Illinois Public Media News

If you want to buy a gun in Illinois, you need to get a background check, but you don’t have to submit fingerprints. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office says it’s time to change that. Plus, nursing homes around the state have been closing for financial reasons, and advocates say it’s going to get worse. And you might know FermiLab for its cutting-edge physics research, but they also keep up to 30 bison that you can go and see. The first calf of the year was born just this weekend.

Activists hope a meeting set for Thursday night will attract residents concerned about chemical pollution they believe was not addressed by the cleanup at the site of a long-gone gas plant in Champaign’s predominantly African-American north side.

Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, his wife and his brother-in-law are under federal criminal investigation for a dubious residential property tax appeal that dogged him during his gubernatorial campaign last year, WBEZ has learned.

Refugees and other immigrants face lots of obstacles when it comes to getting healthcare and the language barrier is one of the biggest. Side Effects Public Media goes inside one clinic in rural Missouri that's trying to help Congolese refugees.

As grassland and prairies gave way to farmland in the Midwest, habitats for some native birds disappeared. There’s a relatively new program in central Illinois looking to restore wetlands for migrating birds and help farmers at the same time.