Working Lunch newsletter
Plus: Heavy lifting: This boulder aficionado helped unearth a 50-ton rock at O’Hare • Cook County awards $191 million in loans to bridge property tax payout gap
 
 
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Working Lunch

Monday, September 21, 2026

 

Federal Reserve official says fighting inflation likely to be ‘painful’

Austan Goolsbee, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said in a speech in London that the Fed is facing a series of persistent supply shocks that have driven up inflation, including higher oil prices from the Iran war and tariffs.

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Heavy lifting: This boulder aficionado helped unearth a 50-ton rock at O’Hare

Over the last two decades, the 45-year-old excavator operator has amassed a collection of several hundred rocks. But none are as large as the one dug up at O’Hare.

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Cook County awards $191 million in loans to bridge property tax payout gap

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle’s office awarded stopgap loans to 32 villages, library and school districts worth $191 million, an effort to dull the impact of this fall’s property tax delay.

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Hobart Mayor lauds windfall payments for Amazon data center

Mayor Josh Huddlestun detailed Hobart’s financial windfall and how the “economic impact payments” are being doled out for the benefit of the local community while beefing up city coffers.

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Potential Democratic candidates race to respond to AI threat amid President Trump’s dismissals

On Friday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order to accelerate implementation of a California law that calls for independent oversight of AI companies and the use of “kill switches.”

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How DraftKings uses AI to target gamblers likely to lose

How DraftKings Uses AI to Target the Gamblers Likeliest to Lose

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Overflow crowd rejects plan for Amtrak maintenance yard near Rate Field: ‘Nasty real estate deal’

Amtrak’s proposed maintenance yard would stretch for about 2 miles along Canal Street on the current Union Pacific railyard just west of the Chicago White Sox’s Rate Field.

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‘It’s really just about making it higher’: Gary airport begins work on new 100-foot tower

The need for a new air traffic controller at the Gary/Chicago International Airport came into sharp focus 11 years ago.

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