USA DAWN: NEWS AND UPDATES

Today – June 14 - -is Flag Day. The day marks the adoption of the American flag by the Continental Congress in the First Flag Resolution of June 14, 1777. The first resolution signified the flag should be "13 stripes alternate red and white: that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation." The Flag Day holiday traces its roots to 1885, when Bernard J. Cigrand, a school teacher at Stony Hill School in Waubeka, Wisconsin, held the first unofficial observance for the American banner at his school. Cigrand went on to deliver speeches around the country about patriotism and the flag and later became president of the American Flag Day Association and the National Flag Day Society. President Woodrow Wilson signed the first national proclamation designating June 14, 1916 as National Flag Day. President Calvin Coolidge did the same in 1927 but it wasn't until 1949 that it was officially signed into law by President Harry Truman....

Just after midnight Tuesday, in one of the last shootings of the Memorial Day weekend, two people pulled out guns and started firing in East Garfield Park. The first call to police was for one person shot on Homan Avenue. Then a second victim. Then a third. Then someone walked into a hospital a few minutes later. In all, 27 of the 69 people hit by gunfire over the weekend were shot in or near the Harrison District, one of the city's most violent and one of the most heavily patrolled by police. So many people were shot there that Deputy Superintendent John Escalante promised Sunday to beef up patrols.  Nine more people were shot there by early Tuesday. The rest of the weekend shootings were scattered across Chicago.  They happened as far north as West Rogers Park and northwest as Jefferson Park and as far south as the West Pullman neighborhood.  The violence centered on the West Side, though. Seven of the shooting incidents on the West Side had more than one vi...