-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
“Motor vehicle thefts” includes cars that are unoccupied (parked on the street, for example). Carjackings – when a car is taken by force – are a growing problem in Chicago, with 870 carjackings through July 22. That is up 53 percent from the same period in 2020.
“I think our media plays a very important role in our democracy, but you lose me, you lose me when it’s a race to the bottom and it’s all about the fight and it’s all about the conflict,” she said. “I’ve got to tell you, some of the reporting I’ve seen this week is just sickening. We all need to ask ourselves what we can do better to show our people everywhere that we have the capacity to be human beings again.”
Authorities had sought to find him in violation of his probation, but a hearing that could have put him in jail was not scheduled until Aug. 10 — three days after French was killed.
“State pension fund board rooms aren’t the best place to debate Israeli-Palestinian politics. This may sound like a blatantly obvious statement, but these debates are exactly what’s been happening in states like Illinois, New York and Texas. “
Up to 12,000 students are expected to get offers of cash payments beginning in October to make up for services they were illegally denied between 2016 and 2018, including transportation and therapy.
“Leadership during tough times requires leading by example and doing everything possible to inform your community about the benefits of vaccination,” Pritzker spokeswoman Jordan Abudayyeh said in a statement. “We finally have a tool to fight coronavirus, and leaders should be touting the benefits of this tool, not stigmatizing it. The Governor encourages all lawmakers not only to get vaccinated, but also to encourage their constituents to get the life-saving vaccine.”
Lawrence Msall, the executive director of the Civic Federation, said, “We are not out of this pandemic. The economic recovery has not been complete.” Significant uncertainty remains in the hospitality, tourism and convention sectors of Chicago’s economy.
The city’s budget director said it was too soon to say how many of the 614 police vacancies eliminated from the 2021 budget would be restored.
“It’s just like a big black hole,” one applicant said after months waiting for a call back. “You have no response. You would have thought by now they would’ve figured out how to handle it better.” The most recent numbers show 33,745 phone numbers waiting on returned calls from the IDES.
The lawsuit by the Illinois Rental Property Owners Association, or IRPOA, follows others filed by landlord groups against the federal government since Aug. 3, when the CDC said the freeze, which expired on July 31, would continue through Oct. 3.
“’She’s already living in a fantasy world,’ Ald. Ray Lopez, 15th told me Wednesday. ‘She has no idea really, what’s going on in her city. She’s insulated and isolated in her protective bubble, with only staffers around her who agree with her. And she doesn’t realize that what she says has no resonance to the people of Chicago.'”
Illinois is the only state in the midwest and only of three states overall to lose population, decreasing by 18,124 over the decade. That’s different from the 2019 estimates of the state losing nearly 169,000 people.
Timothy Christian Schools in Elmhurst made the mask-optional announcement this week through a video from Superintendent Matthew Davidson. “It’s just worth noting that the issue of masks in schools is still categorically a recommendation, not a requirement from the [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention].”
There are a number of reasons public education professionals have stopped paying money to unions, but typically the reasoning revolves around their belief teachers unions don’t represent the best interests of teachers or students.
How Democrats now go about carving up the state’s congressional boundaries is a high-stakes matter that could influence whether the party retains control of the U.S. House during mid-term elections next year. Those gains could help offset potentially new Republican seats in the Sun Belt and other GOP-friendly states that saw population gains this census cycle.
Officially, the city has 2,746,388 people; It still lags behind its 2000 population of nearly 2.9 million. As expected, Illinois’ population declined, with 18,124 fewer residents than it had in 2010. Its population stands at 12,812,508.
The majority of clean energy jobs in Illinois were in manufacturing and construction. Renewable energy now employs more than 17,000 Illinoisans, including about 9,000 in wind and over 5,500 in solar.
The Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce today announced it is calling on businesses to review and implement policies that require all employees to be vaccinated before returning to the worksite, unless a valid health or religious reason is presented, or have stringent masking and testing protocols in place if vaccine requirements are not possible.
“Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced his reelection bid on July 19 with the key pillar of his campaign being his record on “protecting the lives and livelihoods of the people of Illinois.” Look at the “livelihoods” in Illinois, and that quickly looks like a poor campaign decision.”
Resident Ronak McFadden, a vocal opponent of the patch, called the board’s action Tuesday “disingenuous” without further steps to remove the symbol from all “taxpayer-funded property…There is no room for white supremacy in Mount Prospect.”
During his first year in office, Robert Peters, 36, was the chief co-sponsor of 13 bills that were signed into law, including measures eliminating private detention centers, providing college students with SNAP benefits, increasing access to preventative HIV care for minors, increasing accountability for the foster care and corrections systems, and ending the Department of Corrections’ practice of suing ex-prisoners to recoup the costs of their imprisonment.
That figure represents a 7% increase from the previous week, when 20,019 people filed.
“We would have seen a surge if we were going to see a surge at this point,” she said, reporting 203 cases of COVID-19 connected to Lollapalooza – a number that was anticipated and not yet linked to any hospitalizations or deaths.
Gov. JB Pritzker signed a new law Thursday, Senate Bill 1913, allowing judges to issue community service among other penalties to those violating the law, which requires drivers to slow down and change lanes when there is a first responder present with flashing lights stopped on the roadway.
“The pension debt held by the eight pension funds held in the city of Chicago is higher than the debt of 44 other states,” said Adam Schuster, senior budget and tax research director for the Illinois Policy Institute.
The Chicago Teachers Union is flexing its muscles again – this time raising the possibility of Chicago schools going full remote like last year. You can’t help but wonder what more school closures would mean for Chicago’s children, including the increased potential of death by homicide.
Midwest Central school district superintendent Todd Hellrigel said, “We elect our (school) boards to do this. If we don’t need them, then why do we continue to have them? They said we had local control, but as soon as we exercised our local control and they didn’t like what we did, they took that away. To me, that’s pretty retaliatory.”
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