The city plans to build a $75 million training center at Richard J. Daley College to prepare students for jobs in the technology-driven manufacturing field.

Construction on the 105,000-square-foot Daley Center for Excellence on the school’s campus near 76th Street and Pulaski Road in the Ashburn neighborhood is expected to begin next spring and be open to students by August 2017, the mayor’s office announced Sunday.

The training center will replace several temporary structures that have housed the manufacturing program for decades.

In the dozens of articles you probably read in the last few months about our fiscal crisis, what’s the universal omission? A solution.

No analyst, officeholder or commentator has offered one. No combination of survivable tax increases and spending cuts can solve Illinois’ consolidated state and local fiscal insolvency. There is none — unless debt, including pension debt, is cut (and economic growth restored).

Maybe we can kick the can for a few more years. Pensions assets can be bled down to nothing. Maybe there’s a feasible solution outside of bankruptcy for some of the individual, insolvent municipalities that overlap parts of Illinois. But, particularly for the Chicago area, the numbers, taken as a whole, are insurmountable, which we have documented inside and out on this site. It’s just the math, which we won’t repeat now. Chicago, most importantly, will go bankrupt.

Illinois Senate Republican leader Christine Radogno gives her perspective on what’s next for the state and whether a short-term stop-gap budget agreement can be reached.

Years of free spending, poor planning, and inept leadership left Illinois in financial ruin, with meager revenue, a mountainous debt and no clear solution.

Think that sounds like today? It was actually the case in Illinois 175 years ago, when the state was reeling from failures in internal improvements, state banking and a void in leadership.

Whether the crisis of the early 1840s was worse than today’s mess is a matter of debate. But apparently in Illinois, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Illinois residents who buy Blue Cross and Blue Shield health care coverage through the state insurance exchange may be in for Obamacare sticker shock, if proposed rate hikes by the largest insurers in Texas and Oklahoma are any indication.

Texas and Oklahoma are possible harbingers of Blue Cross’ prices on the Illinois exchange because all three health plans are owned by the same company, Chicago-based Health Care Service Corp. Blue Cross is the most popular insurer on the Illinois exchange.

In Texas, Blue Cross and Blue Shield is seeking increases averaging 53.7 percent across its Affordable Care Act plans, according to documents posted online by the federal government. In Oklahoma, Blue Cross and Blue Shield is seeking rate increases that average 49.2 percent. It is far from certain if the rate increases will hold up on review, or how much they might change.

When a pair of undercover IRS agents posed as potential buyers for a North Side bar last fall, they claim its longtime owner spilled the secret to his success.

Bottom line: He learned everything he needed to know about business working for the Chicago Police Department.

“I was police for 32 years,” he allegedly told them. “I worked in a subterfuge unit and, in a subterfuge unit, I worked undercover and I worked in organized crime, so you saw how organized crime hid their ownership in certain businesses. So, I structured mine the same way. I structured and structuring it the same way, it’s worked out.”