Sangamon County Coroner Jim Allmon has released the name of the Pawnee woman killed in yesterday’s multi-vehicle accident on Route 104 just east of Interstate 55. 42 year-old LaDonna Rude died from multiple blunt force injuries according to the autopsy.

A preliminary investigation indicates a vehicle in front of Rude crossed the center line, crashing into a semi-truck.  As a result, it spun into the path of Rude’s vehicle, resulting in a nearly head on collision. The accident remains under investigation.

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (WAND) – A driver hit the front of a HomeTown Pantry in Springfield.

The crash occurred at their Spring and South Grand Avenue location. The inside of the business appeared to have serious damage. The front doors were detached and on the floor with food items scattered around. Shelves appeared to also be damaged.

WTAX is gathering more information from SFD.

In a case which should have the attention of medical providers and insurers all over Illinois, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois and Springfield Clinic have let their affiliations with one another expire.

Lawmakers in the Illinois House Wednesday evening quizzed executives from both organizations. “I’m not so sure what was accomplished tonight,” said State Rep. Suzanne Ness (D-Crystal Lake), while State Rep. Sandy Hamilton (R-Springfield) said the parties should continue negotiating so health care would remain no less accessible.

“Not only are we dealing with the emotional devastation,” said Dr. Cheryl Brown, an ob / gyn, “we are dealing with a lack of accessibility to care for our patients.”

SPRINGFIELD – The Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) today reported 7,359 new confirmed and probable cases of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Illinois, including 117 additional deaths.

• Adams County: 1 female 70s
• Boone County: 1 female 80s, 1 male 80s
• Champaign County: 1 female 70s
• Clinton County: 1 female 60s, 1 male 60s
• Cook County: 1 male 40s, 1 female 50s, 1 female 60s, 1 male 60s, 3 females 70s, 1 male 70s, 2 female 80s, 1 male 80s, 2 females 90s
• Cumberland County: 1 female 90s
• DuPage County: 2 male 60s, 1 female 70s, 1 male 70s, 3 females 80s, 1 male 80s, 1 male 90s
• Edgar County: 1 male 80s
• Effingham County: 1 female 80s, 1 male 80s
• Ford County: 1 male 80s
• Franklin County: 1 female 70s, 1 female 90s
• Jackson County: 1 male 90s
• Jersey County: 1 female 80s
• Jo Daviess County: 1 male 70s
• Kane County: 1 male 60s, 1 male 70s, 1 female 80s, 1 male 80s, 1 female 90s
• Kankakee County: 1 female 50s, 1 male 70s, 2 males 80s
• Kendall County: 1 female 80s
• Knox County: 1 female 80s
• Lake County: 1 female 50s, 2 females 60s, 1 female 80s, 1 female 90s
• LaSalle County: 1 female 60s, 1 female 70s, 1 male 80s, 1 female 90s
• Lee County: 1 male 60s, 2 females 70s, 1 female 80s, 1 female 100+
• Livingston County: 1 male 80s
• Macon County: 1 male 90s
• Madison County: 1 male 60s, 1 male 70s, 2 females 80s, 1 male 80s, 1 female 90s, 3 males 90s
• Marion County: 1 female 70s, 2 males 70s
• Massac County: 1 female 50s, 1 male 60s
• McHenry County: 1 male 80s
• McLean County: 1 female 80s
• Ogle County: 1 male 60s
• Peoria County: 1 female 20s, 1 male 60s, 1 female 80s
• Perry County: 1 female 80s, 1 female 90s
• Rock Island County: 1 male 60s
• Sangamon County: 2 men in their 50 and one woman in her 60s.
• St. Clair County: 2 females 70s
• Stark County: 1 female 50s, 1 female 60s, 1 male 80s
• Stephenson County: 1 male 80s
• Vermilion County: 1 male 50s
• Will County: 2 males 60s, 1 female 70s, 1 male 70s, 1 female 80s, 2 males 80s, 1 female 90s, 3 males 90s, 1 female 100+
• Winnebago County: 1 male 80s, 1 male 90s
• Woodford County: 1 male 70s, 2 females 80s, 1 male 90s

Currently, IDPH is reporting a total of 863,477 cases, including 14,509 deaths, in 102 counties in Illinois. The age of cases ranges from younger than one to older than 100 years. Within the past 24 hours, laboratories have reported 92,922 specimens for a total 11,962,010. As of last night, 4,965 in Illinois were reported to be in the hospital with COVID-19. Of those, 1,057 patients were in the ICU and 598 patients with COVID-19 were on ventilators.

