Feature

Untitled Document Chevonne Watson walks from the Lawrence Adult Education Center to her rent-subsidized apartment three miles east in Poplar Place because she can’t afford bus fare. For her daughters’ frequent doctor appointments, she pushes 2-year-old Promise in a stroller while 7-year-old Justice makes it on foot from Poplar the three miles west to Memorial […]

Untitled Document Center teaches parents how to take charge of their own lives By DUSTY RHODES Parents who enroll in the family literacy program at Lawrence Adult Education Center get more than reading, writing, and arithmetic. They get parenting classes, help finding child care, coaching on how to deal with their kids’ problems at school, […]

Untitled Document Civil War medicine is notorious for being gruesome. It’s an odd topic for the squeamish, like Springfield author Glenna Schroeder-Lein, whose book, The Encyclopedia of Civil War Medicine, was just published. “I’m the sort of person who feels faint at the sight of blood,” she says, laughing. This was the third book and […]

Untitled Document During the Civil War, Springfield had one of the state’s largest soldier-training facilities: Camp Butler, located about six miles northeast of Springfield, west of the current site of Camp Butler National Cemetery near Riverton. The camp was established quickly but not well. According to the Camp Butler history (written by cemetery staffer Mabel […]

Untitled Document With hungry, angry people taking to the streets in countries on every continent — from Morocco to Mexico and Pakistan to the Philippines and at least 20 other nations — the biofuel debate is clearly moving into new territory. Arguments for and against using crops to make fuel are no longer focusing on […]

Two Kentucky death-row inmates — one convicted of killing a sheriff and a deputy sheriff, the other convicted of killing a couple and wounding their 2-year-old son — waited as nine United States Supreme Court justices filed into the room and delivered their verdict. After nearly three months of deliberation, the high court ruled 7-2 […]

Untitled Document For 10 years, Barry Locher was responsible for establishing and maintaining relationships with key Springfield businesses, double-checking hundreds of pages of information, ordering corrections, working within a limited budget, and meeting deadlines — and when he wasn’t doing all that he was running the newsroom of Springfield’s daily newspaper, the State Journal-Register. In […]

Untitled Document The first thing you see when you enter Patty Redpath’s house is two laundry baskets brimming with shoes — big shoes, little shoes, sneakers, boots, sandals. Aside from Patty, everybody removes his or her footwear at the door to minimize the amount of dirt in the house. The next thing you notice is […]

Untitled Document All across Illinois — at town-hall meetings, in federal courts, in the Capitol — battles are raging over coal power, the outcome of which could very well determine the role  of the black rock in the nation’s energy future. Illinois is at the heart of the national debate because in no other state […]

Untitled Document In the London Times, under the headline “The United States of America has gone mad,” the British novelist John le Carré began his modest polemic with “America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember.” Accepting the Wilfred Owen Prize for anti-war poetry, the […]

Untitled Document With corn selling at record-high prices, Steve Albracht expects to have no trouble paying his electric bills this year. Albracht irrigates 1,000 acres of corn near the town of Hart in the Texas Panhandle and figures that he will shell out $180 to $240 per acre to run his pumps through the spring […]