Causes behind the recent surge of train accidents in Chicago. Incumbents in Illinois’ congressional delegation are facing challenges from within their own parties after campaign season opened yesterday. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker is commending Chicago for handling what he calls an “unmanageable” influx of asylum seekers.
Chicago’s controversial plan to build a tent city to shelter migrants in the Brighton Park neighborhood is on hold until a final environmental impact report is done. Just one person has filed to run to replace Kim Foxx as Cook County’s top prosecutor. The Bears take on the Vikings tonight on Monday Night Football following last week’s late collapse against the Detroit Lions.
The village of Oak Park has taken in about 160 migrants that were living in Chicago. A nonprofit in St. Louis wants to resettle hundreds if not thousands more. “There’s a tremendous need for employees,” said Jerry Schlichter, a civic leader and attorney in St. Louis. “If you look around the country at cities that are growing, it’s primarily from immigrants and children of immigrants. That’s what we’re trying to build here — to increase our population, make a more vibrant St. Louis and a more div...
The November 2024 elections are still a year away, but the political season leading up to that vote officially gets underway today. Some City Council members want to see a pilot guaranteed basic income program become permanent. And officials are encouraging Chicagoans to buy local this holiday season.
The co-owner of Calumet Fisheries on Chicago’s Southeast Side says they intend to rebuild after a fire earlier this week. Members of the Chicago Bears served traditional Venezuelan fare to nearly 200 asylum-seeking Venezuelan migrants ahead of Thanksgiving. The city of Chicago plans to open its warming centers this week when temperatures drop to 32 degrees or below.
Lauren Viera’s new city guide to Chicago doesn’t read like a typical guidebook – no 72-hour itineraries or explanatory advice on how to ride the CTA. “ The 500 Hidden Secrets of Chicago ” is mostly just lists of unique places. Five dance clubs, five farmers markets, five nature outings, five small museums, five high-end cocktail bars, five city myths – totalling up to 500. “I'm not a fiction writer,” Viera said. “I'm very bad at making stuff up. So this is really just in my mind reporting times ...
AAA recommends departing for Thanksgiving travel before 2 p.m. or after 6 p.m., and other travel tips. A Chicago group focused on helping formerly incarcerated people has found that cash pilots can help with housing instability and health. The Chicago Bears came up short on Sunday – but the team won the hearts of Venezuelan migrants who they served lunch to.
The Village of Oak Park voted narrowly to reallocate unused COVID recovery funds to shelter about 160 Venezuelan migrants through early February. The owner of about 150 Illinois Burger Kings has taken the witness stand in the corruption trial of former Chicago Alderman Ed Burke. The zones where flowers and vegetables across Illinois can survive and thrive are shifting.
For Thanksgiving, the food may be taken care of, but what about the feels? Jordan Wimby AKA “The Melanin Martha” is a chef and culinary preservationist. She talks to host Erin Allen about prioritizing identity, community and healing when you’re cooking and creating space during the holiday season.
Colleagues remember fallen Chicago firefighter Andrew Price as one of their department’s “very best.” Evanston’s mayor cast the tie breaking vote to greenlight Northwestern University’s $800 million football stadium rebuild. We hear one of the secretly recorded phone calls of former alderman Ed Burke played at his corruption trial yesterday.
The Chicago Fire Department says one person is dead after a freight train struck a FedEx semi-truck Monday morning. Former Chicago Alderman Ed Burke read the riot act to a Field Museum employee after his goddaughter didn’t hear back about an internship. Federal officials say the CTA Yellow Line train that crashed into a snowplow last week should have had a longer braking distance.
A young gay man named Matthew Shepard was murdered in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998. Over a decade later, Congress passed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Sean Fader wanted to document the lives and deaths of LGBTQ+ people who were killed in that decade. He drove thousands of miles around the country to photograph sites of murders, and he has collected those photos in his project “Insufficient Memory.” In this episode, host Erin Allen talks to Fader about queer arch...
Mourners will gather for the funeral of the Chicago firefighter who died in the line of duty last week. Chicago officials say increased case management will help ensure migrants don’t end up homeless in the face of new limits on shelter stays. Jurors in the federal corruption trial of former Chicago Alderman Ed Burke are expected to start getting an earful of wiretapped phone conversations this week.
Former Chicago Alderman Ed Burke and his two co-defendants presented their opening statements at federal court. Cook County prosecutors say they will no longer let 10 Chicago cops testify in criminal cases after they signed up for an extremist group. The CTA Yellow Line train crash that injured 38 people yesterday occurred when a faster moving Yellow Line passenger train ran into a slower moving snow removal vehicle traveling in the same direction on the same track, according to the Chicago Fire...
When Jessica Alvarado Gamez moved to Chicago earlier this year, she drove around to get her bearings. She couldn’t help noticing how close she came to cyclists. “I can easily go into the painted bike lanes,” she said. Some Chicago cyclists have observed the same problem, resulting in the refrain, “paint is not protection.” Alvarado Gamez is WBEZ’s Roy Howard fellow. She focuses on data reporting, so she dug into city data to understand why cycling in Chicago is so dangerous and what cyclists wan...
