In the News
PITTSBURGH -- When you're driving in circles, searching in vain for a parking space, do you wish your car could fold into a scooter?
There are now places where you can try your hand at making that scooter. In fact, someone's already working on it.
Welcome to TechShop Inc. -- your dad's basement workshop on steroids. A TechShop is packed with equipment -- plasma cutters, milling machines, 3-D printers and "iron workers" capable of drilling neat holes in thick steel -- and open to anyone with some ambition and $1,400 for the annual membership fee.
U.S. Rep. Bill Foster (D-IL,11) discussed the positive impact immigrants have on the housing market and the overall economy.
After collecting 2,200 postcards from local residents backing immigration reform, a group from Joliet's Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church delivered them Aug. 30 to U.S rep. Bill Foster, D-Naperville.
The members of Nuevo Horizonte, or New Horizon, want sweeping changes in the current immigration system. They gathered many of the cards this summer during visits to Catholic parishes in Foster's 11th Congressional District, which includes all or parts of Aurora, Bolingbrook, Darien, Joliet, Montgomery, Naperville, New Lenox, Shorewood and Woodridge.
U.S. Congressmen Bill Foster (D, IL-11) and Ted Deutch (D, FL-21) want immigrants protected from fraudulent and unethical legal representation.
Tatiana Jimenez left her native Guatemala seven years ago to escape an abusive relationship and begin a new life in America.
But she endured a different kind of abuse after she arrived in Washington, D.C., and sought legal help on her immigration status. With little knowledge of the system, she turned to an unscrupulous lawyer who had her sign a contract to pay $2,800 and charged her hundreds of dollars for immigration documents the federal government provides for free.
The problem is all too common in Texas and especially the Rio Grande Valley — so much so that the state attorney general's office has a special office to deal with it, and periodically conducts special sweeps to arrest those who fraudulently promise to process immigrants' documents.
Fraudulent "notarios" - a term coming from the Spanish term for public notaries, and referring to non-lawyer immigration consultants - have long scammed immigrants in need of legal help. Federal authorities have rarely attended to the problem, and there is no federal statue which addresses the practice of immigration law by those unauthorized to do so. Now, with the introduction of a House bill sponsored by Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.), bills in both chambers of Congress will seek to crack down on scammers amid bigger bills which would reform the nation's immigration system.
A Hispanic group from Catholic Diocese of Joliet visited U.S. Rep. Bill Foster (D-Naperville) on Friday to drop off petitions urging the passage of immigration reform at the federal level and to remind the congressman about why that legislation is so desperately needed.
WASHINGTON — The only retired general in Congress, House Democrat Bill Enyart of Belleville, who attended a classified briefing Sunday on potential military strikes against Syria, said the challenge facing the U.S. was to choose "the least bad of our alternatives."
"There are no good answers," said Enyart, a retired two-star general who sent thousands of Illinoisans into the fight in Afghanistan in 2008-09 as head of the Illinois National Guard.
Remember those kids you went to school with who were so smart you knew they'd wind up being scientists or engineers?
Two of them are now representing the Joliet area in Congress. U.S. Reps. Bill Foster (D-11th) and Dan Lipinski (D-3rd) have impressive science pedigrees.