The Latest Breaking News from Chicago Tribune

NEW YORK — To use the Britney Spears catalog as the material for a musical preaching feminist enlightenment is, to put it mildly, a stretch. The now reclusive pop star’s heavily sexualized and self-objectifying body of work includes such fodder as “Baby One More Time,” (”hit me baby ...”), “Make…

CHICAGO — NASCAR is coming to Chicago this week, in case you haven’t heard, bringing some of the world’s best race drivers to compete on our downtown streets.

CHICAGO — Every other weekend or so, if you head up seven floors to The Walnut Room, in the store once known as Marshall Field’s on State Street in Chicago, you’ll feel the music before you see the spotlights beaming from the show.

For the first time in five years, a U.S. secretary of state set foot on Chinese soil for an official visit. Antony Blinken, America’s top diplomat, spent the weekend in multiple meetings with senior Chinese officials in the hope that a little jaw-jaw will begin the process of defusing the…

Should immigrants lacking permanent legal status arriving in Chicago in big numbers get free health care paid for by the state?

I was one of 165 Democrats to vote yes for the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which ultimately passed the House earlier this month in an overwhelmingly bipartisan 314-117 vote. Raising the debt ceiling saved the U.S. economy from potential catastrophe. Democrats faced a Hobson’s choice or the illusion that multiple choices…

CHICAGO — Over the past five weeks, a federal jury has been immersed in a small section of Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, where prosecutors say a close-knit street gang named the Goonies acted as “urban hunters,” terrorizing residents and ruling its territory through an unrelenting wave of gun violence.

There had to be at least 200 people in the parking lot when Mariah Dixon arrived Saturday night for what has been billed as a Juneteenth celebration outside a strip mall in DuPage County, near Willowbrook.

Wes Anderson’s latest mirage, “Asteroid City,” carries a lighter and literally sunnier spirit than usual for this filmmaker, whose sense of whimsy can sometimes curdle into, well, a bit of a load. Shooting in Spain, creating a drolly imagined Eisenhower-era desert town out of both practical and digital design elements,…

This June, as many people around the world celebrate Pride Month to commemorate those who fought to secure rights for the LGBTQ community, these rights still remain under threat in many countries. The United States should be doing more to press its partners to protect them.

The needless, tragic murder of Laquan McDonald, a Black teen, by a white Chicago police officer in 2014 put the city’s Police Department, and the need to reform it, in the national spotlight. McDonald’s death was a driving force behind the federally mandated consent decree that requires the Chicago Police…