Stories by Heather Cherone

The Chicago City Council voted 29-18 on Wednesday to grant the Chicago Police Board the power to overrule the Chicago Police Department and remove a Chicagoan from its gang database.

The latest proposed contract maintains the 10% immediate raises that the last deal offered, and it makes what the United Auto Workers union called modest changes to the details of Deere’s internal incentive pay program for workers.

Brookfield Zoo is in the midst of a seahorse baby boom and caught the arrival of its newest little ones on camera. Dad made it look easy.

Holiday lights, intricate artwork, butterfly yoga and stand-up comedy usher in the weekend. Here are 10 things to do in and around Chicago.

CPS CEO Pedro Martinez on Wednesday said his team is beginning to set up plans and solidify a specific health metric that can be used to decide when to shut down in-person learning within a school or across the district itself.

The increasingly heated debate over the presence of certain books in school libraries was aired at a Downers Grove school board meeting this week.

Illinois has intentionally reduced its prison population, and made changes to sentencing laws to reduce offenders’ time behind bars. Now some victims’ family members are calling for the state to reverse directions when it comes to those who murder children.

The leaders of the Chicago City Council’s Black and Latino caucuses said Tuesday that they could endorse a new Chicago ward map with 18 wards with a majority of Black voters and 15 wards with a majority of Latino voters.

The jury at Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder trial deliberated a full day on Tuesday without reaching a verdict over whether he was the instigator in a night of bloodshed in Kenosha or a concerned citizen who came under attack while trying to protect property.

Reneisha Jenkins’ direction, along with the wonderfully playful, hip-swiveling choreography of Christopher Chase Carter and the impeccable music direction of keyboardist Diana Lawrence, has infused the show with genuine emotional heat as well as laugh-generating irreverence and comic sparkle.

Chicago has a long history of segregation and racial inequity. Now, a new data analysis by the DePaul University Center for Journalism Integrity & Excellence shows inequity is rooted even in the planting of city trees.

Three mayors in the past 15 years have all promised to combat the effects of global climate change. But some critics and scientists, along with a new data analysis by the DePaul University Center for Journalism Integrity & Excellence, reveal their efforts have fallen short. 

Illinois’ handwritten copy of the historic document once belonged to the guy who was the main speaker at Gettysburg and whose own two-hour oration was followed by Abraham Lincoln’s 272-word masterpiece.  

A special kind of art gallery in Chicago is emerging as a brick-and-mortar trailblazer in the digital art world. The art space imnotArt in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood bills itself as the city’s first physical NFT gallery and one of the first of its kind in the world.

The annual Conference of the Parties, just held for the 26th time, is all about getting countries to gradually ratchet up their measures to defuse global warming.

One week after it was removed from the advisory, officials returned Arkansas to the list of states with high rates of transmission. The advisory includes 38 states as well as Guam, announced Dr. Allison Arwady, the commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health.

The company’s filing comes as new infections are rising once again, driven mainly by hot spots in states where colder weather is driving more Americans indoors.

Chicago’s inspector general should conduct “a full factual investigation” of Ald. Jim Gardiner's conduct, the Chicago Board of Ethics determined.

When a fish the size of a 10-year-old child was pulled from the Humboldt Park lagoon earlier this month, the reaction quickly went from “Oooh” to “Uh-oh.” The angler had reeled a whopper of an invasive bighead carp accidentally stocked 20 years ago. Are there more?

City Council remap fight down to the wire. Jurors deliberate in the Kyle Rittenhouse case. Recapping COP26. Chicago climate change promises kept and broken. Exploring an NFT digital art gallery, and more.

It's been a “long time coming, a moment I had been imagining so intensely for so long," a bearded and shaggy-haired Danny Fenster said after landing in New York. "Surpasses everything I had imagined.”

A day after he announced his intention to leave the department, John Catanzara — the first-term president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7 — posted a picture of his personnel action request on his Facebook page, which shows that he has indeed retired from the CPD.

The plastics industry is expected to be putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than coal by the end of this decade according to a recent report by Beyond Plastic, an environmental advocacy group.

“Our goal in public safety is to have children no longer think about being shot at,” said Chris Patterson, who was tapped to lead the newly created Office of Firearm Violence Prevention. “Communities don’t feel safe because of the violence.”

In September, 4.4 million people left their jobs, according to the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Some say workers have spent the pandemic reevaluating their priorities and values, leading them to leave their places of work or demand more from their employers. 

As union contract negotiations wrap at John Deere, the used tractor business sees a boom. Ann Dwyer has details on that story and more.