Wide-ranging law put popular, controversial measures into a single package
By Peter Hancock
Capitol News Illinois
phancock @ capitolnewsillinois.com

A law recently signed by Gov. JB Pritzker will extend the deadline for the state to transfer criminal defendants deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial from jail to a mental hospital.
That same bill, House Bill 240, also gives nursing homes in Illinois two more years to comply with minimum staffing levels implemented in 2022 before getting fined by the Department of Public Health.
Those are just two parts of a 67-page “omnibus” health care bill that passed the General Assembly on the final day of its recent lame duck session. Read More

•February 1, 2023•

By Jim Baumann
NP Guest Writer

Several questions arose while my wife and I were driving to a place that would surely serve us Italian bread: Does bread raise or does it rise? Does the baker raise the dough or rise it? What the heck is a transitive verb?
Questions like these constitute about 85% of our conversations.
So today we’ll take a look at “raise” and “rise” and their various usages and homophones.
Let’s start with the issue of bread.
Although I’ve heard it expressed both ways bread indeed “rises.” I often supplement my research by plugging words and phrases into Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks usage in books published in the United States.
I compared “the bread rises” to “the bread raises,” and what I got was interesting. Read More