The preliminary seven-day statewide positivity for cases as a percent of total test from December 8 – December 14, 2020 is 8.6%. The preliminary seven-day statewide test positivity from December 8 – December 14, 2020 is 10.3%.

With everything going on in the state, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources does not want its concern about the official state insect to go unnoticed.

The DNR’s natural heritage division organized a “Monarch Butterfly Summit” which drew almost 100 people from not just the natural resources community, but agriculture, transportation, and others.

Ann Holtrop, acting chief of the natural heritage division of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources says Illinois is monarch butterfly country.

She adds, “We have so much energy around this issue, we need to come up with a collective message on what we should be doing and how we should be doing it and coordinate, start a leadership role and get a collective voice so we can all be working in one direction.”

Holtrop says she wants to maximize habitat (milkweed, native prairie plants) and minimize threats (pesticides, invasive species). There’s also a monarch butterfly survey her office has put up on SurveyMonkey.

Holtrop says the federal government is studying whether the monarch should be declared an endangered species.

For more information about the DNR’s efforts to protect the monarch butterfly, go to this link:

https://www.dnr.illinois.gov/conservation/NaturalHeritage/Pages/MonarchButterflySummit.aspx

If you are interested in the monarch butterfly and want to take a survey, go to this link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ILMonarchsurvey

The Illinois Historic Preservation Agency has a big weekend coming up. On Saturday the agency is holding a civil war tech program aimed for kids in grades 4-8.

Sunday marks the 150th anniversary of the first time an African American gave a speech at the Illinois state capital building. The Illinois Historic Preservation Agency will be holding a reenactment of Fredrick Douglas’ speech at the old state capital on Sunday.

Bob Davis will be portraying Douglas during the reenactment. The event gets underway at 3pm.

It’s a mother of a monument – the Mother Jones monument, and it’s being rededicated today in Mount Olive.

The 10 a.m. event celebrates the long-ago erection of a monument for the late labor leader Mother Jones. It has needed plenty of TLC after decades of service, and the guests today include U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), along with someone pretending to be Mother Jones.

“The monument was built in the early 1900s,” said Amy Rueff, resource director for the Illinois AFL-CIO. “The caulking has come away from between the stones; the statues had kind of a milky, waxy look to them. So we raised money and got a matching grant, and we’ve completely restored the monument and enhanced the cemetery.”

The Union Miners’ Cemetery, located off Historic Route 66 at Mount Olive in Southern Illinois, is the nation’s only union-owned cemetery.

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) is nosing into the minimum wage issue at the state level..
In a conference call on the subject put together by Raise Illinois, the labor coalition that’s seeking an increase, Durbin noted that 66 percent of Illinois voters said yes to $10 an hour on Election Day, and some of those yes voters were Republicans.

“There is no doubt that many people who voted for a Republican candidate for governor also voted to raise the minimum wage. It was a bipartisan effort, and it demonstrated when the people speak that politicians and elected officials need to listen,” he said.

Durbin has been pushing, without success so far, a federal minimum wage of $10.10 an hour, indexed to inflation. On the table in Springfield is $10 by the middle of next year, $10.50 in 2016 and $11 by mid-2017..

Business groups are hoping to include a provision in any minimum wage legislation that would ban cities from enacting a higher minimum wage. Keith Kelleher, president of SEIU Healthcare Illinois, says the referendum that 66 percent of voters approved did not call for such a “pre-emption” provision, and if the federal minimum wage law contained such a provision, Illinois’ minimum wage would now be $7.25 an hour.

The measure that is now under consideration does not include pre-emption.

A proposed minimum wage increase in Chicago may sour the deal for a statewide raise, according to business groups.

While a bill to raise the wage to $10 per hour next July hasn’t yet made it out of the Illinois Senate, the Chicago City Council is set to vote on increasing the city’s wage to $13 per hour. That vote may come Tuesday.

Business groups claim any increase in a particular city threatens the deal at the state level. If Chicago did act on its own, the state could still preempt that increase later, according to Illinois Retail Merchants Association President Rob Karr. He’s not convinced state lawmakers would do so.

“My understanding of that is the state can act. The question has become will they be likely to? Will it be seen as rollback? There are political considerations that outweigh that,” Karr said. “The state could come in and preempt retroactively.”

