Peter Hancock
Peter Hancock joined the Capitol News Illinois team as a reporter in January 2019.
Before that, Hancock covered Kansas state government for much of the past two decades. For the previous 4 years, Hancock had been the statehouse reporter for the Lawrence Journal-World. He provided year-round daily coverage of the Kansas Statehouse, state government, appellate courts, elections and Kansas’ congressional delegation. He previously worked for 8 years as a statehouse reporter for Kansas Public Radio, and with the Kansas Health Policy Authority and the Kansas Education Policy Report.
“As a longtime veteran of statehouse reporting in Kansas, I know how challenging it is for individual newspapers to make that kind of commitment,” Hancock said. “Capitol News Illinois offers a unique opportunity for newspapers throughout the state to pool their resources and enable a small team of reporters to deliver critical news and information about state government to communities throughout the state.
“ I covered state politics and government in Kansas for the better part of the past 20 years, working in both print and broadcast journalism. I graduated from the University of Kansas with bachelor’s degrees in political science and secondary education. Although I was born and raised in the Kansas City area, I have deep family roots in central and southern Illinois, and so coming to Springfield is a bit like coming back home.”
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Former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan and former lobbyist Michael McClain on Wednesday pleaded not guilty in federal court to charges of racketeering, bribery, fraud and extortion.
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The 2022 campaign season got underway in earnest Monday as candidates lined up in front of election offices to turn in petitions to get their names on the June 28 primary election ballot.
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The Illinois Supreme Court is being asked to review the state’s mask mandate and other COVID-19 mitigation orders for K-12 schools on an expedited schedule.
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Speaking to a Senate budget committee Tuesday, Mendoza said the state is nearly caught up on its bill backlog and that those two programs are no longer needed.
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Gov. JB Pritzker’s administration said Friday it will ask the Illinois Supreme Court for an “expedited review” of an appellate court’s decision not to rule on a lower court order that invalidated COVID-19 mitigation measures for roughly 170 school districts that were parties in a set of consolidated lawsuits.
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A legislative panel on Tuesday voted to suspend the latest version of COVID-19 mitigations for public schools, saying in part that those rules are still being litigated in a state appellate court.
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Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul and Gov. JB Pritzker’s administration are asking a state appellate court to set aside a lower court order from late Friday that invalidated the mask and vaccine mandates that the state imposed last year for public schools.
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Gov. JB Pritzker will propose a roughly $1 billion package of tax relief measures aimed at mitigating the impact of inflation on Illinois consumers when he gives his budget address Wednesday.
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A Sangamon County judge is considering a motion to block Illinois schools from requiring people to wear face masks in classes and excluding students and staff from school buildings if they’ve had close contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19.
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Gov. JB Pritzker said Wednesday that he is “cautiously optimistic” that the recent surge in COVID-19 cases spurred by the omicron variant has peaked, but he cautioned that another variant could appear at any time and continued to urge people to get vaccinated and wear face coverings when in public.