Sangamon County State’s Attorney Dan Wright wants the Illinois Department of Human Services (DHS) held in contempt of court, saying DHS has repeatedly failed to set transport dates for inmates who were deemed unfit to stand trial.

“It has been a long time since Congress acted on gun safety so I am glad to see there was some success,” Gov. JB Pritzker said. “It is not enough, we do more here in Illinois than what is being promised in that package, but progress is progress.”

The only recall Illinois has is a measure to recall a governor, implemented after former Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested in 2008, but critics say it’s a high threshold.

The latest Illinois public schools report card data reviewed by Wirepoints President Ted Dabrowski shows many schools get high marks from the state education board and graduation rates are up, despite evidence that many schools are failing students. “Many of them, most of them can’t read at grade level, so we’ve got a real disconnect, it’s a real indictment on the public school system of Illinois.”

Starting July 1, the state will invest more than $175 million in additional funding for child care and early childhood education.

Gov. JB Pritzker has signed 401 bills sent to him this calendar year, leaving just 10 of those passed by lawmakers this year awaiting his action as of Monday.

“It’s not a long-term measure, but I think it’ll have a decent impact this summer and fall and winter,” Champaign Center Partnership Executive Director Xander Hazel said.

Passed as House bill 5496, the law spends 642 pages amending several statutes to uniformly replace the word “accident” with the word “crash” in relation to automobiles, motor vehicles and traffic accidents. A second word change, passed into law as Senate Bill 3865, ends the use of the word alien to describe non-citizens throughout Illinois law.

Matt Paprocki, of the Illinois Policy institute: “In the past four years, Illinois has passed 24 tax and fee hikes worth about $5 billion to taxpayers. Of those taxes and fees, about $650 million has been targeted specifically at businesses…Illinois politicians have told us for decades they are going to increase jobs and support businesses, yet their actions tell another story.”

Officials already lure corporations by touting their strong support for voting rights, racial justice and protections for LGBTQ individuals, but losing the constitutional right to abortion should further strengthen their hand with businesses from red states likely to outlaw the procedure.

There is a new study by psychology researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of Louisville that maintains that those people who maintain a “color-blind” racial philosophy are actually fostering racism. The question is whether the study in the Journal of Counseling Psychology will be used to support universities requiring affirmative anti-racism statements and other direct responses from faculty and students.

“He was an excellent attorney general,” Gov. Jim Edgar said Sunday. “He didn’t play politics at all with anything in the attorney general’s office, sometimes to his detriment. He just was a very ethical, decent person.”