South Side residents expressed frustration Thursday with the pace of replacing public housing that was torn down at the site of what will become a Mariano’s grocery store in Bronzeville.

Members of the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization protested at the northeast corner of Pershing Road and King Drive, the former home of the Chicago Housing Authority’s Ida B. Wells housing development.

While they said there’s need for a new grocery store in the area, there’s greater need to replace public housing that has been torn down over the past 16 years.

Chicago has done it again.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Choose Chicago said the city reached record-breaking tourism numbers last year as more than 50 million travelers came to visit.

The new number is a 3.5 percent increase from 2013 and brings the city closer to Emanuel’s goal of bringing 55 million visitors a year by 2020.

“These gains prove what can happen when we have a coordinated strategy to promote tourism and make the right investments in our airports, our transit system, and our infrastructure,” Emanuel said in a statement. “This progress also proves that our goal of attracting 55 million visitors per year is in reach.”

Gov. Bruce Rauner is pushing a controversial labor policy aimed at unions, but it’s unlikely the state legislature will adopt his idea. Instead, he said it should be up to cities and counties to take action.

Ahead of his first State of the State Address on Feb. 4, Rauner toured the state calling for “right-to-work” zones. Opponents say that idea would weaken unions by forcing them to provide free representation to nonmembers.

In a PowerPoint presentation to a college audience in Decatur, Rauner said local voters should decide upon right-to-work – which he calls “employee empowerment” – for their areas, but it’s pretty clear what he wants them to do.

Gov. Bruce Rauner’s administration on Thursday acknowledged that some state prisons will begin running out of money to meet payrolls in a month, another in what it said is a series of budget crises facing the state.

During an Illinois Senate hearing on depleted funds for state-subsidized day care programs, Rauner’s budget director, Tim Nuding, said the next financial crisis to face the state will occur in the prison system.

“The next one, we’re going to have a problem in our corrections system,” Nuding told the Senate Appropriations Committee. “They are also underfunded. Some of those prisons are going to start missing payrolls maybe as early as late March, early April.”

Every weeknight Bridget Krueger and her husband catch up with an 8 p.m. phone call because his new job is far away and he works long hours, so he has to spend the night in a hotel.

“It’s almost like being a single parent during the week,” Krueger, 46, said in an interview. But it’s better now than it was before, when her husband, Brian, was out of work. “Sometimes you have to do what you have to do.”

Since May, Brian Krueger, 48, has been working as a steamfitter at a power plant in Nelson, Illinois, about two hours from his home in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin. He drives out on Monday, works five or six 10-hour shifts, and heads home on Friday or Saturday.

Pharmaceutical companies are starting to look like banks in the 1990s.

A consolidation frenzy has broken out, driven by a range of forces that make size more important than ever. At this point, pretty much every company in the industry has to be considered either a potential predator or possible prey. And that’s roiling the waters along I-94 in Lake County, where metro Chicago’s biggest drugmakers congregate.

Lake Forest-based Hospira took its place in the category of prey yesterday, accepting a $17 billion buyout offer from Pfizer. The rich price rewarded long-suffering investors who stuck with Hospira through 10 years of ups and downs after it was spun out of North Chicago-based Abbott Laboratories. Manufacturing quality issues plagued the maker of generic injectable drugs and infusion devices, and company leaders never fully executed a growth strategy centered on generic versions of biologic drugs.

A temporary suspension of cost-saving changes to two of Chicago public pensions funds risks credit rating downgrades that could cost millions of dollars, the city’s chief financial officer said on Thursday.

Chief Financial Officer Lois Scott testified in Cook County Circuit Court that all three major credit ratings agencies have negative outlooks on Chicago’s ratings, largely due to a big unfunded pension liability that a 2014 Illinois law aims to ease for the city’s municipal and laborers’ funds.

Labor unions and retirees who are challenging the law, which took effect Jan. 1, have asked Associate Judge Rita Novak to temporarily stop it.

Illinois continued last year to spend tax dollars on health care services to dead people.

In a report released Thursday, Auditor General William Holland found that the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services paid out $3.7 million for medical services to 1,111 people who had been recorded as dead.

The new report comes after Holland found the state had overpaid $12.3 million for medical care to dead people the year before. The 2013 figures affected 2,850 deceased individuals.

The days of rock-bottom gasoline prices in Illinois could be numbered. With gasoline selling for less than $2 per gallon throughout much of the state, Gov. Bruce Rauner and his allies in the business community are talking about “restructuring” the state’s motor fuel tax to raise money to pay for a statewide construction program.

Documents obtained by the Quad-City Times’ Springfield Bureau outline the workings of a possible plan designed to finance an estimated $1.8 billion in road building and maintenance projects.

In addition to boosting the gasoline tax by 13 cents a gallon, the outline shows other revenue options under investigation include a 2 percent sales tax on food and drugs, increasing the cost of registering and titling cars by $20 annually and boosting the cost of driver’s licenses by $5 a year.

What’s bigger (and greener) than Chicago’s cryptic shoulders? All that money our tech companies brought in and cashed out with in 2014. According to our 2014 Annual Report, local tech companies raised $1.6 billion in investment and exits were at a high of $7 billion.

So what’s going on in Chicago in 2015? Just ask the 50 companies listed below. On our list you’ll find bootstrappers, fueled by a dream and 19-shots of espresso, companies that are just on the brink of their funding fantasies and several enterprises led by serial entrepreneurs with tons of cash and capital (all founded within the last 5 years).

Imagine you’ve invented a new technology, something that improves or even transforms an industry. It could be as revolutionary as the next iPad or as nugatory as the next Angry Birds. Whatever it is, people like it and want it.

Naturally, you’d want to be compensated for the time, effort and resources you spent working on developing your creation. That’s the basic idea behind intellectual property; if you create a unique product, you get exclusive legal rights to that work for a set period of time. Patents, copyright and trademarks are all types of intellectual property.

The laws surrounding intellectual property, however, are in desperate need of reform.