The chicken made me read it.

It's not often that I can pay tribute to a book in those words, but Nives, a short novel by Italian writer Sacha Naspini newly translated into English, won me over in its opening pages where a freshly widowed older woman living on a remote farm in Tuscany decides to soothe her loneliness by bringing a chicken into the house for company. The hen, called Giacomina, settles into bed with the widow, whose first name, "Nives," also gives this novella its title.

Illinois could become the second state in the nation to fully decriminalize transmission of HIV.  A measure is under consideration at the statehouse. 

Ahead of Gov. JB Pritzker’s budget address next week, Republican lawmakers are calling on his administration to preserve tax credits for businesses — especially ones Pritzker himself helped negotiate during his first year in office. 

Democrats in the Illinois General Assembly are pushing a measure that would require schools to provide free menstruation products in both girls’ and boys’ bathrooms for grades 4 through 12.

Advocates of the proposal argue it would allow for transgender students who also menstruate to be able to access needed resources.

Senate Republicans have released a $568 billion infrastructure proposal to counter the more than $2 trillion package unveiled by President Biden early this month.

The U.S. House of Representatives has once again voted on a bill to grant statehood to Washington, D.C., and enfranchise more than 712,000 Americans, a cause that enjoys unprecedented support but still faces an uphill battle in the U.S. Senate.

The U.S. Supreme Court's new conservative majority made a U-turn on Thursday, ruling by a 6-3 vote, that a judge need not make a finding of "permanent incorrigibility" before sentencing a juvenile offender to life without parole.

It was the first time in almost two decades that the high court has deviated from rules establishing more leniency for juvenile offenders, even those convicted of murder.

The insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was predictable if you were following message boards on shadowy corners of the internet.

"Yeah, I thought Jan. 6 was going to be really bad," Cullen Hoback, director of the documentary Q: Into the Storm, told NPR in a recent interview. "I got hardly any sleep the two nights before it. I was very anxious going into that day."

Calling climate change "the existential crisis of our time," President Biden announced an aggressive new plan to reduce the United States' contribution to global warming during a two-day virtual summit Thursday, and he urged other countries to do the same.