Illinois and the Greater Chicago Food Depository will each spend $2 million, on top of $10.5 million the state has spent thus far on a contract with the depository to provide meals to migrants. Gov. JB Pritzker’s administration cites “procurement delays” by Chicago as the reason for the shortfall.

Illinois has 327 designated opportunity zones located all around the state, the sixth highest number in the country, but Illinois is trailing most of the country in OZ investment. “A bit of an anomaly in the state of Illinois where about 20% of OZs had registered investments in 2020 compared to 48% nationally,” said Kenan Fikri, the director of research with the Economic Innovation Group.

Gov. JB Pritzker is proposing a new state agency that will handle all early childhood programs, lifting some of the responsibility off of the Illinois Department of Child and Family Services. However there are concerns over the impact on licensed child care centers and how this would fix the issues within DCFS.

“Spending has also been revised upward by $969 million (for Fiscal Year 2024), leaving a $422 million net surplus. According to the governor’s office, that revised spending estimate includes the $160 million the governor is spending on migrants. ‘With the $160 million we’re spending, we still have a $422 million surplus,’ said Pritzker spokesperson Jordan Abudayyeh. Unlike most of the revenue, many cost increases don’t appear to be one-time. And, of course, it’s unknown how long the migrant crisis will last, but it could very well wind up being a semi-permanent budgetary pressure.”

Dick Simpson, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois Chicago and former Chicago alderman, says that machine is still humming. “Since 1976, there have been more than 2,100 people convicted of public corruption in Illinois; 1,800 of those were in the Chicago metropolitan region,” he said. “So the cynicism is somewhat justified.”

“The Democratic Party must engage in serious introspection and consider the prospect of nominating an alternative candidate to contend with either Trump or DeSantis in the 2024 election.”

“This nuclear news out of Illinois matches a broader national trend in recent years. States have been either eliminating their bans on new nuclear entirely, or limiting the scope of those bans. These state policy changes on nuclear power will allow developers to have a wider range of options to provide baseload power to the electric grid. Nuclear power has numerous benefits for the grid, especially in terms of energy density and reliability. This is especially true in Illinois which uses more nuclear power than any other state.”

Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin has reached the age and tenure at which he might fancy himself a Lion of the Senate, but what a joke after his grubby power play Thursday in the Judiciary Committee. In a rush of rule-breaking at the end of a meeting, Mr. Durbin moved to bluster through subpoenas for two friends of Supreme Court Justices on a partisan vote.

The secretary of state’s office has jurisdiction over the Capitol, and a spokeswoman for that office says the decision was made in conjunction with the Office of the Architect of the Capitol. The Rotunda itself is not part of the project, but the space is more cramped this year because the north wing is walled off.

This summer, a lawsuit was filed in federal court on behalf of Boise High School’s Sexuality and Gender Alliance and student Rebecca Roe. The lawsuit sought to keep Idaho school officials from enforcing Senate Bill 1100, which prohibits transgender students from using public school restrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity and allows students to sue schools for $5,000 or more for each instance where they encounter a transgender student in a facility barred by law.

“Perhaps the best lesson from the new migrants themselves, who fled the failed economy in their home country, is that socialism hasn’t worked in Caracas, Venezuela, and it doesn’t work in Chicago either.”

Organized mail theft has become part of the “new hustle in urban America,” a law enforcement source said. One arm of the operation is responsible for stealing U.S. Postal Service master keys from mail carriers, often at gunpoint. Those keys are passed on to “joggers,” who use them to open banks of mailboxes in residential buildings and steal the contents. The stolen mail is passed on to another arm of the organization specializing in financial crimes like identity theft and check washing.

The House China Committee has no lawmaking authority, but it can conduct investigations and lengthy research projects, issue subpoenas, issue policy recommendations, and seed all of its work into other House committees with authority over major budget and legislative issues. In short, this is the beating heart

A Senate Judiciary Committee hearing descended into chaos Thursday, with Republican members criticizing Chairman Dick Durbin, saying that he will face “consequences” for not allowing GOP members to speak. “Congratulations on destroying the United States Senate Judiciary Committee,” Cornyn added.

In the decision, Justice David Overstreet and his colleagues agreed that requiring nurses to scan their fingerprints to unlock the medication dispensing drawers did not run afoul of Illinois’ stringent biometrics privacy law, because those kinds of scans were protected by an exemption provided to biometric scans conducted “in a health care setting … for health care treatment, payment or operations” under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

In its opinion, the court said that auto insurance companies whose policies include language requiring a person to be in an insured motor vehicle to qualify for uninsured motorist coverage are violating the Illinois Insurance Code and public policy.