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Troy to Close Rose Street For Sewer Main Replacement Work

14 hours 14 minutes ago
TROY, Ill. — Rose Street, between Wayland Avenue and Barnsback Street, will be closed on Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2026, for emergency sewer main replacements, the City of Troy announced this week. The repair is expected to be completed within one day. The work will take place adjacent to addresses including 605, 607, and 609 South Main Street, as well as 606, 608, and 610 Shebourne Avenue. Residents who normally park on Rose Street are advised to use alternate parking on the day of the repair.

Durbin Condemns Dark Money In Politics On Anniversary Of Citizens United Supreme Court Decision

14 hours 18 minutes ago
WASHINGTON – U.S. Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, joined his Senate Democratic colleagues in marking the sixteenth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC decision, which opened the floodgates for dark money in our politics. Durbin began by reflecting on the campaign finance landscape during his first Congressional run in 1982. “In 1982, I decided to run for the U.S. House of Representatives for

Whole Milk is Back: President Trump Signs Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act

14 hours 28 minutes ago
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, President Donald J. Trump signed the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act in the Oval Office alongside U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., USDA National Nutrition Advisor Dr. Ben Carson, dairy farmers, moms, and bipartisan members of Congress to restore access to whole milk in schools and strengthen support for American dairy producers. This legislation advances the Trump Administration’s

S. M. Wilson & Co. Completes Northwest R-1 School District Projects

14 hours 32 minutes ago

S. M. Wilson & Co. has completed the Northwest R-1 School District bond program of construction projects that include updates to every campus in the district. S. M. Wilson was the Construction Manager at Risk for the projects, which were funded through the $28 million Proposition S bond issue, and included ADA accessible upgrades and […]

The post S. M. Wilson & Co. Completes Northwest R-1 School District Projects appeared first on Construction Forum.

Dede Hance

Trump Administration Cuts Funding for Life-Saving Illinois Behavioral Health and Suicide Prevention Programs

14 hours 33 minutes ago
CHICAGO — This week, the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS), the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH), and the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) received notice from the Trump Administration that funding for five critical behavioral health and suicide prevention programs, totaling over $5.94 million and affecting hundreds of people and providers, has been cut. “The Trump Administration cutting these life-saving behavioral health programs is nothing short o

Democrats stall Missouri governor’s appointments, vow to slow Senate pace

14 hours 34 minutes ago
Missouri Senate Democrats blocked debate on more than a dozen gubernatorial appointments Thursday, bringing the chamber to a standstill and vowing to spend the year slowing down the legislative process.  For two hours Thursday, a Democratic filibuster prevented the Senate from considering appointments by Gov. Mike Kehoe to various boards and commissions. With no end […]
Jason Hancock, Steph Quinn

Budzinski Priorities to Strengthen Postal Service Pass House of Representatives

14 hours 38 minutes ago
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, Congresswoman Nikki Budzinski (IL-13) announced that three of her priorities to strengthen the United States Postal Service (USPS) passed the House of Representatives as part of the Fiscal Year 2026 Financial Services and General Government (FSGG) report. The language, which Budzinski secured alongside Representatives Jack Bergman (MI-01), Jared Golden (ME-02), Harriet Hageman (WY-AL), and Chris Pappas (NH-01), would address top issues impacting mail delivery fo

CCDI Build Our Future Scholarship Now Open, Partners Encouraged to Help Spread the Word

14 hours 39 minutes ago

The Construction Career Development Initiative (CCDI) is now accepting applications for the 2026 Build Our Future Scholarship, an investment in the next generation of talent entering construction, engineering, design, technology, and skilled trades careers. For more than a decade, CCDI has worked alongside educators and industry partners to strengthen the talent pipeline into the built […]

The post CCDI Build Our Future Scholarship Now Open, Partners Encouraged to Help Spread the Word appeared first on Construction Forum.

Tom Finan

DHS Expands Immigration Ban, Ensuring The Only Way An African Can Come To The US Is If We Bring Slavery Back

14 hours 41 minutes ago
Ever since Trump took office and turned over immigration enforcement to someone who killed pets more often than she’s experienced moments of joy, the world has been shrinking. It America vs. everyone else at this point, with the Trump administration adding hefty amounts of imperialism to its heady blend of white Christian fascism. To be […]
Tim Cushing

IEMA-OHS and American Lung Association in Illinois Recognize Radon Action Month

14 hours 43 minutes ago
SPRINGFIELD – During this Radon Action Month, the Illinois Emergency Management Agency and Office of Homeland Security (IEMA-OHS) and the American Lung Association in Illinois encourage families and schools to talk about radon and its dangerous effects. One way to spur the conversation is to ask school-age students to enter artwork into the statewide awareness poster and video contests. “Radon is an invisible threat that poses a very real danger to our communities. As the second

Daily Deal: The Ultimate Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows License + Windows 11 Pro Bundle

14 hours 46 minutes ago
Microsoft Office 2021 Professional is the perfect choice for any professional who needs to handle data and documents. It comes with many new features that will make you more productive in every stage of development, whether it’s processing paperwork or creating presentations from scratch – whatever your needs are. Office Pro comes with MS Word, […]
Daily Deal

