Rockford | featured news

ROCKFORD — Dennis Case of Rockford is a small-business owner who’s been uninsured for most of his working life. He gets most of his care at Crusader Community Health, which offers sliding-scale discounts to uninsured patients.

July has been a bloody month. Rockford has long struggled with crime, especially in its less affluent south- and west-side neighborhoods. But the city hasn’t seen eight homicides in two weeks since the eight recorded from April 17 to 30, 2011.

INSIDE: Homicide watch

This year’s Alpine Kiwanis Brat Days was a success, thanks in part to good weather Friday and Saturday.

You can go out and breathe the unstifling, fresh air now. The National Weather Service predicts a mostly sunny today, with northerly winds 5 to 10 mph and a high near 85.

Yolanda Stone found Concord Commons when she was homeless and had nowhere else to go.

ROCKFORD — Predawn raids by federal, county, local and Chicago law enforcement officials resulted in the arrest Friday of a dozen suspected Hells Angels.

INSIDE: Arrests & charges

Booker Washington Community Center’s future is anything but certain, but its value was crystal clear for five fours Friday.

INSIDE: If you go

BELVIDERE — It wasn’t long after Belvidere School District administrators decided to close Kishwaukee Elementary School that they were looking for a new tenant.

ROCKFORD — A mosquito pool in Winnebago tested positive for West Nile virus, the Winnebago County Health Department reported on Friday.

The building was named after longtime New American Theater company leader J.R. Sullivan, but now that the library is changing the use of the building from home of a professional theater company to a library-run digital arts, theater and technology center some leaders think now is the time to give the building a new name that better reflects what’s going on inside.