With Helene’s death toll nearing 150, searchers fanned out across the region, using helicopters to get past washed-out bridges and hiking through wilderness to reach isolated homes.

Chicago has a pair of newly minted geniuses. Multimedia artist Ebony G. Patterson and fiction writer Ling Ma are among 22 scientists, artists and scholars who have been awarded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship.

Former President Jimmy Carter, who remains under home hospice care, turned 100 on Tuesday. Here are some notable markers for Carter, the nation and the world over his long life.

Readers of the lifestyle travel magazine Condé Nast Traveler voted Chicago as the best big city in the U.S. for the eighth year in a row, as part of the magazine’s annual readers’ choice awards. Chicago has been named best big city in the U.S. every year since 2017.

The Fermi Forward Discovery Group will replace the Fermi Research Alliance early next year at the accelerator and detector laboratory in suburban Batavia. The announcement comes following criticism about safety and financial stewardship by the particle physics lab.

One person is dead and two others were injured following a traffic crash overnight in McKinley Park after Chicago police attempted to investigate two people they believed to be armed.

The ballooning cost of police overtime — we’ll tell you just how much it’s costing. And Illinois’ latest efforts to stop organized retail theft.

The Chicago White Sox may have won five of their last six games, but it was all too little, too late. The 2024 White Sox officially set a new record for Major League Baseball futility Friday in their 4-1 loss to Detroit, which became their 121st loss of the season.

The city is on pace to spend at least $258 million on police overtime by the end of the year, even as officials imposed limits on overtime for all city departments, except for police and the Chicago Fire Department, amid a massive budget crunch.

Organized retail theft has been a felony in Illinois since 2023, through a law dubbed the INFORM Consumers Act, which broadly characterizes the crime as when someone knowingly steals at least $300 in merchandise from one or more stores with the intent of reselling it.

The radio company’s court appearance comes after it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January, and when it disclosed it was entering a restructuring agreement to reduce debt from about $1.9 billion to $350 million. 

Verizon has confirmed an outage affecting some of its mobile phone customers that sparked a flurry of complaints on social media about disruptions to calls, texts and their ability to access the internet.

American Blues Theater sets the bar high for Halloween season, delivering a tightly focused fever dream version of Stephen King’s novel “Misery.” The psychological thriller is made more unnerving by the humorous touches in this stage adaptation by William Goldman (“Marathon Man,” “The Princess Bride”).

Despite the increased awareness of the term among Latinos — 47% have heard of it — only 4% or 1.9 million people use “Latinx” to describe themselves, an increase of 1 percent since 2019, according to the study by the Pew Research Center.

Judge Andrea R. Wood wrote that the court found a probable risk of irreparable harm from falling concrete attributed to the deteriorated masonry walls, ceilings, steel beams and window lintels at Stateville Correctional Center.