The Chicago Reporter

State Rep. LaShawn K. Ford was indicted Thursday for making false statements to a bank and misusing funds intended to rehab properties in his district. He later blasted the charges as false, telling The Chicago Reporter: “I am not a person of scandal.”

Ford is accused of giving ShoreBank false tax returns to increase his line of credit by $500,000 and obtain a two-year extension on his line of credit, according to a release from the U.S. District Attorney's Office. He allegedly got the money that was supposed to be for fixing buildings and used it instead for personal expenses such as credit cards, car loans, mortgages and for his 2006 campaign for state representative.

Ford told us, it’s simply not true.

"I kept every project that I had with the bank,” he said. “There was never a property that I did not completely fix. They can't go to a property and say look at...

How many poor people are there in Illinois?

It depends on how you count.

Illinois is one of 14 states where a new way of measuring poverty reveals that more of our residents are poor. The Census Bureau recently put out a report (pdf) on the Supplemental Poverty Measure, a new way of calculating the poverty line that was released in 2010. By that measure, Illinois' poverty rate is 15 percent, more than one point higher than the standard poverty measure, which says 13.9 percent of our citizens are poor.

The new measure is called supplemental because it supplements what we already know. The old-school poverty measure is the one used to calculate who gets...

No minimum wage, no overtime pay and working 'round the clock? It may sound illegal, but it's perfectly legit when it comes to domestic workers. Nannies, housekeepers and caregivers don't enjoy the basic labor rights the rest of us have, and a new report shows just how much they're suffering because of it.

The average live-in nanny makes $6.76 an hour. Half of them worked long hours without breaks and a quarter were allowed less than 5 hours of uninterrupted sleep. On average, domestic workers make $10 and nearly a quarter of them make less than their state's minimum wage. These are just a few of the stats released in Home Economics: The Invisible and Unregulated World of Domestic Work, released by the National Domestic Workers' Alliance and researched by the University of...

Decisions, decisions. Gov. Pat Quinn is to decide on the schedule for the special election to replace former U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., who resigned citing health reasons. Several seasoned politicians have already expressed an interest in the post.

School Closings. The state legislature will debate Tuesday whether to extend the deadline for Chicago Public Schools to announce what schools will be closed this year. CPS asked to extend the deadline from Dec. 1 to March 31 to give the district additional time to decide which schools will be closed.

Losing the last resort. The Lakeview neighborhood has just one remaining single-room occupancy, or SRO, building since the rest have been snapped...