* ICYMI: Chicago hemp businesses face uncertain future as Illinois ban nears. Fox Chicago…

- Beginning Nov. 12, intoxicating hemp-derived THC products will no longer be permitted for sale at ordinary retail locations, including convenience stores, gas stations and breweries.
- Those products will instead be restricted to state-licensed cannabis dispensaries.
- “The biggest difference from going into a cannabis regulated dispensary and then just any smoke shop, they’re selling products that they can’t tell you where it came from, when it was grown, when it was packaged. Where here, everything is so much more consistent. We can track that product from the seed to the sale. We also have dosage, potency. You know, all of the lab facts are listed right on those products,” said Dominique White, a regional director at Ivy Hall.

* Related stories…

• WGEM: Up in smoke: Adams County hemp farmer destroys harvest ahead of new regulations
• Axios: THC drinks disappearing from Illinois liquor stores Nov. 12

* At 1:30 pm Gov. JB Pritzker will deliver remarks at an IBM Quantum announcement. Click here to watch.

*** Isabel’s Top Picks ***

* Crain’s | CVS breakup bows to pressure from pharmacy groups and states, including Illinois: Owning the insurer, the pharmacy benefit manager and the drugstore made CVS Health a target for state lawmakers, including in Illinois. Analysts say its planned split signals the end of that model.

* AP | AI data centers took a beating in the midterm elections. A reckoning may be ahead for tech giants: According to data from AdImpact, campaigns large and small spent more than $380 million on television ads mentioning data centers. Democrats outspent Republicans on the topic by a more than 3-to-1 ratio.

*** Statehouse News ***

* Evanston Now | Bailey defiant in defeat: On Election Day, Bailey, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, took a whopping 85% of the ballots in Clay, in southern Illinois. Unfortunately for Bailey, Clay County only had 5,546 voters. Statewide, the former legislator lost to Democratic incumbent JB Pritzker by nearly 900,000 votes, 60% to 37%. […] Surveying the political wreckage, Illinois GOP chair Bob Grogan said “The voters rebuked the Republican party.”

* SJ-R | Pritzker names new Illinois labor director as Flanagan exits: Mike Lazzeri took over the Illinois Department of Labor on Nov. 1 after Jane Flanagan left the agency at the end of October. Gov. JB Pritzker appointed Lazzeri to lead the department, according to a community announcement. The appointment is pending confirmation by the Illinois Senate.

* Tribune | JB Pritzker takes victory lap in Washington and pushes for aggressive Trump oversight: “You can walk and chew gum,” he told a packed audience at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a liberal think tank and advocacy group popular with the Democratic establishment. “We have to deal with affordability. That has to be the principle… The new Congress needs to hold oversight hearings and expose the corruption of this administration.”

*** Chicago ***

* Sun-Times | Missing Election Day results holding up race calls in two Chicago School Board districts: The board counted an additional 12,000 votes Thursday, WBEZ’s analysis showed. There are 3,000 ballots from Election Day left to be counted, according to the board, and 131,131 uncounted votes in total, including mail-in ballots. More than 4,000 provisional ballots also remain to be tabulated. When asked by WBEZ why delays in counting ballots from Election Day were occurring, a board spokesperson said there are “ongoing transmissions to our central data intake and tabulating system.”

* Tribune | How incumbents and CTU-backed candidates fared in Chicago’s school board races: Despite losing the board presidency, the union’s slate of candidates are leading in 10 districts — or exactly half of all district-specific races — and most by a substantial margin. In Northwest Side District 3A, CTU-backed candidate and 2024 mayoral appointee Norma Rios Sierra is well-positioned to keep her seat with a dominant 40-point lead over challenger Pete Gonzales, a legal adviser for the Illinois secretary of state.

* WGN | ‘A new way of life’: Chicago graduates overcome drug addiction through rehabilitation court: The program grants nonviolent eligible participants with substance use disorders an alternative to traditional sentencing. Instead of doing time behind bars — they’ve put in the time —sometimes years—with intensive treatment, regular court appearances, and case management. “They don’t go back to the criminal justice system. We run statistics, and 90-95% don’t have convictions within three years and drop down a little bit after five years. These programs work,” said Judge Charles Burns, who oversees the programs, adding that over the past 16 years, it has continued to change lives and improve public safety.

