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Happy Friday. Before you take on the weekend, check out these stories from WTTW News.
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Daniel Biss appears on “Chicago Tonight” on April 9, 2026. (WTTW News)
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After last month’s win in the Democratic primary, congressional candidate and Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss is gearing up for the Nov. 3 general election, where he will face Republican John Elleson and independent Delila Barrera.
In a stacked March 17 primary, Biss won with 29.6% of the vote, beating out second- and third-place candidates Kat Abughazaleh and Laura Fine, along with 13 other contenders.
If elected, he would represent Illinois’ 9th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. The district includes parts of Chicago’s North Side, Evanston, Skokie, Glenview, Gilmer and Algonquin.
Biss spoke with “Chicago Tonight” to reflect on his win and what comes next for his campaign.
On why his message resonated with voters:
“...In this moment, this moment of emergency with Donald Trump as the president and the fundamental values and priorities of our community under threat, we need somebody with two qualities: the ability to fight and win inside of government and the ability to win out in the streets as an activist...This moment will not be solved without a movement of people rising up across the country to demand something different.”
On how he plans to reach the roughly 70% of voters who didn’t cast their ballots for him:
“I’m very clear and humble about this: 70% of the people voted for someone besides myself, and so I’m spending time now reaching out across the district, working to bring people together to unite not only the Democratic Party and the progressives in our community, but our whole community, because, listen, there’s so much at stake in this moment. Every day brings more alarming, terrifying, horrifying, sickening news from Washington and we need to fight back together, unified.”
On lessons learned as mayor of Evanston:
“I feel that this is really a gift, the experience of having been the mayor of a city and having managed a municipal budget is gonna be really important for understanding how federal law is going to interact with municipal governance...We’ve tried to use Evanston as a kind of laboratory to test out policies that really ought to go national. And I’m excited to go to Washington and say, ‘Hey, listen, we did this in Evanston, it worked. It made an impact. It’s time to bring it to D.C.’”
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Sponsor Message
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Make your plans to celebrate in April with the Poetry Foundation, offering a full roster of FREE public programs, including:
- a poetry reading with Chicago’s own National Book Award winner Patricia Smith;
- a live performance by chamber music collective D+Composed;
- a library packed with more than 40,000 books of poetry for readers of all ages.
Visiting Hours: Wednesday, Friday, Saturday 11 AM–5 PM; Thursday 11 AM–6 PM
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Nurses gathered near Rush University Medical Center in the Illinois Medical District on April 9, 2026, in support of unionizing efforts. (Eunice Alpasan / WTTW News)
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Nurses at Rush University Medical Center rallied across the street from the hospital in the Illinois Medical District on Thursday in support of efforts to unionize.
Rush nurses, in collaboration with National Nurses United and its affiliate National Nurses Organizing Committee, filed a petition Wednesday with the National Labor Relations Board for a union election, according to union organizers.
During the rally, nurses echoed a desire to have a seat at the table when it comes to decisions about patient care and working conditions.
“It is not just for us, it is for the future of the young nurses as they move forward,” Rush medical observation nurse Keeley Binion said during the rally. “It is not just mentoring them, but it is showing them that they have power and that they deserve a seat at the table.”
Some backstory:
By forming a union, nurses are hoping it will lead to improved staffing ratios, increased pay, improved benefits and more transparency from management, Rush nurses told WTTW News.
“I would like to see more voices being heard instead of being brushed off all the time,” said Rush emergency room nurse Angela Brown. “We could actually bring issues and they actually sit down with us and take us seriously.”
When filing an election petition, workers need to show that at least 30% of co-workers support holding a union election, according to National Labor Relations Board regulations. If the union receives a majority of the votes cast at the election, the NLRB will certify the union and the employer must bargain in good faith over working conditions.
Nurses have previously won contracts at other hospitals such as Cook County Health’s Stroger Hospital and Provident Hospital, UChicago Medicine, Jackson Park Hospital and Community First Medical Center, according to Brenda Langford, a National Nurses Organizing Committee board member and Cook County Health nurse.
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Former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan leaves the Dirksen Federal Courthouse after the first day of his corruption trial on Oct. 22, 2024. (Andrew Adams / Capitol News Illinois)
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Michael Madigan’s landmark corruption case returned to Chicago’s federal courthouse Thursday, where his attorneys asked an appellate court to overturn the powerful former Illinois House speaker’s multiple convictions following a four-month trial that ended early last year.
Attorneys for Madigan and the federal government presented their arguments before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals during a hearing Thursday inside a 27th-floor courtroom in the Dirksen Federal Building.
Both sides had 20 minutes to make their arguments before the three-judge panel, which will decide whether to uphold or toss out the convictions rendered in one of the most high-profile criminal trials held in Chicago in recent decades.
While Madigan, who is serving a 7.5-year sentence at a federal prison in West Virginia, was not present in court Thursday, members of his family did attend the hearing, including his daughter, former Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan.
