For almost 40 years, Illinois’ per capita corruption convictions were on average 40 percent higher than the rest of the nation, according to data from the Public Integrity Section Criminal Division at the U.S. Department of Justice.

Regression analysis reveals that if Illinois had the same level of corruption per capita as the national average during that same period, the state’s poverty rate would have been lower by roughly 0.7 percentage points—that’s nearly 88,000 fewer Illinoisans living under the Census Bureau’s poverty line. The poorest Illinoisans tend to be younger, Black, unmarried with young children and less likely to have a college degree.

House Republicans are calling on Gov. JB Pritzker to unfreeze the Blue Collar Jobs Act ahead of his annual budget address Wednesday to help Illinois attract companies and create jobs.

“Nothing helps the middle class more than creating good paying jobs,” said state Rep. Keith Wheeler, R-Oswego. “That’s precisely what the Blue Collar Jobs Act does. It sends a message that Illinois is open for business.”

Talks that produced an agreement to gradually reopen Chicago Public Schools were a “cauldron of tension” that, if repeated, could block the reopening of high schools if the district won’t agree to changes to remote learning, union leaders warned Friday.

Schools CEO Janice Jackson has called reopening high schools a “top priority” and said she is “beginning those discussions” with the CTU, using as a starting point the deal that set the stage for the return of kids in pre-K, special ed clusters and students kindergarten through eighth grade. But Jackson has ruled out any changes to remote learning. She’s not about to reduce the amount of mandatory screen time or adjust schedules, arguing she wants students in school “more — not less.”

With Gov. J.B. Pritzker preparing to deliver his budget address Wednesday, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are sounding off on the few details that have been released.

Some at the Illinois statehouse and some in the U.S. Congress are wondering how federal dollars could impact the plan.

The Illinois Department of Employment Security defended itself Wednesday over a series of issues that have affected the agency’s ability to provide services to people during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At a meeting of the Illinois Senate’s Labor Committee, IDES interim director Kristin Richards said a combination of employment shortages and a lack of funding and resources have hampered IDES’ ability to respond to the surge in unemployment claims that have come up due to the pandemic.

They say money is fungible.

Nowhere is that more evident than at Potbelly. In the past six months, the publicly traded sandwich chain tapped the taxpayer-subsidized Paycheck Protection Program and later new and existing stock investors while paying millions back to JPMorgan Chase, its longtime bank that clearly wants less exposure to this client.

Chicago police supervisors have acknowledged they didn’t have permission from U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Illinois or anyone else for their officers to make popcorn, brew coffee and lounge in the congressman’s South Side campaign office during last summer’s civil unrest, according to records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.

Eighteen officers — including a lieutenant and two sergeants — have been handed suspensions for occupying Rush’s office at 5401 S. Wentworth Ave. late in the day on May 31 and early June 1, according to more than 700 pages of police records released in response to a public records request.

Daisy Gamboa worries her son Diego, an eighth grader at Grimes Elementary, a Chicago public school on the Southwest Side, has missed a lot of learning since the fall of 2019.

Between the pandemic school shutdown, remote classes and the 2019 teachers strike, Gamboa said Diego has been shortchanged.