In Illinois and this nation, we have spent billions of dollars trying to provide the best education possible for our children. Due to COVID-19 we have lost a year or more of education. Remote learning has been difficult for most and virtually impossible for some students.

Whenever I go to a high school or college football game, I cringe at the sight of players on the field, standing as if witless (which they aren’t), looking to the sidelines for instructions from the coaches for the play to call and defense to mount.

The note suggested I had left something out.

Veronica Wolski was a believer in the deeply unhinged QAnon conspiracy theory. When it came to COVID-19, she was anti-vaccine and anti-mask, at one point standing on a pedestrian bridge over the Kennedy Expressway with a sign that read “Ax the vax.” She became a darling in the dark fringes o…

Public safety is one of the foremost issues on the minds of people all across the nation.

As much as they try, soldiers returning home from combat don’t always manage to leave the war behind on the battlefield.

Most of the people who witnessed the events of Sept. 11, 2001 remember where they were when they heard the news. It was a clear crisp September morning. For some reason, we did not turn our TV on that morning.

Editor’s Note: Jim Shultz is the founder and executive director of the Democracy Center and a columnist with the Lockport, New York Union-Sun & Journal, a sister paper of the EDN. He is not local to the Effingham County area.

This coming Monday is Labor Day. It is a day to commemorate the efforts of all workers regardless of their occupation or position in a company.

The events unfolding at the Kabul Airport in Afghanistan during the last couple of weeks were gut wrenching and disturbing. It appeared that America lost another war in a distant land and then hurriedly withdrew from it, creating a chaos and even a tragedy when 13 American Servicemen and wom…

Barack Obama recently purchased a $12 million summer place on Martha’s Vineyard and planned to host 600 “swells” there for his 60th birthday, until the resurgent pandemic shrunk his party numbers.

Former Gov. Jim Edgar has created a program that might be the last great hope for struggling Illinois, yet his Edgar Fellows Program has yet to prove its potential. I propose that the nearly 400 Fellows take on the task, never before tried, of building a strong future for Illinois. The chall…

Schools across the nation find themselves in an impossible situation, as they are stuck between increasingly dire medical advice, frustrated parents, and tricky political realities. A school board in northeast Texas, for example, temporarily added facemasks to its dress code to get around th…

Welcome roses for the new president and CEO of HSHS St. Anthony’s Memorial Hospital. Chad Markham will begin serving in this role on Sept. 7. The hospital noted in a press release on Friday that Markham comes to St. Anthony’s from Sioux City, Iowa, where he has served in a variety of health …

I had lunch the other day with two friends from way back. As we sat down at a public golf course in Prophetstown in Northwest Illinois, I realized each of us has been president of a respected statewide organization over the many decades. There might be a column here, I thought.

I met Steve Nolan two years ago on his first day as a Certified Nurse Anesthetist at the Effingham Surgery Center. He’s a gentleman with impeccable manners and a soft captivating smile and kind eyes that exude respect and maturity.

Gov. JB Pritzker on Wednesday ordered that masks be required in the state’s day cares and in schools from pre-K through 12. Thorns are warranted because it’s come to this. Capitol News Illinois reported that Illinois Department of Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike said that youth hospi…

There is a developing thin line in mainstream journalism ethics between what’s acceptable and what’s not in defining impartial, independent news coverage.

I’ve taken it upon myself to chime in on our nation’s most recent facepalm, which is that we somehow have more COVID-19 vaccines than arms to put them in.

When the COVID-19 pandemic started in China and then swept the entire world, almost every human being was praying to God, each in their own way, to end that pandemic. But it was not going to end just like that. First, we had to know the type of the virus causing the pandemic, then we need to…

Roses to the return of the Effingham County Fair, which opens Saturday. EDN reporter Charles Mills notes that this year’s fair has plenty to offer as last year’s fair was slimmed down to just an Effingham County Fair Queen Contest and Junior Miss competition due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The…

It’s 6 a.m. in Princeton, Illinois. I have a six-hour drive to Rochester, Minnesota, where the Mayo Brothers will take a look-see at my 80-year-old ticker. Some reason for stress.

The summer of 2021 includes a long to-do list as restrictions have been lifted and people take to the roads for summer vacations and family reunions.

Democratic mapmakers in Springfield have crafted new legislative districts that are so laughably offensive to the Illinois Constitution that the state Supreme Court would either have to reject them outright, or confirm the court’s unsavory reputation for partisan political corruptness.

Hey, sports fans, it’s time for the Olympics again. So let’s talk about pot, protests and politics.

I was at Girl Scout camp this past week and I watched the daily closing of the camp and the retiring of Old Glory. The girls were so respectful as they retired the colors. I began to think about patriotism and what it means to me.

Belated roses to the St. Anthony softball team for its remarkable run this year. As your new EDN sports editor, Alex Wallner, put it in a recent column: “It was a season of firsts for the St. Anthony softball team, as the Bulldogs captured sectional and super-sectional championships en rout…

Last week, my brother Emil, his lovely wife, Vivian, and his two bright children, Nardeen and Michael, celebrated their 10th anniversary of coming to America.

Fox News star Tucker Carlson calls it a cult. Will Cain, co-host of Fox and Friends Weekend, calls it “modern-day Jim Crow.”

The spring session of the Illinois General Assembly is now history. At the beginning of the session, there was renewed hope that critical aspects of Illinois government might change. After all, for the first time in decades, the House had a new speaker. After nearly 40 years as House speaker…

Illinois is now fully open but all throughout the state there are numerous fast-food restaurants that still have closed dining rooms.

After more than a century and a half of underappreciation, the emancipation celebration known as Juneteenth is bringing out the regional differences in various ways, some of which make me wonder whether the Civil War really ended in 1865 — and if so, who won.

On Thursday afternoon, Illinois legislators got their first glimpse of what an energy package may look like as they are set to reconvene in Springfield early next week to consider energy-related legislation. Unfortunately, it appears as though the Democrats and Governor Pritzker are cooking …

Nineteen years after completing our journey from Egypt to this great country, we had the opportunity to be sworn in as American citizens on May 12, 1995. Our son, Ramez, however, was living in Seattle at that time and had requested to have his swearing-in ceremony in Seattle. But that reques…

When I was a boy in California in the 1960s, my family was pretty much the only family I knew that ate bagels. That’s probably because we were Jewish and bagels are a Jewish thing.

About 25 years ago my buddy and I were on spring break. We were broke, though, so instead of heading south to cruise down a beach we were driving to McDonalds to cruise through the parking lot. It was a rainy day and too overcast for the beach anyway, which is likely one reason he got the id…

HSHS St. Anthony’s Memorial Hospital and the Family Life Center recently partnered with St. Anthony High School on an annual event, “Window to the Womb,” which allows high school students an opportunity to see the development of life while in the womb.

Climate change is one of the most pressing problems facing society today. Climate change can be attributed largely to the increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and its effects are numerous and severe.