Mayor Brandon Johnson got the message on the first day of budget hearings that his $300 million property tax increase wouldn’t fly.

But just in case it wasn’t abundantly clear, the City Council delivered that message again Thursday in the loudest of political terms.

The Board of Education met Thursday in a special meeting to discuss the closure of seven charter schools and reaffirm their promise to safeguard the rights of LGBTQ and immigrant students, in the midst of a tense standoff between the mayor and the Chicago Public Schools’ chief Pedro Martinez.

For several months, there’s been speculation about whether or not Martinez would be ousted, but the focus of this meeting was to address the impending closure of almost half of the schools in the Acero charter network.

Before the sun rose on a cold Wednesday morning in January 2019, Fidel Marquez agreed to a life-altering assignment as a cooperating witness in a criminal case the government was building against his colleagues at electric utility Commonwealth Edison and powerful Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan.

Marquez agreed to the request without consulting an attorney or any of the family members in his mother’s Hammond, Indiana, home where a pair of FBI agents showed up at 6 a.m. on Jan. 16, 2019. Marquez stood with the agents in the foyer as they played him a few recordings of phone conversations with his colleagues they’d intercepted via a wiretap on Marquez’s cell phone.

More than 52,000 Illinoisans will hear that some or all of their medical debt has been cleared by the state soon.

Letters will be sent out next week telling individuals in nearly every county throughout the state that their debts have been eliminated. The average amount of debt cleared for an individual is $1,349, with one Illinoisan having $242,136 in debt cleared.