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“Hard things are hard,” said Jarrett, who has deep roots in Chicago and worked in the Obama White House. “The challenges presented were challenges that we were prepared to overcome, and we have. And so, no, I never heard a single time where President Obama wavered in his commitment to deliver this world-class center on this site and in this location.”

To further his goal of recruiting girls for sex, Kelly depended on his team to keep victims in line, Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Geddes said in her closing argument, which stretched for 6 1/2 hours over two days. They helped keep them confined to rooms in his Olympia Fields mansion, handed out copies of Kelly’s bizarre “rules,” carried backpacks filled with iPads Kelly used to film sexual encounters, and even offered condoms to one victim before she went in to see Kelly, Geddes said.

A state audit covering the early months of the pandemic, released in July, found IDES paid hundreds of claims to people whose birthdays would have made them older than 90 or younger than 14, sometimes just weeks old. Lawmakers have since directed state auditors to do a deeper review of IDES’ unemployment programs after Senate Republicans accused the administration of Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, of hiding the scope of problems.

Attorneys for the families of two brothers, Inmer Rivera Tejada, 39, and Rafael Rivera Tejada, 36, and their nephew Guillermo Rivera Tejada, 26, who died in an explosion along a bank of the Illinois River next to Starved Rock State Park on May 6, 2021, filed three wrongful death lawsuits against construction companies. The complaint claims that the companies left behind an explosive rod from a bridge demolition that occurred earlier in the year. The men found the rod and used it to prop up a cast iron pan, which the complaint says exploded after being heated by their campfire. One of the men captured the rod in a video call that he made minutes before the explosion. (Tejada family photo/Tejada family photo)