The people of Bloomington are in for a treat, courtesy of the confectionery company Ferrero North America. The company announced plans to spend $75 million in order to expand their factory in Bloomington by 70,000 square feet.
The Kaskaskia Regional Port District in Red Bud was recently featured on an episode of “World’s Greatest TV Show,” a national television show that spotlights interesting people, places and companies. Ranking as the tenth largest inland port in the country with annual tonnage exceeding 1.5 million tons on the Kaskaskia River, the port district has been a fixture of Red Bud for more than half a century.
The port district features five terminals, with each terminal location having unique capabilities such as river, road and rail access. The port district is home to multiple tenants with operations related to agriculture, steel, scrubber stone and more.
Right outside Lewistown in central Illinois lies Emiquon, one of the Midwest’s largest floodplain restoration projects. At nearly 6,000 acres, the wildlife refuge contains a diverse array of native plant and animal species in a complex system of wetlands and lakes. Additionally, Emiquon’s proximity to Dickson Mounds and its own 149 documented archaeological sites make it one of the richest Native American cultural sites in the country.
Did you know, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has launched Crew Dragon spacecraft “Resilience” to orbit, with a University of Illinois alumnus in tow: Mike Hopkins, the crew commander for the SpaceX mission, is leading a four-person team who will spend the next six months aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
Hopkins is a graduate of UIUC, where he played defensive back on the football team and even served as a team captain in 1991. Hopkins, an Air Force Colonel, was selected as an astronaut in 2009. Now, as crew commander, Hopkins is joined by physicist Shannon Walker, Navy Commander and rookie astronaut Victor Glover, and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, who is one of the few people that has rocketed into orbit aboard three different kinds of spacecraft.