* Crain’s…

Commonwealth Edison wants to up the ante for data center developers looking to cash in on the artificial intelligence wave.

The electric utility serving Northern Illinois wants to dramatically raise the deposit required for massive projects to discourage speculators from wasting its time and engineering resources on projects that may never come to fruition. […]

Not long ago, a data center requiring 100 megawatts would be considered huge. Large industrial projects, such as an electric vehicle battery factory or computer chip plant, might require 100 to 200 megawatts. The massive Illinois Quantum & Microelectronics Park, which envisions being home to multiple quantum-computing companies, could eventually require 350 megawatts. […]

ComEd currently charges a $1 million refundable deposit for customers seeking 50 megawatts or more. The current amount already is likely the highest in the country. Under an application filed yesterday with the Illinois Commerce Commission, ComEd seeks a base deposit of $1 million for the first 50 megawatts, plus $500,000 for each 100 megawatts. A 1 gigawatt data center would pay $5.5 million.

* Capitol News Illinois…

For 60 years, SkillsUSA Illinois has held workforce development competitions for young people entering the trades. For 60 years, there has never been an all-female team competing in the architecture and construction team competition. […]

SkillsUSA Illinois’ first all-girls team — Aubrey Levin, Kayhl Miles, Catelin Wesley and team captain Amyla Walls — did not know they were breaking boundaries until after they had finished their competition this spring in Peoria.

The team from the Bloomington Area Career Center reacted to the news with shocked laughter, followed by near immediate dread as they anticipated the heightened expectations and scrutiny of their work this title would bring.

“They’re going to be like, ‘You’re the first all-female team,’ and I’m going to be like, ‘Please don’t look at my electrical,’” Levin said, half laughing.

Although it may seem late for the existence of the first all-female team, it is consistent with the construction industry demographic trends in Illinois. Over the past 10 years, women have held fewer than one in 10 construction jobs. Prior to 2021, fewer than 5% of new construction apprentices in Illinois were women, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor.

*** Statewide ***

* Tribune | Top candidates for the US House in Illinois’ 2nd, 7th, 8th and 9th districts for the 2026 election: The domino effect that began in late April with U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin’s announcement that he wasn’t seeking a sixth term has caused two members of Congress — U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly of Matteson and U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Schaumburg — to declare their interest in Durbin’s seat. That means their spots in Congress are opening up. In addition, much of the north and northwest suburbs will see their first new members of Congress in nearly three decades as U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky is retiring at the end of her term.

*** Statehouse News ***

* WAND | Violent crime reporting proposal arrives on Pritzker’s desk, awaits signature: Police departments would also be required to document when each crime occurred and the status of criminal cases. “The purpose of this is to streamline the process to get away from the clearance rate number that we’re using right now that is a bit opaque and doesn’t provide true justice for people,” said Rep. Kam Buckner (D-Chicago). “The amendment also brings ICJIA and the Illinois State Police to neutrality on the bill.”

*** Chicago ***

* Crain’s | Chicago-area home prices rising at four times the nation’s: In the Chicago metro area, where home prices used to be among the slowest-rising in the U.S., prices in May went up at four times the speed of the nation. That’s according to reports from Illinois Realtors and the National Association of Realtors, released separately June 23. A month ago, Chicago-area prices were going up at more than three times the national pace, and before that, they were going up at more than double the U.S. rate.

* Tribune | City mum on what documents it provided ICE in Streets and Sanitation subpoena: After first asserting it did not turn over personal information about city workers to U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Law Department is now hedging on how exactly the administration responded to a federal subpoena for employment eligibility forms. Johnson Corporation Counsel Mary Richardson-Lowry told reporters last week the city’s response to an ICE subpoena for the forms of Streets and Sanitation employees that determine whether they can legally work in the U.S. contained no personal information about those workers. But on Monday, a Law Department spokesperson declined to go that far when the Tribune asked about what documents ICE did receive and what information they contain.

* Sun-Times | Mayor Brandon Johnson credits tipped minimum wage law with fueling growth in Chicago: Samoora Williams, an organizer with advocacy group One Fair Wage, bartended in Chicago from 2019 to 2022. She made a base pay of $10 an hour; additional tips did not bring her up to minimum wage, she said on Monday. Williams wasn’t aware of the federal law mandating employers pay minimum wage if tips don’t bring workers to that baseline. One Fair Wage organizer James Rodriguez worked as a host at a Lincoln Park Italian restaurant for two years. He said the eatery paid tipped workers minimum wage if they didn’t reach that threshold with tips. But “a lot of workers don’t know they’re supposed to be making that,” said Rodriguez. “These are so many cases of abuse of the law. The city doesn’t have the manpower to go after those restaurants.”

