This past Saturday, for July 4 weekend, the occupancy rate downtown hit 69.4% – inching closer to the mid 80% mark that hotels have traditionally seen in years past.

But some aldermen criticized the absences of Lightfoot chief of staff Sybil Madison and Lightfoot’s deputy mayor for public safety, John O’Malley. Southwest Side Ald. Raymond Lopez said it shows city leadership is “disconnected.”

Ald. Brian Hopkins speculated that the criticism and last year’s violence downtown may have led Target to give up on Water Tower. “They’re never going to say that, but I did get the sense that we needed to have a good summer season with minimal incidents” to help the area recover this year, he said. “And that applies to the residents as well as businesses.”

“Three strikes and mass incarceration failed and did more harm than good. It has long been obvious that we cannot arrest and jail our way out of this,” Deputy Police Chief Antoinette Ursitti said.

A national study ranked Chicago’s unemployment recovery 172nd out of the 180 most-populous U.S. cities. Lawmakers didn’t help when they imposed $655 million in new taxes on the state’s job creators.

According to the policy, dishing out contraception to minors who have largely yet to undergo puberty is “medically accurate” and “provides strategies to support all students that are inclusive of gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, sexual behavior, race, and disability.”

Private litigation against critical race theory in Evanston public schools is necessary because the Biden administration isn’t enforcing federal law as written.

” (New York Gov. Andrew) Cuomo issued an executive order on Tuesday that declared the gun violence a “disaster emergency” and a public health crisis. That allows him to immediately muster the power and personnel of at least a dozen major New York state agencies and direct it toward solving the issue…Meanwhile Chicagoans have been treated largely to a complicated and frustrating game of finger-pointing.”

According to official records of the mayor’s schedule obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, Chicago’s mayor in just over two years in office has given exclusive, one-on-one interviews to the national MSNBC network an eye-popping 40 times. That’s once every 2½ weeks—and nearly twice the 22 sit-down interviews the mayor has granted in the same period combined to Chicago’s two major daily newspapers, the Tribune and the Sun-Times.

In February of this year, the Illinois Department of Transportation allocated $12.5 million to upgrade cameras and add license plate readers and software to 47 locations on expressways, however, it still hasn’t been done.

“And no, we don’t need federal troops; we need federal resources of a different kind,” the mayor said. “And I’ve been very vocal about that; really vocal about both issues since 2019, and I talked at length last summer about the Trump administration’s disastrous policy of sending troops into cities like Portland and Seattle, which was an unmitigated disaster. Troops don’t know how to do local law enforcement. They’re not interchangeable.”

Victim Alyssa Blanchard wants to have sympathy for the 13-year-old who allegedly did the carjacking, but acknowledges that the crime has shaken her faith in the system. “I’m selling my house because I don’t know when this kid is getting out and when he does I want to be well out of dodge.”

College junior Styles Avant-Pinkston said when he was growing up in West Austin, some families made the decision to send their children out of the neighborhood to get a good education. “I shouldn’t have to take a fifty minute bus ride to go to a good school. I should be able to just walk to a good school.”