This newscast aired at 12:04pm on 5-30-2025 on WGLT.
From the WGLT Newsroom, I'm John Norton. Rivian workers will be the first to benefit from a 35,000 square foot medical village in West Normal, less than 2 miles from the plant. When it opens by the end of June, workers can expect care with zero co-pay, deductibles, or out of pocket costs in most cases. Kate Thorndyke.
senior manager for occupational health and medical management. Just to expand the options and be able to get seen in a timely manner and so close to the manufacturing site. Owner Pentas Health plans for the clinic at the Crossroads Outlet Mall to be open to all in the Bloomington Normal area when complete over the next year.
The collapse of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood's closure closer to home prompted a group of women to organize a Bloomington Normal chapter of the National Organization for Women. Chapter president Lindsay Delahunt says normal now has been 3 years in the making.
My
generation has never, I mean, we've always had these rights. We've always known them to be true. We've never had to really fight or advocate
for them.
Delahunt says Normal now aims to advocate for a variety of social causes benefiting a variety of people, not just women.
A swath of grant cancellations by the National Endowment for the Arts significantly hampers a 50 year old literary journal that's housed at Illinois State University. Obsidian publishes print and digital media and hosts programs centering art and literature from the African diaspora. Editor Doriel Harris says without the arts communities wither. There's no scholarship if you don't have any poetry and any arts. There's, there's nothing to, to talk about there.
And then there's also then a kind of absence of imagination. Obsidian lost 2 grants.
And an Abraham Lincoln historian says he hopes a new mural depicting Lincoln's famous lost speech in downtown Bloomington becomes a historical destination. At the mural dedication, Guy Fraker noted the speech is commonly thought to have been about ending slavery, but there is no official documentation of the speech. The union was his real goal, and if it took ending slavery to do that, fine, but to save the Union. The mural can be seen on the outside of Rosie's pub. I'm John.