Alderpeople on where the city’s 2025 budget stands. And why some people responded with indifference to a CEO’s death.

“A budget that would lay off workers and cut services is just, you know, one that should not be tolerated by any Chicagoan,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said.

This week’s fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has unleashed a wave of public feeling — exasperation, anger, resentment, helplessness — from Americans sharing personal stories of interactions with insurance companies, often seen as faceless corporate giants.

The Illinois Senate last spring passed a proposal to require the Illinois Law Enforcement Training Standards Board to develop or approve a hate crimes training program, which would become part of police officers’ introductory and continuing mandatory education. The measure did not advance.

After an extraordinarily short day of trial Monday, jurors may only remember one detail: those high up in Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s 2018 campaign had nicknamed then-Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan “Sphinx.”

After an unrelated news conference, Mayor Brandon Johnson declined to say whether he still had confidence in Jason Lee, but praised his track record of helping progressive politicians get elected.

NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny identified the suspect as Luigi Nicholas Mangione, who was born and raised in Maryland, has ties to San Francisco and a last known address in Honolulu, Hawaii. Mangione had a ghost gun, a type of weapon that can be assembled at home from parts without a serial number, making them difficult to trace, investigators said.

The CTA’s Red Line Extension project will create four new stops on the Far South Side. Residents in nearby communities harbor both concerns about how the project will play out and hope about how it could improve their communities.  

The Merriam-Webster entry for “polarization” reflects scientific and metaphorical definitions. It’s most commonly used to mean “causing strong disagreement between opposing factions or groupings.” Merriam-Webster, which logs 100 million pageviews a month on its site, chooses its word of the year based on data, tracking a rise in search and usage.

Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability President Anthony Driver, Jr., said he had no doubt that he was stopped because he is a 6-foot-3-inch Black man who weighs more than 200 pounds and wears his hair in dreadlocks.

Far-right influencer Nick Fuentes is due in court later this month after a woman accused him of pepper-spraying her when she showed up at his suburban Chicago home following his “Your body, my choice” post on X.

The court on Friday ruled that Wyndham Lathem had been improperly denied access to his legal counsel by Judge Charles Burns during an overnight recess in his 2021 murder trial.

What’s in a new city budget proposal. Chicago Public Schools’ CEO rejects a buyout. And a pivotal week in the Michael Madigan trial.

The U.S. Senate has approved the reauthorization through 2031 of a federal program that provides crucial funding for restoration and protection of Great Lakes ecosystems. Now it’s up to the U.S. House to do the same.

The new plan comes after the Chicago City Council rejected Johnson’s first two proposals to raise property taxes in order to avoid draconian cuts to city services and thousands of layoffs.