News

Taylor Roylance was sleeping over at a friend's house when the slumber party was disrupted by two masked, armed strangers who burst in and ordered the girls to hand over their phones.

Maywood's fire chief said the controversy over his order to have all patriotic and personal stickers removed from firefighters' helmets and lockers — including American flags and 9/11 memorials — was blown out of proportion.

The Chicago Park District Board of Commissioners unanimously voted Wednesday to ban smoking from Chicago’s parks and harbors. The measure takes effect immediately.

For many of the 120,000 rail passengers who pass through each day, Union Station is either a mystifying maze of ramps and escalators, or a perplexing funnel that forces them to navigate perilously narrow platforms.

Chicago teens would be subject to the city’s nighttime curfew laws until their 18th birthdays — a year longer than they currently are —  in a move Mayor Rahm Emanuel says is all about keeping kids safe.

More than two-thirds of the Chicago City Council is on board with a plan to give the city’s top watchdog the power to investigate aldermen — with at least one string attached.

A Chicago activist whose violence-prevention work is featured in a critically acclaimed documentary film has been diagnosed with cancer, and friends have begun a fundraising campaign to raise money for her treatment.

Gov. Pat Quinn today visited a downtown fire station to receive the endorsement of the Associated Fire Fighters of Illinois, which has 15,000 members across the state, including 5,000 in Chicago.

The former CEO of Chicago's fired red light camera vendor, Redflex Traffic Systems Inc., pleaded not guilty Wednesday to federal charges that she helped orchestrate a decadelong $2million bribery scheme to win and grow the largest automated traffic enforcement program in the nation.

Seven people, including two 15-year-old boys and a 15-year-old girl, have been charged in a machete attack on the Kedzie Brown Line CTA platform in Albany Park, police said.

The shooting of an elderly man in May was not unlike many other gang-related shootings across Chicago — except in this case, the suspected triggerman was on probation and working as a paid FBI informant.

State regulators this week suspended the license of an Evanston appraiser involved in a $1.7 million roller rink purchase by south suburban Markham from its city attorney.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has paid back the city for more than $14,000 in travel expenses after a Tribune story found he spent taxpayer money on trips in which he tapped well-heeled donors for campaign contributions.

Magazine cutouts of Michael Jackson, stylish young rockers and characters from the "Twilight" series cover the walls of Stephanie DiCara's bedroom in North Barrington, where a nurse watches closely over the ventilator that keeps the young woman alive.

While attending college in the mid-1970s, Cherlynlavaughn Bradley joined the American Chemical Society and began a lifelong commitment to encouraging young people, especially girls, to pursue careers in chemistry.

In more than 30 years with Chicago's Newberry Library, James W. Wells gained a wide reputation as an authority on the history of printing, typography and calligraphy.

Gerald Wilson, a bandleader, trumpeter, composer, arranger and educator whose multifaceted career reached from the swing era of the 1930s to the diverse jazz sounds of the 21st century, has died. He was 96.

A prominent player for decades in the local advertising scene, Sherwood "Woody" Miller was vastly different from the raucous, back-stabbing, hard-drinking types who populated that world during what is now referred to as its "Mad Men" era.

A proposal for greater citizen oversight of the Ferguson Police Department has been criticized as "weak" and "insulting" by police experts and St. Louis-area officials who examined the plan Thursday, while others say it is a positive step forward that needs more work.

A teenager serving a life sentence for shooting three students to death at a Cleveland-area high school in 2012 escaped on Thursday with another inmate from a northwestern Ohio prison, prompting a manhunt for the pair, police said.

Police have arrested a woman after the bodies of three infants were found amid the squalor and vermin of a condemned southern Massachusetts home from which state officials previously rescued four children, officials and media said on Thursday.

The military offensive ordered by President Obama against marauding Islamic State militants barely resembles the grinding ground war that the United States waged in Iraq from 2003 to 2011 — but may prove just as tough to win.