17-year-old Connor Bedard is a Chicago Blackhawk

Good morning, Chicago.

The wildfire smoke that arrived in Chicago on Tuesday took many by surprise, including weather experts. When it will leave remains unclear.

Forecasters had predicted improved conditions for Wednesday, but air quality and visibility remained the same or worsened, weather officials said. That’s because dynamics like location and weather patterns make the smoke’s path difficult to predict.

For the second day in a row, air quality was considered “very unhealthy” in the Chicago area, according to AirNow, a website combining county, state and federal air quality data. The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency forecast that air quality could improve today to “unhealthy for sensitive groups” like children and adults with respiratory conditions.

Gino Izzi, senior meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Romeoville, said it’s difficult to forecast when the smoke will completely clear up, as this is “uncharted territory.”

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Top Illinois officials agreed last year that police shouldn’t ticket students for minor misbehavior at school and pledged to make sure it didn’t happen anywhere in the state. But a bill to end the widespread practice fizzled this spring because of disagreement over whether it would accomplish its goal and confusion about whether police would still be able to respond to crime on campus.

Now, legislators and activists are regrouping with a goal of rewriting the bill and passing it in the next legislative session.

The Chicago Board of Education approved a $10.3 million contract with the Police Department to post school resource officers in around a quarter of district high schools in the coming school year. The vote came amid renewed scrutiny over the presence of law enforcement in schools and over who should decide if the cops are welcome.

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But the 57 school resource officers funded by the new contract don’t encompass the full scope of the Chicago Police Department’s footprint in Chicago Public Schools.

Mayor Richard Irvin has invited the Chicago Bears to consider relocating to Aurora.

In a letter from Irvin to the Bears organization, he touts Aurora’s history, location and track record of getting developments done. The letter comes on the heels of Bears President and CEO Kevin Warren saying recently that the Bears are “in a position to start exploring other places and opportunities and no longer considers Arlington Heights as a singular focus.”

At 13 years old, Connor Bedard was proclaimed “the future of hockey.” If so, the future begins now.

The Blackhawks took about a minute and a half after the clock started during Wednesday night’s NHL draft to select Bedard with the No. 1 pick, christening him as the “cornerstone” of their attempt to build the next Chicago sports dynasty.

Inspiration can strike like lightning or it can sneak up on a person, writes the Tribune’s Rick Kogan. Few know that better than Dawn Raffel.

She is an accomplished writer and her two most recent books grew from inspiration she found while researching the Century of Progress. That World’s Fair took place along the city’s lakefront in 1933-34 and provided some relief from the Great Depression with a variety of sights, sounds and other diversions, famously the fan-dancing Sally Rand.