The Latest Breaking News from Kankakee

Barack Obama turned to the Kankakee, Illinois, librarians when he kicked off an effort to push back against book bans earlier this week to support their belief that among their library’s 80,000 books, there’s something for each reader.

Book bans are brewing as an issue that could energize voters — on the left and right — from local contests for library and school boards to the White House — heading into the 2024 election cycle.

A relative of one of the victims called police around 2 p.m. after finding the men in an upstairs apartment in the 600 block of West Merchant Street, police said.

Nearly two-dozen candidates are running in the First Congressional District, which stretches from Chicago’s South Side nearly to Kankakee. “It really is important that you have somebody that speaks truth to power,” said political consultant Delmarie Cobb, who ran Rush’s first campaign in the…

A morning fishing with Matt Mullady on the Kankakee River was good for catching smallmouth bass on topwaters (and other ways), to listen to and watch the birds, and to catch up on family and life.

In Kankakee, Biden sought to focus farmers’ anger on Russian President Vladimir Putin and “Putin’s war.” In Chicago, an animated Biden detailed his infrastructure plan’s creation of jobs at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’ International Convention.

Biden arrives in Illinois hours after the April inflation numbers are released and the White House is braced for grim news.

A winter storm warning has been issued from 3 a.m. until 9 p.m. Thursday for southern Cook County as well as Grundy, Kankakee, Kendall, La Salle, Livingston and Will counties in Illinois and Lake and Porter counties in Indiana.

CHICAGO — Nancy Rish, who was originally serving a life sentence for the 1987 kidnapping and murder of Stephen Small, a Kankakee businessman who suffocated after being buried alive, walked free Thursday after she won a sentencing appeal last July, according to one of her attorneys.