* Sun-Times | Patients evacuated from Weiss Memorial Hospital over heat suffer again during heat wave at new facility: Then the heat came. Last Tuesday, Weiss evacuated its entire inpatient unit after failing to fix the hospital’s air conditioning system as temperatures inside the building rose to 90 degrees and a heatwave moved into the city. Hospital leaders blamed the problem on an aging air conditioning system that had not been maintained by previous owners, which forced the 239-bed acute care hospital to transfer or discharge 45 patients. The AC may not be fixed for two more weeks, they said.

* Tribune | Indicted on fraud charges, ex-Loretto Hospital exec wages bizarre PR campaign from Dubai: And while the news release, dated Sunday, claimed Ahmed is still based in Chicago, he actually fled to Dubai before the first charges were filed and has not returned to answer to either case. A warrant for his arrest remained active as of this week, court records show. The news release was the latest in a strange public relations campaign that appears aimed at rebuilding Ahmed’s image and possibly courting the attention of President Donald Trump, who has recently granted executive clemency in a number of notable Chicago-area cases, from Gangster Disciples boss Larry Hoover to former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

* WGN | ‘Potential death’: Chicago firefighters, alderman raise concerns with OSHA-backed policy change: “There’s going to be a lot of buildings burning down and potential death,” said Patrick Cleary, President of Chicago Fire Fighters Union Local 2. “That’s what’s gonna happen.” The specific issue Cleary is fired up about involves new tactical guidelines affecting the first fire engine to respond on scene to a fire. According to the new policy, the officer on smaller, four-man rigs responding to fires must become the incident commander, with two other firefighters performing specific duties.

* Block Club | Wicker Park Neighbors Fight ‘Atrocious’ Rat Problem In Dean Park. So Far, The Rats Are Winning: The city has taken some action to remedy the issue this spring, with 311 requests showing the Department of Streets and Sanitation baited the park with rat poison three times since May, including on Monday. Ald. Daniel La Spata (1st) said his office is also working on improving sanitary conditions in the surrounding area. But neighbors have continued to see rats in the park after the first two baitings, with some digging new holes over the weekend along the fence near Gutstadt’s apartment, Gutstadt said.

* Crain’s | Can buying pot be as easy as buying groceries? A Chicago company aims to find out.: Verano Holdings, which has 157 stores across 13 states, is opening a pilot location in Cave Creek, Arizona, that’s more like a convenience store than the traditional dispensaries that most companies operate. This type of setup is rare in the tightly regulated industry, where most products are kept behind the counter and handed over by staff after ID checks.

* Tribune | PETA names Chicago the country’s most vegan-friendly city: Brody said PETA chose Chicago because it has become so easy “to enjoy classic Chicago dishes” in vegan form, citing Buona’s Italian beefless sandwich and Kitchen 17’s vegan deep-dish pizza. At Runaway Cow, Eichhorn offers fully vegan beef sandwiches and Chicago dogs. Rafael Tenorio, who lives in LaGrange, has been vegan for 10 years. He stopped eating meat after he began volunteering at animal shelters, joining his daughter in the lifestyle. He has found it easy to maintain in the Chicago area. Most restaurants, he said, can accommodate vegans even if their menus are not designed for them.

* WBBM | Chicago journalism icon Craig Dellimore retires after 42 years at WBBM: “I think what made everyone think twice was, frankly, the civil unrest of the 60s, and going forward, because people realized that you didn’t have a variety of voices, that they didn’t see it coming,” said Dellimore. “I think that’s really what it was. People didn’t see all of this coming, and said maybe we ought to either train and or hire people who had a different perspective.”

* Fox Chicago | What’s happening in Chicago this summer? A lot—from jazz nights to burgers and beer: This summer, Millennium Park and the Shedd Aquarium are offering fun and unique experiences open to the public from May through August. While Jazzin’ at the Shedd requires a ticket, all concerts and movies at Millennium Park are free. Check out the highlights below for details on event dates, performers, and what to expect.

* Block Club | West Side’s ‘Unsung’ Blues Legacy Gets Its Due In New Austin Exhibit : “Unsung Austin-West Side Stories,” organized and presented by the Chicago Blues Museum, explores 70 years of musical history on the West Side through large reprints of archival photos, banners and posters along with extensive descriptions. The free exhibit is hosted in the lobby of the park’s cultural center, 5610 W. Lake St. This is the first time the West Side is getting an exhibit that chronicles its unique history and contributions to music, said Gregg Parker, founder of the Chicago Blues Museum and curator of the exhibit.

*** Cook County and Suburbs ***

* Daily Herald | It’s so hot you could fry an egg on the buckling pavement — asphalt eruptions dot suburbs: Heat indexes above 100 degrees and humidity create perfect conditions for asphalt and concrete blowouts, IDOT explained. When there’s no more room for the pavement to expand, it pushes up. Bartlett drivers were down to one lane along Route 59 north of Stearns Road on Sunday afternoon, when the roadway buckled. More street meltdowns occurred Monday in Buffalo Grove.

