The escalating migrant disaster dominated political information in Chicago this week, with one alderperson pushing again on plans to accommodate asylum seekers in a West Side area home. Meanwhile, WTTW News investigated situations of Chicago Public Schools hiring fired Chicago cops to work as safety guards. NASCAR is returning to the streets of Chicago in 2024, and birders’ pleasure turned to shock when greater than 1,000 birds had been killed colliding with metropolis buildings.
Here are 5 tales you might have missed this week:
1. Ex-Northwestern Head Football Coach Suing University for $130M
Nearly three months after he was fired as Northwestern’s head soccer coach, Pat Fitzgerald is suing the college claiming he was wrongfully terminated amid a yearslong hazing scandal that allegedly took place below his watch.
The $130 million Fitzgerald is looking for contains $68 million that might have been paid via the rest of his teaching contract and one other $62 million in damages. Read extra
2. Illegal Building in Humboldt Park to Be Demolished, Museum Leader Apologizes
The building, supposed as an archive facility for the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture, has been on the middle of controversy for greater than a yr, after neighbors noticed it rising with no prior discover.
Objections ranged from aesthetics incompatible with the museum’s most important building — housed within the park’s landmarked Receptory and Stable, which the museum leases from the Chicago Park District — to the underhanded method during which the museum skirted Chicago’s allowing course of. Read extra
3. CPS Suspended 2 Security Guards Last Month. Both Were Named on Chicago’s Do-Not-Hire List
At least two CPS safety guards — each former Chicago cops who had been fired by the division — had been suspended final month, elevating questions on whether or not the district’s background examine system is working as supposed.
One man, who has been working as a safety guard at Lane Technical High School since 2021, was terminated in 2019 by the Chicago Police Department following allegations of sexual misconduct involving a minor, data present. The different is a Kenwood Academy safety guard who the police division ousted in 2012 due to a string of home violence incidents, in accordance with CPD disciplinary recordsdata. Read extra
4. Johnson Administration Struggles to ID Locations for Tents to House Migrants
Nearly a month after Mayor Brandon Johnson introduced plans to maneuver the hundreds of migrants being pressured to sleep on the ground of police stations and on the metropolis’s airports into massive tents, Chicago officers have but to establish a location to build what they name “winterized base camps.”
Cristina Pacione Zayas, Johnson’s first deputy chief of employees, stated officers had been nonetheless scouting places for the large tents, which might shelter, feed and look after as many as 1,000 migrants in a single location. Johnson and his aides have defended that plan as the perfect — and solely — possibility available to the town, given the shortage of available present buildings that may be transformed rapidly into shelters. Read extra
5. Massive Migratory Wave Leads to Mass Mortality as Birds Collide With Chicago Buildings
Early within the day Thursday, Chicago’s birding group was abuzz about “fallout” situations, with migrating birds passing over some factors of the town on the charge of 100,000 an hour. A mix of excessive depth migration and situations antagonistic to flying had funneled an awesome variety of birds towards Chicago’s lakefront the place they both got here to floor at locations like Jarvis Bird Sanctuary or hugged the shore as they continued their southern journey.
The pleasure later turned to shock as experiences of a special mass birding occasion started circulating. More than a thousand birds had been killed colliding with McCormick Place alone, as shared by Field Museum employees who usually collect useless birds from the conference middle’s grounds. Read extra
