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, but in an industry where the bottom line reigns supreme, tighter rules have caught on in only nine of the 50 states. (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 to gradually drop — from 12 million in 2007 to 11 million in 2009.

What is interesting about these numbers is how little they have to do with deportation policy under the Bush and Obama administrations. (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. Old Second Bancorp was burned by real estate loans, and in January 2009, the Treasury Dept. propped up the bank with the purchase of $73 million in preferred shares. The bank continued to take a nose dive, losing $60.6 million in the first half of 2009. (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 of immediate superior First Lt. Caleb Shinn. But the bigger news is Vilatoro’s substantive allegations. (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 projects without telling them beforehand. (more…)

The EPA’s new regional administrator, Jared Blumenfeld,  joined California officials deep inside an otherworldly realm of deadly caustic waste deemed the most toxic place on earth, reports Peter Fimrite of the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Iron Mountain Mine lies nine miles from the city of Redding at the north end of the Sacramento Valley. It was first tapped in the 1890s as a source of sulfuric acid and later for copper.  When miners uncovered vast deposits of pyrite, exposing it to oxygen, water and bacteria, it began breaking down and creating poisonous runoff. (more…)

The Environmental Protection Agency has started to regulate coal ash, a toxic byproduct of burning coal to produce electricity.  However, Micah Maidenberg of Progress Illinois suggests that the initial regulations are too limited. EPA did not deem coal ash as a hazardous material fit for regulation until December 2008, when 5.4 million cubic yards of ash spilled through the retaining wall of an Eastern Tennessee power plant. The sediment destroyed nearby homes and seeped into the Emory River, producing elevated levels of lead and thalium. (more…)