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Serving DeKalb County since 1879
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
PREP FOOTBALL • SPORTS, B1
NUTELLA • FOOD, C1
DeKalb’s seniors aim to finish on high note
Going crazy for a chocolate spread
Jonathan Vega
DISAPPEARING MONARCHS
Ring, sentence hang in balance Jewelry is part of evidence against convicted robber By ANDREA AZZO aazzo@shawmedia.com
Danielle Guerra – dguerra@shawmedia.com
DeKalb resident Mary Kowalski points out a large section of the milkweed leaf that the monarch caterpillar has eaten while on her front porch on Monday. Kowalski found several monarch caterpillars on the milkweed in her rain garden and brought them in for protection from birds. One of them is currently a chrysalis, the last stage in the transformation to a monarch.
Local residents try to help butterfly species By KATIE DAHLSTROM kdahlstrom@shawmedia.com The thought that her grandchildren might never see a monarch butterfly terrifies Mary Kowalski. So Kowalski is nurturing five monarch caterpillars she found on the milkweed plants outside her DeKalb home in hopes they will transform into the iconic orange and black winged insects. Kowalski’s fears aren’t farfetched, some local experts say. Monarch butterflies make a remarkable journey from the upper Midwest to Mexico every year, but the number of monarchs measured in Mexico has declined by 97 percent
since its peak less than 20 years ago, say scientists with the World Wildlife Fund that measures the population annually. The decline has prompted local conservationists and residents to bolster supplies of milkweed, the plant crucial to monarch survival that also has been disappearing. But it’s not just what’s happening to monarchs that has them concerned. “I’m concerned about our world,” Kowalski said. “They used to send a canary into a coal mine and if it died, they knew there was poison gas. Is this our canary in a coal mine?”
See BUTTERFLY, page A5
Photo provided
A photo of a monarch, Danaus plexippus, taken by Pat Miller, conservation specialist with Monarch Watch, an educational outreach program based at the University of Kansas that engages citizen scientists in large-scale research projects.
SYCAMORE – A woman whose wedding ring was held as evidence for an armed robbery trial will have to wait even longer before she can get it back. The ring was key evidence against Demond Hunt, a 22-year-old Matteson man convicted April 16 of armed robbery and aggravated battery for taking a cellphone and purse containing the ring Demond Hunt from two University Heights office employees in November. A DeKalb County Jail officer found the ring inside Hunt’s cargo pants after he was arrested Dec. 5. Prosecutors asked for DeKalb County Associate Judge John Adams’ permission to return the ring to the woman, who wanted it back after the six months or so it has been held in evidence. Prosecutors offered to take a photograph of the ring to use as evidence instead. But McAdams ruled Tuesday that the ring will continue to be kept as evidence until after the sentencing hearing and through any appeals that are filed. Hunt faces between 21 and 75 years in prison when he is sentenced Aug. 6. “This woman certainly deserves to have her ring. There’s no question of that,” McAdams said. “The safest route is to keep it in evidence. It favors the state to keep it in evidence.”
See EVIDENCE, page A6
Kurdish leader cites ‘new reality’ in Iraq The ASSOCIATED PRESS
AP photo
Kurdish regional President Massoud Barzani (right) listens to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry during a meeting at the presidential palace Tuesday in Irbil, Iraq. Kerry arrived in Iraq’s Kurdish region in a U.S. diplomatic drive aimed at preventing the country from splitting apart in the face of militants pushing toward Baghdad.
IRBIL, Iraq – Iraq’s top Kurdish leader warned visiting Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday that a rapid Sunni insurgent advance has already created “a new reality and a new Iraq,” signaling that the U.S. faces major difficulties in its efforts to promote unity among the country’s divided factions. The U.N., meanwhile, said more than 1,000 people, most civilians, have been killed in Iraq so far this month, the highest death toll since the U.S. military withdrew from the country in December 2011. Massoud Barzani, whose powerful minority bloc has long func-
tioned as kingmaker in Iraqi politics, did not directly mention Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who is facing the strongest challenge to his rule since he assumed power in 2006. But al-Maliki has made little effort beyond rhetoric to win the trust of his critics, who are led by disaffected Sunnis, Kurds and even several former Shiite allies. Instead the Kurds have deployed their own well-trained security forces known as peshmerga and seized long-coveted ground of their own in the name of defending it from the al-Qaida breakaway group and other Sunni insurgents who have swept through the north. The Kurds are unlikely to give up
that territory, including the disputed oil-rich city of Kirkuk, regardless of the status of the fighting. Al-Maliki, meanwhile, has been entirely focused on the security situation, spending hours each day in the main military command center, rather than politics, officials close to his inner circle say, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to release such details. Despite the attention, Iraq’s mainly Shiite security forces have failed to wage any successful counteroffensives against the insurgents.
See IRAQ, page A6
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