A Skokie lawyer's challenge of a speeding ticket that also led to his client being charged with DUI may finally provide the test case that will restore some sanity to how accused speeders are treated in Chicago's Traffic Court.
For at least the past year, speeding tickets produced by Chicago police officers using high-tech LIDAR speed detectors have been routinely dismissed in Cook County Traffic Court for any defendant bothering to show up to contest the case. When challenged, the tickets are being voluntarily waived by the city's Law Department because of legal challenges to the laser technology underlying the LIDAR (light detection and ranging) equipment.
Michael Chambers' family long ago gave him up for dead, believing he'd been killed in a street fight.
The provocateurs who made economics cool with the best-selling book Freakonomics are back with a sequel, Super-Freakonomics, that is causing quite a stir in global warming circles for its flip handling of a serious subject.
If we accomplished nothing else with Tuesday's column about the once common practice of naked swimming in Chicago area high schools, we at least helped a whole bunch of parents creep out their children.
A couple of old classmates from Thornton High School bumped into each other over the weekend, and as is often the case with male alums of their era, the subject quickly turned to what both consider one of the stranger aspects of their high school experience: swimming naked in gym class.
My house is 100 years old. I didn't even know it until I checked the Cook County assessor's Web site Friday, so there hasn't been time to schedule a party.
Parking meter rates in the City of Chicago are going up again in just 71 days.
Alonzo "Lon" Monk was Rod Blagojevich's close friend. They roomed together in law school at Pepperdine University. Monk stood up at Blagojevich's wedding and later came to work in his congressional office.
Rod Blagojevich has every right to go on the "Celebrity Apprentice" television program and proclaim his innocence while making an even bigger ass of himself than he already has -- and he's even welcome to get paid to do it.
I wonder if there's a politician of any note in Illinois who doesn't keep score. I'm talking about somebody who doesn't keep track of favors sought and favors granted, the quid and the quo that greases the machinery of politics, whether we like it or not -- and not just in this state but anywhere the dark art is practiced seriously.
Harry Bosch is back on the case, and not a moment too soon. I was starting to go into serious Bosch withdrawal, a condition characterized by staring longingly into bookstore windows and obsessively scanning police crime blotter stories.
After his July 10 death, William Scott's body was kept in storage for three months so he could be laid to rest alongside his late wife, Lorraine, in scandal-scarred Burr Oak Cemetery once it reopened for business. But when cemetery workers tried to dig Scott's grave last week on the deeded burial plot, they unearthed an unpleasant surprise -- a casket and remains that weren't supposed to be there.
Leon Figa sat across from me Monday in his Niles apartment and casually talked sabotage: how to blow up a train, retrieve the explosives from an undetonated bomb or block a road for a proper ambush.
Charlie Dennis really, really loves his bicycle. He became emotionally attached to it while riding solo two years ago from Denver back home to Chicago, a cross-country journey of about 1,800 miles. It was just Dennis, his Salsa road bike and his iPod on the long, open road for 3½ weeks. They bonded.