The current Senate legislation does not include a preemption clause for home rule cities.

Police in Raymond say three Cub Scouts and one of their leaders are still being treated for burns suffered by a science experiment that went wrong.

Raymond Police Chief Valerie Sheldon says the accident happened at about 7-20 Monday night as the scouts were mixing different chemicals to study the reaction.

The scouts were transferred to Memorial Medical Center and St. John’s hospital by helicopter.

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Jim Oberweis is pleased that Sen. Mark S. Kirk is now supporting him.

Kirk initially said he didn’t want to campaign against Sen. Dick Durbin because they have a working relationship that’s good for Illinois, and because Durbin supported Kirk while Kirk recovered from a stroke in 2012.

This week, though, Kirk changed his mind. Oberweis said he did have a conversation with Kirk about this, but it was Kirk doing the talking.

“I don’t think I can tell Sen. Kirk anything; it’s more I listened to his thoughts, and I did talk to him a week or 10 days ago, something like that, certainly after those comments, so I understood what his position was,” Oberweis said Thursday at a press availability with several Republican state senators in Glen Ellyn.

Oberweis says Kirk is putting together a coordinated campaign for Republicans statewide, in the races for Senate, governor, Congress and the state legislature, and he’s glad to be part of that. He didn’t specify what kind of help he himself would be getting from Kirk.

Are Waukegan, Rockford, Rock Island, and Danville the low-hanging fruit for neighboring states? The Illinois Senate has passed a bill which, its sponsor says, is supposed to keep businesses along the state lines within state borders.

The bill, State Sen. Melinda Bush (D-Grayslake) says, makes changes to the recently-formed Illinois Business Development Council. It adds the requirement that, “in counties that border another state that we take a look at best practices there and provide recommendations … regarding those best practices for business retention,” says Bush.

SB 2640 has passed the Senate, 52-0-1.

A cable TV giant is apparently interested in Springfield.

The board that oversees the Prairie Capital Convention Center has ok’d negotiations with a New York City-based production company to film a pilot episode of a reality series.

“The focus of the show would be a combination of looking at the unique sub-cultures of  people who have the interest and the staff of the center serving as the cast of the show that carries out last minute change-overs and odd requests” says General Manager Brian Oaks.

If an agreement can be reached, the pilot could be filmed in the next few weeks for the A & E network.  If the green-light is given, a number of episodes will be filmed in the next year with the potential of airing on a number of cable channels to include TLC, the History Channel, and A & E.

One Republican candidate for governor believes the controversy surrounding one of his rivals in the primary is distracting from the issues.

State Senator Kirk Dillard (R-Hinsdale) called a press conference in Chicago to announce that he’s being endorsed by the Illinois Education Association, but instead, questions focused on the harassment lawsuit against State Treasurer Dan Rutherford.

“Dan has been a friend of mine for many years, and he’ll have to work through these questions himself,” Dillard said, “but the problem is, for the last two weeks, his issues have sucked some of the air out of the campaign.”

Dillard refused to comment on the decision by Rutherford not to release the results of an internal investigation about the allegations.

At a candidate debate on Monday in Hoffman Estates, Dillard asked Rutherford if he expected more allegations of sexual harassment to come out. Rutherford called the question inappropriate.

Political newcomer Landon Laubhan, entering the March primary as a Republican candidate for the 96th District says although has lived in the state for only three years, he feels he is vested in the Land of Lincoln.  Laubhan says he feels most voters are tired of business as usual at the statehouse

“When it comes to Illinois, I love Illinois so much. I am excited to be here.. Am I scared to death right now? You bet I am but a lot of people should be scared to death right now,” says Laubhan.

A native of Oklahoma, he moved to Illinois three years ago but says that shouldn’t matter .Laubhan is seeking to unseat current State Representative Susan Scherer.

Now that concealed carry is the law in Illinois, area religious figures are trying to find a way to deal with it.  Eric Hansen, senior pastor of the iWorship Centers says he has no problem with guns in church.

“We have a couple of policemen in the church, off-duty and I always feel more comfortable when I know those guys are there.  I don’t have any issue at all” says Hansen.

Hansen adds he has gone through the training and is awaiting his permit so he may carry as well.

Kathy Sass, spokeswoman for the Springfield Catholic Diocese says it has not formulated any policy yet.