* Daily Herald | Homer Glen names former Willowbrook police chief, real estate agent, as trustee: Schaller worked for the Willowbrook Police Department for 28 years, including five years as police chief. For the last two years, he has been a real estate broker in Orland Park. Schaller said his extensive background in government will make him an effective board member, and said he’s worked hand in hand with various municipal departments during his tenure in Willowbrook. Schaller said he is confident and ready to get to work on the Homer Glen Village Board. “I’m hitting the ground running,” he said.

*** Downstate ***

* Sun-Times | For older adults, a robust network of friends, relatives key to better health outcomes, study finds: The analysis was led by Lissette Piedra, a professor of social work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who found three types of social networks emerged among older adults. Those in an “enriched” network — a larger social circle filled with diverse relationships that included friends and relatives from different social circles — reported better health scores and lower rates of loneliness, Piedra said. Researchers used a health indicator model in which adults in the study ranked their own health.

* WIFR | ‘Starved Rock Killer’ Chester Weger dead at 86, reports say: Chester Weger, the man convicted of slaying a woman at an Illinois state park in 1960, has died, according to a report from Shaw Local. He was 86 years old. Weger, also known as the “Starved Rock Killer,’ spent nearly 60 years in prison for killing Lillian Oetting, one of three women found dead in St. Louis Canyon.

* WGLT | Bloomington council OKs updated massage business regulations in effort to halt illicit operations: “Really, what we want is compliance, and we want to get a regulatory structure in place,” said City Manager Jeff Jurgens. “We understand that we have a lot of great massage therapists out there and establishments, and we understand that the illicit ones are likely not going to go through this process. But we will use this regulatory process to shut them down.” Two weeks after tabling an original proposal, the city council on Monday unanimously approved an adjusted ordinance to include application fees and other regulations for massage establishments.

* WCIA | Effingham man accused of human trafficking after pastor, others help victim escape: “A trusted third party who is the pastor of a local church brought the juvenile to the police department to make the report,” officials said. “The pastor had previously attended an informational meeting for community leaders on how to be an advocate for victims, which was led by Effingham Police officers.” After the initial report, the victim received immediate medical attention and was given protective assistance from child-victim crisis professionals.

*** National ***

* WaPo | Supreme Court for now allows Trump to deport migrants to ‘third countries’ : The court’s order, which drew a sharp dissent from the three liberal justices, was the latest of several allowing President Donald Trump to move forward with a major change in policy while litigation on the issue continues in lower courts. Each has been made as part of the court’s “emergency docket,” which means they are decided based on truncated court filings, not oral argument, and the justices do not always explain their reasoning.

* NYT | The Global A.I. Divide: Nations with little or no A.I. compute power are running into limits in scientific work, in the growth of young companies and in talent retention. Some officials have become alarmed by how the need for computing resources has made them beholden to foreign corporations and governments. “Oil-producing countries have had an oversized influence on international affairs; in an A.I.-powered near future, compute producers could have something similar since they control access to a critical resource,” said Vili Lehdonvirta, an Oxford professor who conducted the research on A.I. data centers with his colleagues Zoe Jay Hawkins and Boxi Wu.

* Rockwood Notes | A Profile: Nicholas J. Pritzker: While his grandsons Jay (the financier) and Bob (the operator) are often credited with the family’s vast wealth, and his son A.N. was the first real dealmaker, Nicholas played a different, but arguably more fundamental, role. It’s not a story of high profile deals but of perseverance through relentless hardship and tragedy, pieced together from an autobiography he wrote entirely from memory. He was the family’s first lawyer and, inspired by the Rothschilds’ centuries of success, unified the family’s assets under a shared ethos that would define the family for nearly a century.

* The Atlantic | The Archaic Sex-Discrimination Case the Supreme Court Is Reviving: By invoking Geduldig, the Roberts Court is doing what the Supreme Court of earlier eras did: supplying tortured legal logic to justify long-standing hierarchies. In Plessy v. Ferguson, for example, the Court insisted that laws that required white and Black individuals to ride in different train cars were not impermissible racial discrimination—the rules applied to and burdened everyone, after all. That logic sounds like the thread in Skrmetti that maintains that bans on gender-affirming care don’t constitute gender-identity discrimination because the bans allow transgender and cisgender kids to access hormones and puberty blockers—just not for treatment of gender dysphoria. In Korematsu v. United States, the Court claimed that the internment of Americans of Japanese descent did not constitute racial discrimination; the policy was about national security. That reasoning tracks with Skrmetti’s insistence that the health-care bans do not discriminate on the basis of sex or gender identity; they are about age and medical procedures.

* WaPo | The plan to vaccinate all Americans, despite RFK Jr.: The American College of Physicians, one group involved in the talks, said Kennedy’s recent changes to the ACIP and lack of transparency in the process “puts at risk decades of progress in vaccine development, access, and public trust, and contributes to confusion and uncertainty.” If the panel departs from long-standing recommendations, “we will need to look elsewhere for reliable information guided by the best-available evidence to guide the use of vaccines,” said Jason Goldman, the group’s president, in a statement.