Former state Rep. Michael Madigan, 78, handpicked his successor on Sunday when he voted to fill the House seat he resigned from on Thursday, marking the end of his 50-year career in the state General Assembly.

Out of 10 candidates, Madigan voted for Edward Guerra Kodatt, a 26-year-old employee of Madigan’s 13^th ward organization on the southwest side of Chicago, who is of Ecuadorian descent and bilingual.

After almost 10 years of improvement, public corruption in Illinois spiked in 2019, and the state remains the second most corrupt in the nation, while Chicago still is the most corrupt city, according to a new report from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“We’re making progress, but we ought to be making progress a lot faster,” said former Chicago Alderman Dick Simpson, a political science professor at UIC and principal author of “Corruption Spikes in Illinois,” the 13th anti-corruption reportproduced by the university since 2009.

Thanks to better-than-expected revenue and some budgetary maneuvers, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker says the state will finish the current fiscal year with more money than projected.

In his budget address last week, Pritzker described previous revenue estimations as “conservative,” explaining that income and sales taxes had provided the state with billions of dollars more than had been foreseen.

Gov. JB Pritzker signed a criminal justice omnibus bill backed by the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus Monday, abolishing cash bail, overhauling police certification and reforming use-of-force standards among numerous other provisions.

Pritzker signed the legislation, House Bill 3653, referred to as the “Safe-T Act”, during an event at Chicago State University alongside members of his administration and lawmakers from the Black Caucus.

Chicago remains America’s most corrupt city, and Illinois the third-most corrupt state, according to an annual report from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The report, co-authored by UIC professor and former Ald. Dick Simpson, is based on an analysis of the public corruption statistics published by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Anjanette Young, the social worker who endured a humiliating botched raid conducted by Chicago police officers in 2019, has filed another lawsuit against the city, alleging Mayor Lori Lightfoot and several more high-ranking city employees “became involved in the conspiracy to cover up these grotesque human rights violations.”

The nine-count lawsuit was filed Friday in Cook County Circuit Court and named the city and 12 CPD officers as defendants.

The city is reexamining a ban on single-container beer sales at downtown area liquor stores.

Members of a council committee this month agreed with three liquor store owners who said the restriction puts them at a disadvantage with competitors within walking distance but outside the boundary lines of the ban.