Stories by Associated Press

President Joe Biden plans to lay out new steps to stem a rising national tide of violent crime, with a particular focus on gun violence, as administration officials brace for what they fear could be an especially turbulent summer.

The delay comes as city officials wait for U.S. Treasury Department officials to decide whether they will give Mayor Lori Lightfoot the green light to use $465 million in federal funds to pay off high-interest debt the city incurred to balance its 2020 and 2021 budgets.

How much is nature worth? The Forest Preserve District of Cook County is about to find out. The district’s board of commissioners has thrown its support behind a proposal for a ballot referendum that would put a property tax increase for the preserves directly in the hands of voters.

President Joe Biden said Tuesday that his administration needs to “bring every resource to bear” to deal with natural disasters as huge swaths of the country have already endured extreme weather with the summer season just starting.

When U.S. law enforcement officials need to cast a wide net for information, they’re increasingly turning to the vast digital ponds of personal data created by Big Tech companies via the devices and online services that have hooked billions of people around the world.

The U.S. government is stepping up efforts to get younger Americans vaccinated for COVID-19 as concerns grow about the spread of a new variant that threatens to set the country back in the months ahead.

Chicago Public Schools is advising administrators against contacting police in non-emergency situations and will remove “criminalizing” language from its student code of conduct in an effort to help eliminate the school-to-prison pipeline, according to a proposed set of revisions.

The third time did not prove to be the charm for a proposal to build hundreds of apartments near Higgins Road and Cumberland Avenue. Instead, the City Council’s Zoning Committee voted 11-2 Tuesday to table the plan from GlenStar.

A Chicago man robbed two Iowa gas station employees at gunpoint and confined them in a cooler before he fired 10 shots at a sheriff’s deputy who responded to the crime, seriously wounding him, prosecutors said Tuesday.

Homeowners and businesses cleaning up from strong storms that produced two tornados Sunday night, including an EF3 that tore through the Naperville area, should be on alert for scammers, according to Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul.

A year after the launch of a program aiming to provide 100,000 Chicago Public Schools students with free high-speed internet for four years, city officials have announced plans to extend the program further.

An EF0 tornado, with maximum winds of 85 mph, touched down in Plainfield late Sunday, carving a 3.2-mile path to southwest Romeoville before dissipating near the Mistwood Golf Club, according to the National Weather Service.

In the eyes of the law, pets are property when it comes to divorce, but new ways of working out custody of the dog, cat or parrot have sprung up with special mediators and “petnups” to avoid courtroom disputes.

Two people were fatally shot and another 10 were injured this weekend on the city’s West Side. How a local anti-violence group is working alongside the community to prevent further violence.

Have you ever thrown out a broken bike or any of its spare parts? There’s a chance a local bike club scooped up that trash to make a work of art on wheels. We visit Logan Square to learn about the city’s bustling custom bike culture.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought Chicago’s nightlife scene to a halt. How businesses are faring — and hoping to rebound — now that the city is fully reopened. 

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday the NCAA can’t limit education-related benefits that colleges can offer their sports stars, a victory for athletes that could help open the door to further easing in the decades-old fight over paying student-athletes.

Chicago’s police superintendent said Monday that his decision to strip an officer’s police powers was tied in part to the officer’s ownership of a house on the city’s South Side where gunmen killed five people and injured three others. 

A cutback in flights for a major airline. Crain’s Chicago Business editor Ann Dwyer takes us behind the headline of that story and more business news.

After conducting a preliminary survey of Sunday’s tornado site in the western suburbs, the National Weather Service said it has determined the twister was an EF3, the strongest to touch down in the Chicago metropolitan area since 2015.

Though many Chicagoans found refuge in nature during the pandemic, the physical Nature Museum in Lincoln Park has been shuttered since spring 2020. 

Approximately 26,850 Chicagoans who lost their jobs or found their paychecks scaled back because of the COVID-19 pandemic applied for $137 million in grants designed to stave off a wave of evictions and keep the lights on across Chicago, officials said Monday.

Aldermen are poised to settle a lawsuit alleging that four paramedics were sexually harassed by fellow members of the Chicago Fire Department — three by the same person — and another was retaliated against for reporting that she had been harassed.

Some of the nation’s largest metropolitan regions have become increasingly segregated in the last 30 years, underscoring racial inequalities that have led to poorer life outcomes in Black and brown neighborhoods, according to a study released Monday.

More than 1 million people were under a tornado warning late Sunday as a line of storms ripped through the Chicago area. At least one tornado touched down and left in its wake a path of destruction through Naperville, Woodridge and Darien, according to the National Weather Service.

A report released last week indicates that deaths of people of color are severely undercounted and much more needs to be done to produce an accurate database that collects ethnicity information.