“This heinous crime is heartbreaking. But it didn’t come out of nowhere. My office requested the perpetrator be detained after he committed a previous violent crime,” State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke said. “The judge denied our request. This was a tragedy. But it never should have happened.” Burke announced that her office will now push for detention in all cases involving violent felony offenses committed on public transit.

The $637.6 million spending plan closes a $30 million deficit — the largest since the pandemic. The plan budgets for a new staff member aimed exclusively at addressing homelessness in the parks.

“We have to show up and ensure that we’re holding these young people accountable,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said. “That’s why it’s going to take every single adult attached to a young person to hold that young person accountable.”

“I prayed in church today for this young woman and her loved ones. You wake up in the morning thinking it’s all ok and then your life changes, either by gasoline or a log on Michigan Avenue. No one deserves this! The city leadership doesn’t care about you and it seems in Chicago, neither do your fellow passengers.”

Indeed, Mayor Brandon Johnson is now claiming that unless he gets his corporate head tax, he will go back to demanding property tax hikes. “It’s clear here. We’re either going to cut services and lay people off and raise property taxes, or we’re going to make sure that those with means who can actually afford it put more skin in the game. That’s the choice that the people of Chicago have right now,” he exclaimed last week.

Ald. Andre Vasquez, chair of the committee, called the portal a “one-stop shop” for those seeking accountability and promised to pass on submissions to the appropriate city or state agency. That could include the Mayor’s Office and its law department or Gov. JB Pritzker’s Illinois Accountability Commission.

In Cook County, businesses with fewer than 20 employees have been the only firms to add jobs on net since the onset of the pandemic, creating nearly 65,500 jobs. Firms of all other sizes have yet to bring their employment back to pre-pandemic levels. They remain more than 57,000 jobs below early 2020 levels, according to Census Bureau data.

The district comprising 18 schools and education centers needs to cut up to $15 million as part of a Structural Deficit Reduction Plan (SDRP) and one of the options is closing what they classify as underutilized schools. All the three schools being considered for closure are at less than 50 percent capacity.

“When politicians, advocacy groups, and consultants try to control police departments — setting policy, procedures, training, and even operational choices — they cross a dangerous line. That is not accountability. That is a hostile takeover.”

“But we’re ready to go,” Trump said Tuesday about deploying the National Guard. “You know, we’ve been moving toward Chicago. We have a governor that thinks it’s wonderful that only like seven people were killed this week … We’re going to lose a great city if we don’t do it quickly.”

Chesney’s office said Joseph Haggerty, a plumbing inspector for the city of Chicago, sent two emails threatening to harm the lawmaker the same day he participated in a press conference that focused on illegal immigration and President Donald Trump’s proposal to deploy the National Guard to Chicago.

In the filing, Assistant State’s Attorney Todd Kleist said the oldest boy, 16-year-old Wuinayker Rodriguez-Vasquez, has no local criminal record but had prior law enforcement contact in Texas in 2023 that was documented as an “alien inadmissibility” case.