Chicago-native Sendy L. Soto became  the city’s first chief homelessness officer. Part of her new role will be to devise a five-year plan to end homelessness. 

Elected officials and developers gathered at the Thompson Center on Monday to help mark the start of Google’s $280 million makeover of the former state government building.

The Field Museum ushered in a new era of scientific exploration with Monday’s unveiling of the Chicago Archaeopteryx.

Meet Chicago’s first chief homelessness officer. Birds are modern-day dinosaurs — the Field Museum says it now has a rare fossil to prove it.

Nearly 100 people are claiming in a new lawsuit that they were subjected to sexual abuse and assault as the hands of correctional officers and staffers at facilities in Chicago and across the state.

A spokesperson for the Chicago Police Department said CPD would fully cooperate with the probe, which comes approximately 100 days before the Democratic National Convention comes to Chicago.

The vast majority of Alzheimer’s cases occur after age 65. But research published Monday suggests that for people who carry not one but two copies of the gene, it’s more than a risk factor, it’s an underlying cause of the mind-robbing disease.

Only 13 specimens of Archaeopteryx — and one special feather — are known to exist since the first Archaeopteryx fossils were discovered in 1860. Most come from the same deposit of Solnhofen Limestone in Bavaria, Germany.

Shake any family tree, and a few skeletons are bound to fall out — that’s as true for birds as it is for people. Except that for birds, the wacky cousin lurking in one of those branches is T. Rex.

The Field formally announced to the world what had become a not-so-well-kept secret: The museum had acquired just the 13th specimen known to exist of Archaeopteryx, a fossil often described as the “missing link” between dinosaurs and birds.

WTTW News sat down with paleornithologist Jingmai O’Connor and talked about dinosaurs, birds, the Chicago Archaeopteryx, evolution and why studying fossil birds is more important now than ever.

According to Chicago Police Department figures, 31 people were shot in 24 separate shootings between 6 p.m. Friday and 11:59 p.m. Sunday.

In all, the 34 appointments Johnson made between May 2023 and April 2024 that require confirmation by the Chicago City Council reflect the city’s racial diversity, as measured by the 2020 census, more closely than the appointments made by his two predecessors, former Mayors Lori Lightfoot and Rahm Emanuel.

The reversals can be seen as marking the end of a half-century of epic battles and schisms over LGBTQ involvement — not only in the United Methodist Church but in U.S. mainline Protestant denominations overall.