A new 60-day shelter deadline puts pressure on the need for permanent housing for asylum-seekers. The Peoples Gas Rate hike was slashed by over $100 million yesterday. Winter is coming, and the Illinois Department of Transportation is telling drivers to ‘get it together.’
Gov. J.B. Pritzker earmarked $160 million toward helping the thousands of asylum seekers now sleeping at Chicago police stations and O’Hare Airport. The Chicago Fire Department reports at least 19 people are injured as a result of a Yellow Line train crash at the Howard Street switching station. Northwestern University surprised the college football world this season: the team has a chance to make it to a postseason bowl game by winning one of their final two games.
The Chicago area is home to the country’s largest Palestinian American community. There are more than 18,000 Palestinians living in Cook County alone, the most of any county in the nation, and that’s only according to the available Census data. “Experts say that’s likely a huge undercount of the true population,” said WBEZ data reporter Amy Qin. “Some experts estimate the actual Palestinian population here in the Chicago area to be five times larger than what the Census has.” Qin analyzed availa...
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s first city budget passed. There are few details on a 60-day limit for migrants staying in Chicago city shelters. The Illinois Commerce Commission will issue its decision on the Peoples Gas $402 million dollar rate hike today.
The Chicago Police Department’s budget for next year will be nearly $2 billion, a slight increase from this year. The father of the suspect in last year's Highland Park mass shooting wore a shirt reading "I am a political pawn" when he showed up at the Lake County courthouse today to begin serving his jail sentence, leading a judge to threaten him with contempt. Chicago Bears quarterback Justin Fields is expected to return to the field on Sunday after missing the previous four games due to a thu...
Can artists make the world a better place? “We have seen over and over again that the existing structures and hierarchies aren't working, the models aren't working,” said Megha Ralapati, the director of the fellowships program at CEC ArtsLink, “and artists are uniquely trained and experienced to dismantle, to understand them from a new angle – a new vantage point – to bring nuance, to bring a more 360 degree perspective that isn't binary and isn't reductionist.” “That's really speaking to the tr...
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s first city budget will be voted on today. Chicago’s police oversight board says the city is not accurately tracking how much is spent each year on policing. There’s a new initiative with the mission of informing young people about PrEP to prevent H-I-V.
The Biden Administration’s National Climate Assessment is out today, and the Midwest is expected to grow warmer and wetter if the U.S. does not cut emissions. The head of Northwestern University is appointing a new advisory committee on preventing antisemitism and hate. The number of migrants arriving in Chicago has slowed for the first time in months.
Angela Allyn started the Old Lady Project because she didn’t see enough aging women on Chicago’s stages. “I’m kind of reclaiming old,” Allyn says. “I don’t understand why old is great for houses or valuable paintings, but it’s not okay for humans.” She solicited scripts and screenplays with the goal of producing a couple staged readings. But in the 2023 submission cycle, she received over 600 scripts from around the world. Between the overwhelming response and the recent success of older adults’...
Chicago Police arrested more than 100 protestors – who were calling for a ceasefire in Gaza – during a massive demonstration in downtown Chicago yesterday. A new rule aims to prevent Chicago cops from joining hate or extremist groups. Evanston leaders voted to delay a vote on Northwestern’s $800 million stadium rebuild.
Hundreds of Jewish people from across the Midwest rallied at Ogilvie Transportation Center Monday morning, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and leading to more than 100 arrests, according to organizers. A 39-year-old Chicago firefighter died Monday morning after battling an extra-alarm fire in Lincoln Park. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is announcing Doctor Olusimbo Ige will lead the city’s public health department, replacing former health commissioner Allison Arwady.
In 2016, Chicagoan Tracy Occomy Crowder went on a mission to find an adventure novel with a Black boy protagonist for her son. She wanted him to see himself in a book that wasn’t only about the heaviness of being Black in America, and she came up empty-handed. “You might have to write it,” a bookseller told her. So she did. This year, she published her debut middle grade novel, Montgomery and the Case of the Golden Key. In this episode, host Erin Allen talks to Occomy Crowder about representatio...
Coming up - a new assessment shows major barriers in the city of Chicago’s mental healthcare system. Owners of a west suburban grocery store float plans to expand into areas with poor access to fresh food. Former U.S. Representative Adam Kinzinger on his new book.
Illinois lawmakers approved a measure that benefits those with existing cannabis transporter licenses, but Gov. J.B. has not committed to signing the bill yet. Deerfield-based Walgreens is laying off about 5 percent of its corporate staff, the company’s second round of staff reductions in recent months. Calumet Fisheries has been closed by the Chicago Department of Public Health after failing a health inspection.
How are religious leaders in Chicago explaining the conflict in Israel and Gaza to their congregations? The Rundown’s Adora Namigadde spoke with a Muslim shaykh, a Christian reverend and two Jewish rabbis – one a self-described Zionist and the other a self-described anti-Zionist. We hear from all four. Namigadde tells host Erin Allen how each of them is processing the conflict, and how each wants their congregations to pray, learn and take action.
