Hannah Meisel
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Before closing out its truncated spring legislative session earlier this month, the General Assembly approved language that will be put to voters in November, asking whether Illinois should amend its constitution to add a so-called “Workers’ Rights Amendment” to guarantee the right to collectively bargain in a state with a long tradition of strong organized labor. But those behind a new lawsuit filed Thursday hope to prevent the question from being printed on the ballot in the first place, claiming the proposed amendment would conflict with federal labor law.
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GovernmentBreaking a decades-long tradition in shared sacrifice, the continued deepening of partisan animosity in the state legislature left Democrats voting by themselves Wednesday night on a plan to begin paying back the $4.5 billion of federal debt Illinois accrued over the last two years as the COVID-19 pandemic brought the state’s unemployment system to the brink.
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Five-hundred new COVID patients were admitted to Illinois hospitals between Sunday and Monday — a number that represents a quadrupling of COVID patients hospitalized in Illinois since a late-October lull in the pandemic after the state’s battle with the Delta variant in late summer.
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A Chicagoan who’d been fully vaccinated against COVID and gotten a booster shot is the first confirmed case of the virus’ Omicron variant, state and city public health officials announced Tuesday evening.
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As Gov. JB Pritzker attempts to overhaul how the state reimburses nursing homes with Medicaid patients — a move they say will engender more accountability and equity — an unpublished report paints a complicated picture that neither fully bolsters Pritzker’s argument for an overhaul nor the resistance from the nursing home industry warning its cash-poor facilities will close en masse.
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GovernmentTwo weeks after Texas effectively banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, a Democratic state lawmaker in Illinois is proposing a law based on Texas’ model — but turned on its head.
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Nuclear giant Exelon will spare its power plant in Byron from slated closure Monday after the Illinois Senate passed massive energy and climate legislation that includes nearly $700 million in ratepayer subsidies to keep three of Exelon’s unprofitable nukes afloat.
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Dems Forge Ahead With Redistricting Redo While Community Advocacy Groups Claim Deja Vu And GOP HopesJust three months after Democrats pushed new legislative maps through the General Assembly in the waning days of spring legislative session, lawmakers are back in Springfield on Tuesday to fix those same maps, lest a federal court take mapmaking power out of their hands one way or another.
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Gov. JB Pritzker Thursday morning announced a reinstated mask mandate for all Illinoisans aged two and over in public indoor settings, in addition to making Illinois the seventh state in the nation to require teachers get vaccinated against COVID-19.
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GovernmentProlific anti-COVID mitigation attorney Tom DeVore on Monday filed suit over Gov. JB Pritzker’s mandate requiring all students, faculty and staff at Illinois schools wear masks in the face of COVID’s more contagious Delta variant spreading across the state.