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...)

Chicago’s affluent Lincoln Park neighborhood has low levels of air pollution now — and will have even lower levels when a nearby steel mill moves to the poorer part of town. (more...)

Steve Daniels of Crain’s Chicago Business reports that Aurora, Illinois-based Old Second Bancorp Inc. will stop paying dividends to the Treasury Dept. under the TARP program. The arrangement highlights how non-Wall Street firms are still reliant on TARP and also the continued — questionable– generosity shown to even medium-sized banks. (more...)

A Chicago-based Army Reserve sergeant, 28 year-old Alejandro Vilatoro, has declared his reserve unit of 160 soldiers not ready to serve in Afghanistan. The Chicago Tribune’s Kristen Schorsch focuses on Vilatoro first telling the Tribune as well as Illinois U.S. Representative Luis Gutierrez and U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin — instead (more...)

Talk about passing the buck. California lawmakers approved a bill that would allow the release of prison inmates deemed permanently medically incapacitated, reports the Los Angeles Times. No, the state is not going soft on crime, nor is this about compassion or rehabilitation. It’s about money. (more...)

Bill McMorris of Illinois Statehouse News reports that the Dept. of Energy is experiencing a communications breakdown with two rural Illinois towns about plans for “FutureGen 2.0,” a less ambitious version of DOE’s plan for a commercial scale “clean coal” power plant.  Basically, DOE pencilled the towns in for big (more...)