More context:
Madigan’s attorneys in their appeal claim the government’s prosecution of their client “pushed federal bribery law over the boundaries set by the Supreme Court.” They took issue with “erroneous” instructions given to jurors over the definition of the term “corruptly” and alleged federal prosecutors engaged in a “blind pursuit of Madigan.”
Madigan’s appeal team argued the government’s claims — that he agreed to take some unspecified action on future, unspecified legislation — are far too vague to support a conviction.
“The government did not prove a promise to act on a specific question or matter,” attorney Amy Mason Saharia told the court. She added that while bribery cases often involve trips to Las Vegas or designer watches, the only benefit offered to Madigan was that his political allies received work.
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More From WTTW News:
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Mayor Brandon Johnson nominated Anjanette Young, a social worker who was handcuffed while naked during a botched 2019 Chicago Police Department raid, on Thursday to serve on the city’s police oversight board.
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Back in the Day: April 10, 1977 - Led Zeppelin Plays Final Chicago Show
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In Led Zeppelin’s storied history as one of England’s finest rock bands, they played Chicago 17 times. Their first appearance in the Windy City was in 1969, when they performed at the Kinetic Playground on February 7 of that year. (They’d return to the venue six more times over the next nine months). The last Chicago show the Robert Plant and Jimmy Page-led group appeared at happened on this day, 49 years ago, at Chicago Stadium. It was Easter Sunday, and the band was finishing out a run of four shows. One had to be cut short due to the Chicago Blackhawks needing the stadium the following day, and Page’s bout with food poisoning marred another. But Sunday’s concert to
close out the run went off without a musical hitch. They opened with “The Song Remains the Same,” closed with “Stairway to Heaven” and encored with “Rock N Roll.” Though the band was scheduled to play again in 1977, they had to cancel due to the unexpected death of Plant’s 5-year-old child from a stomach virus. In 1980, when they planned a return to the city, the death of drummer John Bonham forced Led Zeppelin to disband. When they reunited with a new percussionist in 2007, they never trekked back to Chicago.
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Other News From Around Town
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Every Friday, WTTW News highlights our favorite stories about Chicago from the local and national press.
Volunteers Turn a Chicago Man’s Recordings of 10,000 Concerts Into an Online Treasure Trove (AP)
"On July 8, 1989, a young music fan named Aadam Jacobs, with a compact Sony cassette recorder in his pocket, went to see an up-and-coming rock band from Washington for their debut show in Chicago.
After a blast of guitar feedback, 22-year-old Kurt Cobain politely announced to the crowd at the small club called Dreamerz: “Hello, we’re Nirvana. We’re from Seattle.” With that, the band, then a quartet, launched into the riff-heavy first song, “School.”
Jacobs surreptitiously recorded the performance, documenting the fledgling band in raw, fiery form more than two years before Nirvana’s global breakthrough with the album “Nevermind.”
Jacobs went on to record more than 10,000 concerts, with increasingly sophisticated equipment, over four decades in Chicago and other cities. Now a group of devoted volunteers in the U.S. and Europe is methodically cataloging, digitizing and uploading them one by one."
10 Years After: How Cubs Went From Lovable Losers to 2016 World Series Champions (Chicago Sun-Times)
"Before Anthony Rizzo pocketed the glorious final out in Cleveland, before Jason Heyward gave that rain-delay speech to his team, before Miguel Montero launched his epic grand slam against the Dodgers, before Javy Baez found the basket in left against the Giants, before the trade for closer Aroldis Chapman, all the MVP heroics of Kris Bryant, the emergence of “Professor” Kyle Hendricks and a million other good and wonderful things — not the least of which were the signing of lefty Jon Lester and the hiring of skipper Joe Maddon — there was Oct. 12, 2011.
Whew, that was a long sentence.
But the 2016 Cubs’ World Series championship was a long time in the making, and it started with a “yes” from Theo Epstein to take the reins of the club as president.
'I don’t believe in curses,” Epstein declared a couple of weeks later at his official introduction in Chicago. “[But] I do believe that you can be honest and upfront about the fact that certain organizations haven’t gotten the job done, haven’t won the World Series in a long time.'"
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What's your favorite book about Chicago?
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Email DailyChicagoan@wttw.com with your responses and your answers might be published. Here's what you had to
say:
"'Chicago: A Novel' by Brian Doyle bc it's such a fun coming of age story and relatable " — @muffins.at.dawn
"'Algren' by Wisniewski" — @ohsarabee
"'Devil in the White City:' it has architecture and suspense. A great Chicago historical novel!" — Gail B.
"'Night Moves' by Jessica Hopper" — @jlweber.bsky.social
"'Chicago: City on the Make' by Nelson Algren. From the very first sentence it's a beautifully descriptive love letter about a fascinating city full of gritty characters and history. A place we can't help but love in spite of it all." — Victoria P.
"'Malort!' By Josh Noel It's a tasty adult beverage shaped by Chicago's history, Swedish legacy." — @pastrystout
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Newsletter Producer: Josh Terry
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