The New York Times’ Mary Williams Walsh and Sheryl Gay Stolberg report that at a speech in Milwaukee yesterday, Barack Obama said he wanted Congress to pass $50 billion in public infrastructure spending and create a public infrastructure bank. The money would surely have ramifications for the Chicago region, as (more...)

Wayne Andersen, a retired U.S. District Court judge in Chicago, has started to preside over a federal board investigating the Gulf oil spill, reports the Chicago Tribune’s Ameet Sachdev. The public hearings will determine who was at fault when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. (more...)

Outside of the arid west, it’s a little difficult to grasp. But where rain is a merely a seasonal phenomenon, water is very much a commodity. As Mark Grossi writes in the Sacramento Bee, there’s enough skullduggery and swindling going on with California’s water to provide a storyline for a (more...)

The Asian carp will have its day in court today, reports the Chicago Tribune’s Joel Hood. Between Tuesday and Thursday, U.S. District Judge Robert Dow will listen to attorneys representing Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota who will argue that the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers must force Illinois to (more...)

If the economy needs another round of stimulus programs, as Paul Krugman and other economists have suggested, then renewing the federally funded Put Illinois to Work and similar state programs are a good place to start. (more...)

FEMA announced yesterday that $75 million in aid has been distributed to Northern Illinois flood victims, just two weeks after the Obama administration declared seven Illinois counties a federal disaster area. The AP reports that more than 45,000 flood victims have applied for aid and that the average aid reward (more...)

Adam Doster of Progress Illinois reports that Illinois has declined Dept. of Health and Human Services money for abstinence-only sex education. (more...)

The trade off between safer eggs and the risk of a deadly salmonella outbreak is just pennies a dozen, according to a in-depth look at the industry by P.J. Huffstutter in the Los Angeles Times. Slightly stricter guidelines in California have helped egg producers avoid bacterial contamination in recent years, (more...)

Local officials in California are going head to head with federal authorities over a program requiring local law enforcement to cooperate with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency’s attempts to deport undocumented immigrants. (more...)

The Chicago Tribune’s Dahleen Glanton reports that Illinois has “bucked a national trend” with an increase in its 2009 illegal immigrant population. A Pew Hispanic Center study finds that they were 525,000 illegal immigrants in Illinois last year compared to 475,000 in 2008. Nationally, the number of illegal immigrants continues (more...)