Daywatch: Chicago ward map proposal blasted as loss for city’s Latinos | Parents struggle with baby formula shortage

Good morning, Chicago.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s pick for Chicago’s casino was the subject of a six-hour hearing Monday that saw some aldermen complain of a rushed selection process. The special committee took no votes, as members in opposition of the gambling complex’s pending location in River West voiced fears that casino plans were advancing too fast and without enough transparency.

The alderman of the 27th Ward where the proposed complex is located, Walter Burnett, urged his colleagues to make haste with the opportunity to welcome a casino, even if he hadn’t initially expected it to be in his ward: “Nothing is perfect,” he said. “But also in life, you have to seize the moment.”

In other news, Lightfoot announced Monday that the city of Chicago will spend $500,000 to support abortion access for residents and people from neighboring states in anticipation of Roe v. Wade being overturned.

Finally, here’s an early look at where things stand in Chicago’s 2023 mayoral race: Who is in, who is out, who is undecided.

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Enough Chicago aldermen are in agreement on a new map of the city’s 50 wards that they will avoid a ballot referendum next month that would have let voters choose from between competing maps, sources said Monday.

The proposed map will create 16 wards with Black majorities and 14 with Latino majorities, sources said. That’s one fewer Latino ward than the City Council Latino Caucus spent months fighting to secure.

Republican candidate for governor Richard Irvin met with the media Monday for only the second time since announcing his candidacy. The Aurora mayor used the news conference at his suburban campaign headquarters to attack Gov. J.B. Pritzker over his administration’s handling of the November 2020 COVID-19 outbreak at the LaSalle Veterans Home.

But with Irvin rarely seen in public since becoming a candidate, reporters used the opportunity to ask if he had voted for Trump in the past or would do so if the former president makes a 2024 bid, and whether he supports a federal ban on abortion or the overturning of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision.

Despite pleas and shouts from reporters, Irvin did not answer any of those questions.

For months, many types of formulas have been tough to find partly because of supply chain issues and a recall of certain formulas made by north suburban-based Abbott Laboratories. Abbott has recalled those formulas amid an investigation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which has said it is looking into complaints of Cronobacter sakazakii infections among four babies who reportedly consumed powdered infant formula made at an Abbott facility in Sturgis, Michigan.

In the Chicago area, about 34% of formulas were out-of-stock at local stores the first week of May, up from 28% at the beginning of March, according to Datasembly, a company that scrapes data from retailers’ publicly available websites and apps to gauge product availability.

A powerful and painstaking investigation into fatal fires that exposed flaws in Chicago’s building code enforcement and the permanent scars left on survivors has earned the Chicago Tribune and the Better Government Association the highest honor in journalism: a Pulitzer Prize.

“The Failures Before the Fires,” a collaboration between Cecilia Reyes of the Tribune and Madison Hopkins of the BGA, was awarded the Pulitzer for local reporting.

Conserving energy and stargazing are two of many reasons people opt to turn their lights out at night, but over the next couple of days, experts are urging residents to also flip their switches between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. to help save the lives of millions of migrating birds.

Over the next two nights, the birds are expected to migrate across Chicagoland in one of the biggest migration movements of the season so far, according to the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors. But with migration comes lethal dangers, including starvation, predators and high-speed crashes into building windows.