Illinois Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka, long one of the state’s most colorful and outspoken elected officials, died early this morning from complications of a stroke she suffered early Tuesday, her chief of staff said. Ms. Topinka was 70.

Ms. Topinka was preparing next month to be inaugurated for her second four-year term as comptroller following her successful re-election in November. Nancy Kimme, her long time chief of staff, said Ms. Topinka died shortly after 1 a.m. Topinka was taken to MacNeal Hospital in Berwyn Tuesday morning after feeling discomfort. She was undergoing testing and observation when she lost consciousness early Wednesday morning, according to an official statement.

In a public career that spanned more than three decades, Ms. Topinka was known for an eclectic persona that coupled her preferences for clothes shopping at resale stores and fondness for dogs with a blunt speak-her-mind attitude largely missing in today’s politics.

Attorneys representing thousands of retired teachers and state workers are poised to block an attempt to speed up a lawsuit over the state’s controversial pension overhaul.

In a move that could play a significant role in how Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner crafts his first budget this spring, the lawyers say Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s bid to put the case on a fast track is unwarranted.

“We do not believe there is any need to impose an emergency schedule,” said attorney John Fitzgerald, who is among a team of lawyers representing retirees. “We see no need to depart from the rules.”

In an expected but still potentially potent political move, the University of Chicago today announced collaborations with just about every major academic institution in town, an apparent effort at boosting its prospect of winning the Barack Obama Presidential Library.

Just about every major academic institution, that is, except one: the University of Illinois at Chicago, which also is competing for the library and research center.

Most of the collaborations laid out in a news release by U of C so far are pretty general. But with final bids due by Dec. 11, possible deals with Northwestern University, Chicago State University, the Art Institute of Chicago and others won’t hurt.

In a sign of real progress at Chicago Public Schools, the odds that ninth-graders will earn a bachelor’s degree by the time they hit their mid-20s has almost doubled since 2006.

That’s the bottom line of a report issued today by the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research that strongly suggests the city finally has begun to do some things right in educating kids. But the study underlines that much still must be accomplished.

The report’s key finding is that the share of entering high school freshmen who obtain a degree from a four-year college within 10 years has risen to 14 percent from an estimated 8 percent in 2006, when the consortium last crunched the numbers.

He may have claimed to beat what he believed was a government conspiracy to push him out of business — and won a $6.5 million settlement in the process — but now the owner of a Mount Prospect restaurant is abruptly closing up shop.

Tod Curtis, the Arlington Heights man who owns Ye Olde Town Inn at 18 W. Busse Ave. in Mount Prospect, said Monday that he was shutting down his business but declined to answer questions.

“Right now, I’m at the store. I’ll talk to you later,” he said by phone.

Jim Andrews is a firm believer in second chances. Now, it’s his dream that is getting another opportunity.

In a few weeks, the hot dog stand he previously owned on Chicago’s Near West Side will be reopened in Oak Park by his son. The moniker, menu and theme all will be the same. So will the business model; just like his dad, Deno Andrews plans to hire ex-offenders to offer them a livelihood outside of crime.

The difference this time is government officials aren’t trying to run the restaurant out of town because of its name: Felony Franks.

DuPage is the second largest county in the state, and Cronin’s well-known streamlining efforts cover 900 employees in 24 agencies with budgets totaling $300 million. “Everyone wants the best in their towns,” he said in a recent interview. “The goal is to put aside individual wants, take initiative and collaborate.” A major motive behind DuPage’s efforts is that similar to Illinois, current county health and pension costs are not sustainable.

Cronin believes certain public services such as transit, storm water and mosquito abatement lean toward regionalization. He also knows how difficult consolidation can be, and how personally people take some of their municipal services. In addition, employees working at these agencies worry about losing their jobs.

Nobody’s willing to say it yet. But after Ferguson, and especially after the Eric Garner case that exploded in New York yesterday after yet another non-indictment following a minority death-in-custody, the police suddenly have a legitimacy problem in this country.

Law-enforcement resources are now distributed so unevenly, and justice is being administered with such brazen inconsistency, that people everywhere are going to start questioning the basic political authority of law enforcement. And they’re mostly going to be right to do it, and when they do, it’s going to create problems that will make the post-Ferguson unrest seem minor.

The Garner case was a perfect symbol of everything that’s wrong with the proactive police tactics that are now baseline policy in most inner cities. Police surrounded the 43-year-old Garner after he broke up a fight. The officers who responded to that call then decided to get in Garner’s face for the preposterous crime of selling “loosies,” i.e. single cigarettes from a pack.

There are no frills to be found at www.killedbypolice.net. The site is just a simple spreadsheet. The information it contains, though, is invaluable. It is a list of every single person documented to have been killed by police in the United States in 2013 and 2014. There are links to a media report for every single death, as well as their names, ages, and when known, sex and race.

The site is so valuable because, as we’ve noted previously, there is no reliable national database for keeping track of the number of people killed by police each year. The FBI tracks homicides by law enforcement officers, but participation is voluntary, and many agencies don’t participate. As I noted last week, Eric Garner’s death at the hands of a New York Police Department won’t show up in the FBI’s statistics for 2014 because the state of New York does not participate in the program.

The FBI’s statistics for 2013 say that law enforcement officers killed 461 people that year. Killedbypolice.net apparently got its start last year. Using their system of monitoring by news report, they have calculated that police actually killed 748 people between May and December. That’s 287 more than the FBI reports for the whole year.