At issue Wednesday was whether the April 1 trial date should stand in light of the Supreme Court’s decision last month to take up the petition of James Snyder, the former mayor of Portage, Indiana, convicted of taking bribes from a trucking company that had won contracts to supply garbage trucks to the town. A decision from the high court overturning that conviction could resolve a split among federal circuits over whether “rewards and gratuities” given to a public official constitute bribes, even in the absence of a distinct quid pro quo.

Wirepoints President Ted Dabrowski said the update doesn’t change the trend that Illinois is losing people to other states. “Call it stagnation if you want. While everybody else is growing, we’re stagnating,” Dabrowski said, noting states like Texas and Florida are growing by millions. “If we don’t solve that problem, we’ll continue to hemorrhage tax base, we’ll continue to be uncompetitive and watch out.”

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin said there are two main objectives that should be met in the near future. “End the suffering and release the remaining hostages immediately, and the second, finally commit to finding a two-state peace agreement.”

Department of Juvenile Justice Director Heidi Mueller will take over the embattled Department of Children and Family Services starting Feb. 1. Last month, DCFS and its watchdog released two reports detailing failures of the agency to properly place children in appropriate settings and how failures to follow the law and the department’s own policies compromised child safety.

That gave Illinois a grand total of 33.8% in government taxes on the cell bills compared to the 24.5% U.S. average. It also added $34 to the average $100 monthly bill for a family of four’s shared plan. That means Illinois families pay $406 a year in cell taxes compared to the U.S. average of $294.

‘The Corporation board led by Penny Pritzker selected the wrong president and did inadequate due diligence about her academic record despite Gay being in leadership roles at the University since 2015 when she became dean of the Social Studies department,” said Ackerman, a donor who received his MBA from Harvard in 1992 and now runs the hedge fund Pershing Square. “When the Board finally publicly acknowledged some of Gay’s plagiarism, it characterized the plagiarism as ‘unintentional’ and invented new euphemisms, i.e., ‘duplicative language’ to describe plagiarism, a belittling of academic integrity that has caused grave damage to Harvard’s academic standards

Illinois was one of several states whose Capitol building received a bomb threat Wednesday morning. Some states evacuated buildings such as in Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi and Montana.

“I don’t think this problem is going to stop,” said Grundy County Sheriff Ken Briley. “We’re a rural community. We just don’t have the same kind of tax base that the city of Chicago does to be able to provide those resources.” Highway signs in Grundy County tell bus drivers in no uncertain terms, “NO MIGRANT BUSES THIS EXIT.”

“Illinois government tax increases are outstripping inflation and wage growth, a situation high-growth states with lower taxes don’t have. Such as Texas, where asylum-seekers are fleeing, and Illinois companies fled to in 2023. The well-heeled can always leave for tax-friendly states. Many have, and others who can afford to are making plans to do so in 2024 as part of their New Year’s resolutions.”

The DuPage County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management is working with local and regional partners to ensure asylum seekers are transported safely to the landing zone in Chicago, the only designated location in the state of Illinois to receive asylum seekers.

If an employer has more than 250 employees, workers under this act get 12 weeks of leave. For employers between 50 and 250 employees, workers can take six weeks off. This law does not guarantee any leave for workers who work for an employer with less than 50 employees.

Illinois’ average price of gas is slightly lower than the national average of $3.06, GasBuddy found.

Eleven small cities in Illinois and Iowa are the only municipalities so far to have signed agreements with the U.S. Census Bureau for a second count of their residents in 2024 and 2025, in a repeat of what happened during the 2020 census. With one exception, city officials don’t think the numbers from the original count were inaccurate. It’s just that their populations have grown so fast in three years that officials believe they are leaving state funding for roads and other items on the table by not adding the extra growth to their population totals.

“New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, Vermont, Illinois, Oregon and Washington already cover migrants in specific age categories, and left-wing lawmakers are pushing to expand the coverage to all ages.”

A recent study by United Van Lines shows that nearly 61% of the interstate moves it handled in Illinois were outbound last year. Competitor Atlas Van Lines released a report with similar findings: 63% of the moves it handled in the state were outbound.

The No. 1 reason United Van Lines was given for people leaving Illinois was jobs, with more than one-quarter of respondents listing it as a primary reason ahead of family and retirement. Over half of outbound Illinoisans in the survey made $150,000 or more. Wealthier residents have the fewest barriers to moving.

Compared with last November, total nonfarm payrolls were up 0.9% over the year in Illinois and 1.8% nationally. “The overall state of the labor market in Illinois is not meaningfully different than the country as a whole,” said Matthew Notowidigdo, a labor and health economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. “In a sense, I think that that itself is kind of bad news, because of the fact that aggregate employment growth in Illinois is continuing to lag the rest of the country.”

The mayor of Edison, New Jersey, Democrat Sam Joshi, told New York’s WABC News this morning why the city turned away a bus full of migrants and asylum-seekers sent from Texas after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.