Edwardsville Native Among Iowa State University Fall 2025 Grads List

14 hours 48 minutes ago
AMES, Iowa – Iowa State University awarded degrees to 1,751 graduates this fall. Graduate and undergraduate commencement ceremonies were held Dec. 19-20 at Hilton Coliseum. The following graduate is from the Riverbend region: Edwardsville, Illinois: Mitchell Henry Steinkuehler, Bachelor of Science, Mechanical Engineering, B.S., Cum Laude (Iowa State University)

Wikipedia’s 25th birthday proves the power of free speech

15 hours 8 minutes ago

In the mid-1700s, Denis Diderot published his Encyclopédie in France, collecting the work of more than 140 authors to summarize the Enlightenment. It quickly landed on the Catholic Church’s banned books list for including contrarian thoughts, and, at one point, his publisher preemptively censored some content without Diderot’s knowledge.

Around the same time, King George III censored the first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, requiring the removal of some anatomically correct drawings in an article about midwifery.

So when the 13 newly independent American states ratified the First Amendment a few decades later, it laid the groundwork not only for a free press but also for an encyclopedia that was not censored by an oppressive government.

Today, we celebrate the realization of that dream in the form of Wikipedia, which over the past 25 years has been collaboratively built by unpaid strangers on the internet. Wikipedia went from the source that teachers universally clamored “you can’t trust it” to one of the most reliable sources in a world of “disinformation” and AI-generated slop.

Despite not being written by professional journalists (I edit it myself as a volunteer and used to work for its nonprofit host, Wikimedia Foundation), it’s still able to set trends and drive narratives. For example, in 2011, Wikipedia editors started collating a list of people killed by law enforcement in the U.S., three years before The Washington Post would win a Pulitzer for its version of the same.

And for better or worse, Wikipedia is most likely the largest single source powering today’s AI models. All in all, it’s the largest repository of knowledge in human history.

But it’s important to understand and appreciate that Wikipedia only exists because of the robust free speech and free press protections that exist in the United States.

But it’s important to understand and appreciate that Wikipedia only exists because of the robust free speech and free press protections that exist in the United States.

Kunal Mehta

Wikipedia has never been actively censored in the U.S., nor has any U.S.-based editor ever been arrested for their edits to Wikipedia. There’s never even been a serious threat of censorship of Wikipedia by the federal government. (The FBI once demanded Wikipedia stop using its seal under a law written to stop impersonation of federal agents; Wikipedia’s legal team laughed it off.)

The same cannot be said about Wikipedia in other countries. In France, intelligence operatives held a Wikipedia administrator until he deleted an article about a military radio station, under the guise it contained classified information. Agents made this demand even though the information in question wasn’t classified at all and was mostly based on a documentary that the French air force had worked on and publicly released.

In India, a court required Wikipedia to remove an article about a news agency because it was supposedly defamatory. To top it off, the court then demanded Wikipedia remove the separate article that was written about the court case and removal order!

This kind of censorship shouldn’t happen in the U.S. The Supreme Court ruled the First Amendment protects publishing classified information in a case about the Pentagon Papers. A U.S. court cannot order an article to be taken down, as that would be an unconstitutional prior restraint.

In the U.S., the law known as Section 230 would also protect Wikipedia from defamation claims, and instead require litigants to sue the editor who actually wrote and published the allegedly defamatory content. Those editors would be protected under the First Amendment and the high court’s New York Times v. Sullivan decision, which requires defamation claims from public officials — later expanded to public figures — to meet the much higher standard of actual malice to win (nearly every biography on Wikipedia is of a public figure, by policy).

And to state the obvious, the U.S. has never blocked all of Wikipedia, unlike China (since 2015), Myanmar (since 2021), or Turkey, which did so from 2017 until an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights forced that nation to unblock it in 2020. We know of one editor, Bassel Khartabil, who was executed for their online activity, and a few others who are incarcerated in Belarus and Saudi Arabia.

Certainly, there are plenty of people in power who wish they could censor or control Wikipedia. At first, it was through editing: In 2006, a number of Congressional staffers were caught whitewashing their bosses’ biographies, and, in 2007, someone at the FBI tried to remove images from the Guantánamo Bay detention camp article.

Then, in 2013, Edward Snowden leaked that the National Security Agency was illegally spying on Wikipedia readers and editors, revealing that the U.S. had adopted the same playbook as China. Wikipedia responded by encrypting all connections using HTTPS a few years later, and (unsuccessfully) sued the NSA for First and Fourth amendment violations.

The attacks against Wikipedia are starting to ramp up once again; last year saw ethically compromised interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin and Sen. Ted Cruz complain about Wikipedia’s supposed left-wing bias, despite the First Amendment prohibiting the government from acting as speech police. We’ve also seen bits of the First Amendment firewall begin to crumble, with judges green-lighting prior restraints, or bipartisan groups of lawmakers working to repeal Section 230.

It will require a concerted effort by all of us to not just maintain existing First Amendment protections, but to expand them. That’s the only way Wikipedia will thrive for another 25 years.

Kunal Mehta