And don't ever describe the offender either (right Cuck?): Two men were robbed by a group of suspects armed with handguns and rifles on the Northwest Side Thursday morning, Chicago police said. The two victims were standing on the sidewalk in the 3500-block of West Belmont Avenue at about 3:20 a.m. when police said a black sedan approached and four armed suspects got out. The suspects demanded the victims' property and then they fled westbound on Belmont Avenue, police said. No one was injured and no one is in custody. The robbery comes amid a CPD alert detailing more than a dozen similar arm ..read more

We didn't coin the term "doom loop" or it's cousin, "death spiral," but we were using it years and years ago. Maybe we helped popularized them a bit? Regardless, here's someone noticing what we noticed long ago: The downtown core of St. Louis, Missouri, which has not had a Republican mayor since 1949, finds itself trapped in a downward doom loop, plagued by vacant buildings, criminal activity, and shuttered businesses, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. The Journal paints a grim picture of a city center in distress, with boarded-up properties and occasional raids by emergency services s ..read more

All those GPS trackers and automated bus / train notifications to show how efficiently the CTA is burning through your tax dollars, and this happened last year? A Block Club Chicago investigation into the circumstances around Lyons’ death raises questions about the safety of CTA drivers as the agency is touting improved working conditions in an attempt to bolster its staff. Block Club’s reporting found Lyons sat in her bus unconscious for nearly an hour before someone eventually sought help. CTA supervisors neglected to check on her even though the bus never moved and subsequently failed to ..read more

Just in time to gin up panic for the fall: A worrying new strain of monkeypox with "pandemic potential" has been discovered by scientists. Researchers have called for “swift action” from the international community to avoid another outbreak of the virus, which is now officially known as mpox. It comes after a study tracked a new outbreak in a mining town in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Authorities in the country have for the latest been battling a variant of mpox called "clade 1" for around a year. This variant is thought to kill 10% of all people who become infected - and researchers h ..read more

Why stay? The city and many citizens hate us. The stress is through the roof. Every year you stay, you probably take at least three years off your life. The risk of a bankrupting lawsuit increases dramatically. Not to mention the continued damage to your already aging body. We suppose if you die earlier, there's more pension to go around, and you're all old enough to make your own decisions, but we can't see this effecting more than one hundred people ..read more

This would have been helpful a week or more ago, when it was the hot topic around all the media outlets: An alderman from the city’s Northwest Side has filed a complaint against the head of the independent agency that oversees the Chicago Police Department for comments she’s made about the fatal police shooting of Dexter Reed, the Chicago Tribune reported Tuesday. According to the report, Ald. Nicholas Sposato of the 38th Ward sent a letter to the city’s Office of the Inspector General criticizing Andrea Kersten, the chief administrator of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, for rec ..read more

Taxpayers are being soaked for more and more money for a failing product. Kids can't read, can't write, can't do basic math at their Grade Level. Schools have been turned into grooming factories.... And they want more money? If the Chicago Teachers Union gets its way with the mayor they helped elect, their next contract will boost the average teacher’s pay by half to $144,620 in the 2027-2028 school year. The average now is $93,182. Teacher pay rose more than $43,000 since 2012 – nearly triple the private-sector salary increase. If CTU’s demands are met, another $51,438 will be added to the ..read more

This will likely go nowhere: Mayor Brandon Johnson has his hands full with the migrant crisis, a persistent robbery surge, negotiations on a new teachers’ contract and an increasingly restive City Council. Now, he faces another potential, but much smaller, headache: a recall. A former technology salesman who lives in Lake View has formed a political action committee to raise money and at least begin the formidable challenge of putting a binding referendum on the Nov. 5 ballot asking Chicago voters whether they want the power to recall their mayor. Daniel Boland said the recall effort is abou ..read more

Continuing a long history of family corruption, in Chicago, Maywood and who knows where else: The Chicago Board of Ethics fined City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin $60,000 for violating the government ethics ordinance by using city resources to host a prayer service. In keeping with the rules governing the inspector general and Chicago Board of Ethics, Conyears-Ervin was not named in the report. However, sources confirmed to WTTW News that Conyears-Ervin was the subject of the board’s action. A spokesperson for Conyears-Ervin did not immediately respond to a text message from WTTW News see ..read more

But you'll never get a good answer: Honest question, why does COPA still have videos BEYOND the storage date? Outside of on-going court cases or some murder case, why are our videos still on their site!? Why are they above the law? We asked the same question, years ago when COPA was IPRA was OPS. The City never throws out a piece of paper, never deletes a computer file (aside from selected e-mails), and never completely closes a complaint against an Officer. We recall a few years back, we'd get those emails from the Department telling us that certain lists of Complaints were going to be rele ..read more