* Sun-Times | Downtown ‘Cultural Stadium’ idea gains steam with new leader, $2 million funding: Former Michigan state representative Donna Lasinski was announced Wednesday as the initiative’s inaugural president. Under her leadership, the Cultural Stadium plans to build on Chicago’s already vibrant arts scene and “transform existing infrastructure and underused public spaces into new cultural experiences,” according to a news release from the group.

*** Cook County and Suburbs ***

* Daily Herald | Voters choose to dissolve Schaumburg Township road district, end elected position in 2029: If those election results are certified, responsibility for maintaining 10 miles of unincorporated roads and the district’s budget will move under the authority of the township’s board of trustees in 2½ years. According to unofficial results, 60% of voters opted to end the road district and 40% opposed. Schaumburg Township Supervisor Tim Heneghan said he recognized it as a change of approach that seemed to work in nearby places such as Hanover and Elk Grove townships. He agreed with two trustees in August that residents should decide the matter.

* Tribune | Park Ridge eyes mandatory affordable housing requirements for developers: This debate, continuing for months now, hinges on how best to meet the state’s demands that each city have at least 10 percent of its housing stock meet the criteria for affordable. Park Ridge hasn’t met this and, so far, the eight percent of housing stock that is affordable only exists by chance—meaning the property is only affordable due to the market itself not by design.

* Aurora Beacon News | Kane County Board declares vacancy in sheriff’s office, with Amy Johnson slated to take over post-election: Amy Johnson, who served as Hain’s undersheriff, could potentially be appointed to the office next week, pending county board approval. But who will be the Kane County sheriff for the next four years was decided just a day prior, in the Nov. 3 general election. According to unofficial election results, Johnson, a Democrat, appears to have won the seat, defeating her Republican opponent Rob Russell. When Hain announced he was not running for reelection in 2026, he cast his support behind Johnson.

*** Downstate ***

* WCIA | Champaign Co. Drug Court graduates celebrate new beginnings: “You just cannot punish people out of addiction. At some point if you’re actually interested in addressing the root cause of the addiction, you’re going to have to invest in the person,” said Judge Ben Dyer. He said seven people graduated this fall. “We heavily invest resources into substance abuse treatment and also a number of life skills that they may or may not have had the opportunity to develop,” said Dyer.

* STLPR | Illinois EPA wants to build trust in Cahokia Heights after decades of unresolved sewage backup: The state agency entered an agreement with local and federal officials in 2024 to make long-awaited changes to the sewer system after the city was determined to be in violation of the federal Clean Water Act and the Illinois Environmental Protection Act. But Jackson said the agency’s 20-year plan has too many exit ramps and that older residents deserve more immediate relief. “They’re fighting this hard for something they may never see,” Jackson said. “We’d like to see an immediate redress to the public health crisis that’s created by the raw sewage overflows, by the chronic flooding, by the contaminated drinking water.”

* Illinois Times | Hotel files petition to convert to apartments: The owners of MainStay Suites on South Dirksen Parkway have filed a zoning petition with the city of Springfield for a permit to convert the extended-stay hotel into apartments. Hazur Hospitality is seeking to turn the 109 hotel units in the property at 3185 S. Dirksen Parkway into 109 apartments, including a mix of 450-square-foot studio apartment units and 900-square-foot family apartments, according to the zoning permit. According to Anu Arora, owner/operator of Hazur Hospitality, the company currently works with area nonprofit organizations such as Helping Hands and Fifth Street Renaissance to provide housing to individuals and families being assisted by those agencies.

* WAND | SMTD buys 25 acres for future transit hub on Springfield’s south side: The land purchase is the first crucial step in a multi-year process. Riders plan to use the new hub, and they believe it will make a difference. “That’d be great,” said Tracey Gragg. “I’ll be able to get to Lincoln Land a lot quicker and get a lot more homework done. It will be really good.” The new hub will offer better shelter from the weather and new passenger information screens. It could also have ticket vending machines.

*** National ***

* NBC News | Hooked on YouTube: Over the past decade, YouTube has become ubiquitous in the American classroom. Many school districts give students their own laptops and encourage them to watch educational videos on the platform. But districts often struggle to effectively restrict what else students can watch, and YouTube, which has become ingrained in class curricula, does not give schools a way to disable addictive features like autoplay and TikTok-style YouTube Shorts unless they block the website entirely. That means millions of students have access to billions of videos, leaving some endlessly scrolling through targeted recommendations that have nothing to do with school.