbook I’ve been reading, a restaurant at which I’ve recently eaten, recipes I’ve been developing, […]
family
Drying paint and picking jurors
It took just two weeks to try mass killer Richard Speck in a Peoria courtroom in 1967. Forty-six years later in a courtroom adjacent to the one where Speck was convicted after less than an hour of deliberations, it took a full week simply to pick a jury in the murder trial of Christopher Harris, […]
Why are there so few black farmers?
Urging his fellow lawmakers to release funding for a discrimination lawsuit originally settled more than a decade ago, U.S. Sen. Roland Burris last month pointed to the increasingly homogenous culture that is Illinois farming. The still unreleased funding would go to farmers, or former farmers, who had been affected by systematic racial bias in the […]
Shakeup in juvenile justice
Three weeks after the director of the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice announced his resignation, two different studies are calling for major changes in the troubled agency’s operations. Kurt Friedenauer announced his resignation as IDJJ director on July 14, having served in that position since the department’s creation in 2006. Friedenauer oversaw IDJJ’s slow separation […]
