McHenry County | featured news

GENEVA – By midday Thursday, 41 people cast ballots for early primary voting at the Kane County Clerk’s offices in Geneva and Aurora.

And among them was Hector Velazquez, a deputy clerk.

Sporting a sticker proclaiming “I voted early,” Velazquez said he hoped people would step up and vote in the March 17 primary election.

“It’s our civic duty,” Velazquez said. “I would hope that people would go out (and vote).

When police responded to a crash Jan. 16 at the Starbucks in McHenry, they tried to clear everyone from the building because of the “frailty of the structure and the smell of gas.”

But one employee, a 23-year-old woman from Carpentersville, didn’t move.

“The female appeared to be in shock and was continuing to work,” an officer wrote in the police report, received by the Northwest Herald via a Freedom of Information Act request. “Her back was to me, and I began to yell at her to exit the building.

A number of changes to Cary's liqour licensing code were reviewed at a meeting of the Committee of the Whole.

Police Chief Patrick Finlon said there are a significant number of license changes being proposed, as well as some of the endorsements and some regulatory issues the village has identified.

"We had we found some issues that we thought needed some shoring up," Finlon said.

Finlon said four liquor licences classes were deleted because they were redundant, and most of them were a

Some of the biggest country music acts McHenry County has ever seen are coming to McHenry this summer for the RISE Up Foundation’s inaugural Rise Up Music Fest.

The two-day event is slated for June 19 and 20 at Petersen Park.

The “Splash into Country” concert June 20, which will be headlined by Brantley Gilbert and include the multiplatinum Grammy-winning Eli Young Band, will raise funds for a new splash pad in the city.

Headliners for the “Rock the Lake” show June 19 will b

WASHINGTON – Suicides in the active-duty Air Force surged last year to the highest total in at least three decades, even as the other military services saw their numbers stabilize or decline, according to officials and unpublished preliminary data.

The reasons for the Air Force increase are not fully understood, coming after years of effort by all of the military services to counter a problem that seems to defy solution and that parallels increases in suicide in the U.S.

Fitness 120 in McHenry hosted a grand reopening event recently.

LUSAKA, Zambia – At a Chinese-run hospital in Zambia, some employees watched as people who recently returned from China showed up with coughs but were not placed in isolation.

KABUL, Afghanistan – Two U.S. soldiers were killed and six wounded in a so-called insider attack in eastern Afghanistan's Nangarhar province late Saturday when an Afghan dressed in an Afghan army uniform opened fire, the U.S. military said.

A member of Nangarhar's provincial council, Ajmal Omer, told The Associated Press that the gunman was killed. There have been numerous attacks by Afghan national army soldiers on their allied partners during 18 years of America's protracted war in Afghanistan.

Six U.S.

NAKHON RATCHASIMA, Thailand – A soldier with a grudge gunned down 26 people and wounded 57 in Thailand's worst shooting spree before he was fatally shot inside a mall in the country's northeast on Sunday, officials said.

Officials said the soldier was angry over a financial dispute, first killing two people on a military base and then went on a far bloodier rampage Saturday, shooting as he drove to the mall where shoppers fled in terror.

It took police sharpshooters 16 hours to end the crisis.

MANCHESTER, N.H. – Scrambling to salvage his presidential campaign, Joe Biden escalated his criticism of Pete Buttigieg on Saturday, mocking Buttigieg’s experience as a small city mayor and cutting down the comparisons Buttigieg has drawn to the last Democratic president, declaring: “This guy’s not a Barack Obama.”

Biden’s biting attacks on Buttigieg’s relatively thin resume mark a new, more aggressive attempt to slow the momentum of the youngest candidate in the Democratic field.