The city of Chicago's partial ban on plastic bags is now in place, but the ordinance as it's currently written will still allow stores to give out plastic bags, provided they meet certain standards. We discuss the new rules and proposed changes to them.

Could Chicagoans soon be paying higher taxes for sugary drinks? We'll tell you about that and other items Chicago's City Council took up today.

The City Council today tackled a host of issues in its final meeting before a two-month break. But one issue that didn't come up between aldermen and Mayor Emanuel is the big, expensive elephant in the room. Carol Marin talks with a panel of aldermen to analyze the city’s options for making its pension payments. 

Mayor Emanuel, back in Chicago after a vacation in Europe, returns to a fiscal situation that is bleaker than it was when he left, thanks to last week's court ruling throwing out a law that cut benefits for many city retirees.

Chicago police officers shot and killed 70 people between 2010 and 2014, according to a new report from the Better Government Association. Andrew Schroedter, senior investigator with the BGA, joins Chicago Tonight to talk about these numbers and their implications for Chicago.

There was heated debate at a City Council committee meeting Monday on whether or not to strip Illinois Film tax credits from Spike Lee's forthcoming film Chi-Raq. Some say the title validates gang culture while others fumed that aldermen have far better things to do with their time. Is the title Chi-Raq here to stay? 

A Cook County judge ruled Friday that Chicago's plan to change city workers’ pensions was unconstitutional. The city vows to appeal the decision. We look at the ruling, whether any pension reform can be constitutional, what the consequences are to the city's plummeting bond rating, and whether the city will have to raise taxes to cover the pension liability. 

Mayor Emanuel and the city of Chicago are back to square one in efforts to resolve the funding crisis for two of the city's four pension funds, likely exacerbating the city's ongoing fiscal problems. 

This month Mayor Rahm Emanuel says he plans to wind down seven Tax Increment Financing Districts located near downtown. Critics of the move say he’s hanging downtown out to dry, but others say this is a first step toward taxing transparency. We’ll hear from Crain’s Chicago Business columnist Greg Hinz and Tom Tresser of the TIF Illumination Project.

He famously called television a “vast wasteland," but Newton Minow's influence goes far beyond that iconic phrase. Geoffrey Baer sat down with Minow to talk about some current political issues.

Illinois Senate President John Cullerton is a key player in the state budget standoff. Yesterday, Gov. Rauner told reporters that the state would have a budget if it was up to him, Sen. Cullerton, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Today, what remained of the goodwill between Rauner and Democratic leaders seems to have evaporated. Paris Schutz has more.

A U.S. Appeals Court on Tuesday overturned five of the 18 convictions against former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who is currently serving a 12-year sentence in a Colorado federal prison.

Gov. Bruce Rauner on Tuesday held a press conference to lay blame for the weeks-long partial state government shutdown at the feet of House Speaker Mike Madigan, and to decry lawmakers for taking a pay raise when there's no budget in place. We'll get the latest Springfield news from Chicago Tonight's Amanda Vinicky.

In a city that has 50 aldermen, it might not come as a surprise that Illinois has the most units of government in the country, nudging out the competition with 6,964 governmental bodies, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. This fact isn’t lost on Gov. Bruce Rauner, who created the Local Government and Unfunded Mandates Task Force to come up with recommendations on how to trim down that number. We discuss the task force’s recommendations.

This is week three of the partial state government shutdown. Carol Marin talks with four lawmakers about whether a compromise is in the foreseeable future.

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle won a victory Wednesday after the county board narrowly signed off on her controversial sales tax hike, but there might be some legal and political risks. We’ll talk with the Civic Federation president Laurence Msall and Nick Kachiroubas, an assistant professor at DePaul University’s School of Public Service.