In a new Illinois House speaker, scandal-tainted Commonwealth Edison may have a powerful new friend in its pursuit of locking in a controversial and profitable method of setting electricity rates that has cost consumers billions of dollars in the past decade.

As recently as 2019, Democratic House Speaker Emanuel Chris Welch favored a long-term extension of ComEd’s soon-to-expire and highly lucrative ratemaking template. Federal prosecutors connected passage of the 2011 bill that originally authorized those rates to the company’s long-running Springfield bribery scheme.

Majority Democrats in the Illinois House adopted procedural rules on Wednesday that the GOP complained are nearly identical to the suppressive ones they labored under in the decades-long rule of former Speaker Michael Madigan.

One month after celebrating new leadership and renewed openness, the Democratic-controlled House convened in its state Capitol chamber for the first time in nearly a year and voted 70-44 on operating rules for its new session. The rules include permission to conduct legislative work remotely by video because of the coronavirus pandemic.

While Gov. J.B. Pritzker said he remains optimistic about the state’s COVID-19 vaccine supply growing in the weeks ahead, Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle on Thursday rejected his plan to expand the pool of eligible shot recipients later this month.

Doing so would add over a million people to the free-for-all playing out across the city and suburbs for the coveted and incredibly scarce doses, creating “an even harder time” for those still waiting at the head of the line, according to Lightfoot and Preckwinkle.

The goal is to have every Illinois police officer and state trooper wearing a body camera by 2025, if a proposal passed by lawmakers in January is signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker this spring.

The body cam provision is one part of a huge criminal justice reform bill passed by the Legislature in January in response to protests that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last summer.

Chicago parents Willie and Brittany Preston have spent nearly a year wrestling with online school schedules for their six children, often with everyone hovered over devices around the dining room table.

Starting Thursday, they’ll get relief. Their youngest daughter, 4-year-old Lear, returns to class as the nation’s third-largest school district slowly reopens its doors following a bitter fight with the teachers union over COVID-19 safety protocols.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit full force, the Chicago area was losing jobs, except for downtown and far exurban areas.

That’s the bottom line of a new state report that suggests the regional economy steadily lost steam in the past decade, consistent with an estimated growing loss of population in the same period.

State agency officials responsible for giving out business aid grants said they had yet to punish any business for noncompliance with Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s COVID-19 mitigation orders.

Agency officials also said they could have better communicated with businesses about applications.

With carjackings through the roof and a 50% surge in homicides and shootings, Chicago aldermen are under renewed pressure from local police district commanders to use their precious aldermanic menu money on surveillance cameras and license plate readers.

Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20th) said each of her four police commanders — overseeing the Wentworth, Grand Crossing, Englewood and Chicago Lawn districts — have asked her to spend $36,000 of her $1.32 million in annual menu money on a camera and a license plate reader.

In the last decade, high-profile police killings — including George Floyd in 2020 — have shaken the nation and led to widespread protests and calls for reform, including hiring more nonwhite and female officers.

But there was little research to back that up. Now, a new study published Thursday in the journal Science, suggests that diversity in law enforcement can indeed lead to improvements in how police treat people of color.

The Pritzker administration is keeping details of a new privately funded corrections training facility in Macon County close to the vest.

Some Springfield-area state Representatives say moving state jobs away from the Springfield could violate state law.