President Joe Biden made a quick foray to the Capitol on Wednesday hunting support for his multitrillion-dollar agenda of infrastructure, health care and other programs. Our Spotlight Politics team weighs in on this and more.

The Texas voting bills that prompted state Democrats’ flight to Washington this week include a raft of tweaks and changes to the state’s election code. Some are dramatic, others highly technical, and a couple could make life easier for voters.

Supporters of the plan told aldermen Wednesday that it will benefit young residents of the West Side and bring much-needed investment to one of Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods. If the plan is approved, it will end a ferocious controversy that has raged for nearly four years.

The island nation of Cuba has seen unprecedented demonstrations amid the country’s worst economic crisis in decades — and nearly 60 years into the United States’ embargo on the nation.

It won’t be smoke-filled, but members of the Chicago City Council will head to a backroom at City Hall later this month to start crafting new ward boundaries that could shape Chicago politics for the next decade.

President Joe Biden declared preserving voting rights an urgent national “test of our time” on Tuesday but offered few concrete proposals to meet it. Texas Democrats took their own dramatic action to stymie Republican efforts to tighten ballot restrictions in their state.

Chicago officials have reinstated the city’s COVID-19 travel advisory as cases spike with the spread of the delta variant of the virus in Missouri and Arkansas. The order had been suspended for 42 days.

In the midst of a right-wing attack on creating a more inclusive education in the U.S., Illinois just became the first state to require Asian American history to be taught in public schools.

Facing rising fears of summer violence, President Joe Biden is embarking on a political high-wire act, trying to balance his strong backing for law enforcement with the police reform movement championed by many of his supporters.

Over the past year, a small group of people who are homeless have established a tent encampment in a small Avondale park. Similar encampments are all over Chicago, and as Illinois’ eviction moratorium nears its end, the number of unhoused people is expected to grow.

U.S. immigration authorities will no longer routinely jail migrants facing deportation if they are pregnant or recently gave birth, reversing a Trump-era immigration policy.

A war of words ensues as the mayor and police chief blame the courts for the city’s violence. Joe Biden’s first stop in Illinois as president. The list of alderpeople under indictment grows. And the city pension debt swells.

President Joe Biden told Russian President Vladimir Putin in a Friday phone call that he must “take action” against cybercriminals acting in his country and that the U.S. reserves the right to “defend its people and its critical infrastructure,” the White House said.

President Joe Biden met with civil rights leaders Thursday in the West Wing, while Vice President Kamala Harris announced $25 million in new spending by the Democratic National Committee on actions to protect voting access ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.

The city is conducting additional environmental studies after the head of the Environmental Protection Agency said the proposal raises “significant civil rights concerns.”

Determined to convince tech companies to trade in views of the Golden Gate Bridge for the City of Big Shoulders, Mayor Lori Lightfoot spent Wednesday and Thursday wooing Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, even as the city reeled from the most violent weekend of 2021.