Jobs and the economy are two things voters said are the most important things to them after the November election.

What is Illinois doing to create much-needed jobs? Some say not enough when it comes to the price startup companies have to pay to become open for business in the state.

Alex von Lugossy turned her passion for repurposing furniture into a career. She started her business this fall with her mother and fiancee.

Illinois lawmakers may have one more chance to approve a state-run health insurance marketplace during the fall legislative session that starts Wednesday, and they are under pressure from an end-of-the-year deadline and a pending court decision.

Supporters of creating a state-run website say the impending deadline to receive up to $300 million in federal funding plus a U.S. Supreme Court decision on tax credits due in the spring create urgency. Currently, Illinois residents purchase insurance on the national HealthCare.gov website.

Gov. Pat Quinn, who’s set to leave office in January, supports the idea, and the Illinois Senate passed a bill last year. Sponsors are now readying a House version. “I’d like to see the House take it up and pass it,” the Democrat said at a wellness fair Saturday.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Tuesday announced his administration had issued the first city licenses to two ride-sharing companies, as lawmakers in Springfield consider voting this week to override Gov. Pat Quinn’s veto of a bill that would impose tougher statewide regulations on the industry.

The city issued “Class A” licenses to San Francisco-based ride-sharing companies Lyft and Sidecar, Emanuel’s office said. The Class A is a less-strict type of license, for companies with driver averages of no more than 20 hours per week behind the wheel.

The “transportation network provider” licenses are a centerpiece of the ordinance Emanuel shepherded through the City Council in May, part of a package he said would help level the playing field between drivers who use their personal cars to pick up people requesting rides via phone apps and traditional cabbies who complain about competition from ride-share services that are less strictly regulated.

Illinois lawmakers may have one more chance to approve a state-run health insurance marketplace during the fall legislative session that starts Wednesday, and they are under pressure from an end-of-the-year deadline and a pending court decision.

Supporters of creating a state-run website say the impending deadline to receive up to $300 million in federal funding plus a U.S. Supreme Court decision on tax credits due in the spring create urgency. Currently, Illinois residents purchase insurance on the national HealthCare.gov website.

Gov. Pat Quinn, who’s set to leave office in January, supports the idea, and the Illinois Senate passed a bill last year. Sponsors are now readying a House version. “I’d like to see the House take it up and pass it,” the Democrat said at a wellness fair Saturday.

Illinois lawmakers Tuesday faced a parade of school officials, some begging the state to make them winners and the others fearing they’d soon be made losers.

Lawmakers did neither.

After an Illinois House hearing Tuesday to air opinions from across the state, lawmakers will continue to consider a controversial proposal aimed at sending more money to poorer Illinois school districts. It has drawn the ire of many suburban officials whose districts would stand to lose money as a result.

The City of Chicago and Chicago Public Schools pay more than $100 million annually on interest rate swaps. These deals became particularly costly after the financial crisis when a host of risks embedded in the deals materialized. An investigation by the Chicago Tribune details many ways that banks misled CPS about the risks involved with these deals and finds that the complex financing schemes involving auction rate securities and swaps likely could cost CPS at least $100 million more than plain vanilla bonds.

When asked at a press conference last week why he wasn’t trying to recover any of this money, Mayor Rahm Emanuel responded, “There’s a thing called a contract.”

Yes, there is a thing called a contract, and the banks broke it when they unlawfully steered CPS into these deals without making adequate disclosures about risk. For example, even though Bank of America officials knew that the auction rate securities market was headed for a “meltdown,” they still pushed CPS into the deals anyway without disclosing their concerns.

After watching one Illinois House race where their candidate led by just a dozen votes on election night, Democrats appear to have retained their veto-proof majorities in both chambers of the General Assembly.

State Rep. Kate Cloonen, D-Kankakee, widened her lead from 12 votes to 114 votes over Republican Glenn Nixon in the 79th House District on Tuesday after Kankakee County officials finished counting provisional and late-absentee ballots.

Nearly three-quarters of the district’s precincts are in that county — there are smaller portions in Will and Grundy counties — so Cloonen’s lead was expected to hold. Final vote counts are expected Wednesday.

The No. 2 official at the Justice Department delivered a blunt message last month to Apple Inc. executives: New encryption technology that renders locked iPhones impervious to law enforcement would lead to tragedy. A child would die, he said, because police wouldn’t be able to scour a suspect’s phone, according to people who attended the meeting.

At issue is new technology that Apple, Google Inc. and others have put in place recently to make their devices more secure. The companies say their aim is to satisfy consumer demands to protect private data.

But law-enforcement officials see it as a move in the wrong direction. The new encryption will make it much harder for the police, even with a court order, to look into a phone for messages, photos, appointments or contact lists, they say. Even Apple itself, if served with a court order, won’t have the key to decipher information encrypted on its iPhones.

Illinois school districts ended up nearly $1 billion in the hole in 2013, dipping into reserves or borrowing to pay the bills, according to the latest finance data, painting a grim picture of the state’s public school system.

While statewide school deficits aren’t unusual — some have been much higher over the years — the red ink comes just two years after districts as a whole were in the black and at a time when a fight over state education dollars has become more fervent and widespread.

State Senate Democrats are pushing to overhaul how Illinois pays for schools, with hearings scheduled Tuesday on proposals that could fundamentally change how state money is disbursed to target needier districts. Several hundred downstate districts could get more money while wealthier districts — many in Chicago’s suburbs — could lose dollars.