Stories by WTTW News

We’re live from Avalon Park. Monkeypox is now a national health emergency. Kids get hands-on environmental training in the Cook County Forest Preserve. And why certain communities get hit harder with viruses like COVID-19.

A husband and wife in Waukegan have transformed their grocery store to include a coffee shop, boutique and a gathering place for fellow entrepreneurs. 

Next week, Chicago will host the Interfaith Leadership Summit. For 23 years, the event has brought together students and educators from across the country to promote religious pluralism.

Viruses don’t discriminate, society does. That’s the argument made by Northwestern University journalism professor Steven Thrasher in his new book.

U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner was convicted Thursday in Russia of drug possession and sentenced to nine years in prison. U.S. President Joe Biden denounced the verdict and sentence as “unacceptable.”

The announcement will free up money and other resources to fight the virus, which may cause fever, body aches, chills, fatigue and pimple-like bumps on many parts of the body.

While federal legislation to create a modern-day Civilian Conservation Corps inches its way through Congress, the Cook County Forest Preserve is moving full steam ahead with programs that deploy crews of youth and adults to tackle restoration and maintenance projects across the district’s acreage.

Police have changed their description of the crash that killed Indiana Republican U.S. Rep. Jackie Walorski, saying Thursday that it was the SUV in which she was a passenger that crossed a state highway’s centerline and caused the head-on collision.

Major League Baseball announced Thursday that the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs will play a two-game series on June 24-25, 2023, at London Stadium. The NL Central rivals were supposed to play in London in 2020, but the games were canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The coffee shop, located at Lincoln and Jersey avenues on the border of North Park and West Ridge, is located in the Lincoln Village shopping center. It’s now the sixth Chicago-area Starbucks to vote for unionization – and among more than 200 around the nation to unionize so far.

With more than half the state legislative primaries concluded, Republican incumbents this year have been losing at nearly twice the average rate of the past decade, according to data compiled for The Associated Press by the election tracking organization Ballotpedia.

The first major gun decision in more than a decade, the ruling could dramatically reshape gun laws in the U.S. even as a series of horrific mass shootings pushes the issue back into the headlines.

The Honoring Our PACT Act will make it so veterans who served in certain areas over a period from the ‘90s on, and who have conditions like certain cancers, will get the presumption it’s related to their service and burn pit exposure.

Chicago police officers are arresting thousands more Black drivers after traffic stops than they report, according to a recent analysis of police data from Block Club Chicago and Injustice Watch.

The Republican nominee for Illinois governor, Darren Bailey, is feeling the backlash from both sides of the aisle for comparing abortion to the Holocaust. Our politics team weighs in on that story and more.

The city’s newest concert venue, appropriately called the Salt Shed, which just celebrated its opening day Tuesday. The concert hall is on the site of the renovated Morton Salt shed. 

In an appearance on “Chicago Tonight,” CTA President Dorval Carter said the agency is working closely with the Chicago Police Department to deploy additional resources to address crime concerns. Recruitment efforts are also underway to help with a worker shortage. 

Speaking a day after the parents of a 6-year-old boy who was killed in the 2012 attack testified about the suffering, death threats and harassment they’ve endured because of what Alex Jones has trumpeted on his media platforms, the Infowars host told a Texas courtroom that he definitely thinks the attack happened.

The man accused of killing seven people and wounding dozens more in a shooting at an Independence Day parade in suburban Chicago pleaded not guilty on Wednesday, a week after prosecutors announced he faces 117 felony counts in the attack.

Costumes, bugs, barbecued meats and Italian fare usher in the weekend. Here are 10 things to do in and around Chicago.

Republican U.S. Rep. Jackie Walorski was killed Wednesday in a car accident in her northern Indiana District, according to her office.

The native swamp rose mallow has hit full bloom, its super-sized six-inch blossoms bursting forth in seemingly every shade of pink from the palest blush to saturated fuschia

The climate deal reached last week by Senate Democrats could reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that American farmers produce by expanding programs that help accumulate carbon in soil, fund climate-focused research and lower the abundant methane emissions that come from cows.

The alleged Highland Park shooter pleads not guilty. The president of the CTA is here to address issues of safety and service across the system. Why police are stopping more Black drivers during traffic stops, and more.

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx is facing a deluge of criticism. How some tenants are responding to rapidly rising rents. The governor declares monkeypox a state health emergency. And a local artist re-envisions famous disasters.

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s office is seeing a degree of turnover that’s raising alarms among the criminal justice community. One recent high-profile departure has only added to the outcry.