Here's a story that sheds some light on why Russian President Vladimir Putin is so firmly entrenched as his country's ruler and sole serious decision maker. It has to do with the vast wealth even his low-level allies -- not to mention his inner circle -- have been able to accumulate while...
Two Maryland parents stand accused of doing the unthinkable: They trusted their kids, 10 and 6, to walk home from the park. The children got about halfway there when someone saw them and called the cops.
The debate over the future site of the Barack Obama presidential library is intensely personal for me, especially the proposal for the city to make a corner of Washington Park or Jackson Park available for the library.
Rising like a well-coiffed, buttoned-down phoenix from the ashes of his wildly unsuccessful 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney has politely expressed interest in running again.
Sarah Brightman has a cold. This wouldn’t ordinarily be news. When I start to sneeze, no reporters rush to cover my trip to the local pharmacy.
John Boehner, the newly re-elected speaker of the House, is known to be a heavy smoker. This is a bad habit, but it is one he confines to private places. So few know that the speaker is putting his health at risk by not quitting.
"Islam is a religion of love. My brother was killed by terrorists, by false Muslims."
Much has happened in the last 16 weeks: A new governor was elected and sworn in, the Bears' coach was fired and temperatures went from autumn comfortable to winter miserable.
Walk through a typical public school, and you see students, sitting in rows of identical desks, listening to teachers talk.
Old lives matter, even in our throwaway culture, in the country that John Wrana risked his life to protect so many years ago.
Gov. Bruce Rauner is, understandably, peevish and wroth about the flurry of executive orders and agency appointments that came down from former Gov. Pat Quinn during Quinn's last few months in office.
Why should the world care about Nigeria more than its own president does?
Mid-January is the time to ask the annual question: Are we ready for a big, noisy, overhyped prime-time production that has outgrown its simple origins and usually leaves us feeling both gorged and disappointed? If not, you may want to skip the State of the Union address and prepare for...
The Bears' John Fox hunt has ended with the hiring of the former Denver coach to replace Marc Trestman. And ex-Bear Jim Harbaugh was recently introduced as coach at the University of Michigan, where he'll make $7 million his first year. Talk about pay dirt. Here's the whole 10 yards about...
Pentagon officials have started calling retired generals to let them know that their home addresses, private emails and other personal information appeared in a document that was publicized globally by a group claiming to support the Islamic State.
That didn’t take long.
President Barack Obama's administration said Thursday that the new set of U.S.-Cuba travel regulations, first announced last month as part of a return to normal diplomatic relations with the island nation, will take effect on Friday. As part of those changes, it will be easier for Americans...
President Barack Obama's is proposing legislation Thursday that would give American workers seven days a year of paid sick leave. The U.S. remains the world's only wealthy nation that does not mandate a minimum of paid sick leave, vacation leave or parental leave.
Days after the 2012 presidential election, in which less than one third of both Hispanic and Asian voters supported Republican candidate Mitt Romney, House Speaker John Boehner told ABC News that "a comprehensive approach" to immigration reform was "long overdue" and that he was "confident" a...
On Sunday, at the great Paris rally, the whole world was Charlie. By Tuesday, the veneer of solidarity was exposed as tissue thin. It began dissolving as soon as the real, remaining Charlie Hebdo put out its post-massacre issue featuring a Muhammad cover that, as The New York Times put it,...
Not a day goes by when I'm not reading another headline arguing that women can have it all, or, more accurately, why they can't.
It's a tale of two completely different worlds.
Since Mike Huckabee announced that he was leaving his Fox News show to contemplate another run for the presidency, his most visible campaign issue appears to be an attempt to launch the War on Beyoncé.
Angered by watching defense lawyers argue that 95-year-old John Wrana wanted to die, the family of the World War II vet killed by police have decided to break their silence and condemn such talk as lies.
Each of the attacks in Paris that killed 17 people last week was an atrocity, an affront to freedom and an act of terrorism. On those points, most people agree, and they're right. Most people also fear this marks the beginning of a rash of extremist violence in the West. On that, they're...
Ever since the news broke last Friday that Mitt Romney is not only thinking about running for president again in 2016 but also making moves that suggest he is going to run, I’ve been trying to figure out why. I’ve talked to Republicans who are close to Romney and Republicans who are...
I recently walked into a public bathroom at a nearby college to do one of the two private things that people usually do in bathrooms. I took my position three urinals down (as far away as possible) from a well-dressed, 50-something man, who stood at his urinal doing a third thing: talking on...
The abuse of Department of Children and Family Services wards in residential care as documented by recent articles in the Chicago Tribune continues not because of the bad faith of DCFS directors or because of the incompetence of DCFS workers. It continues because DCFS, indeed the entire...
President Obama has announced a plan to make community college "as free and universal as high school." Whether or not you think this program is a good idea depends on what you think the effects will be.
Will the suburban Park Forest cop who fired five beanbag rounds from that 12-gauge shotgun at 95-year-old John Wrana go to prison?
A second-grade girl ran out of Madison Elementary School in Skokie on Monday afternoon and into the freezing mess known as January.
In the wake of the terrorist attacks by Muslim militants in Paris, which killed 17 and wounded many others, pundits have come forward to speculate on causes and motives. While never excusing the assailants' barbarism, some of these commentators have scolded the French for failing to...
In the documentary "Mitt," which follows the titular Mitt Romney and his family through two presidential campaigns, the former Massachusetts governor gripes that nominees who lose "become a loser for life."
The inaugural address by the new governor of Illinois left me sobered but inspired and hopeful.
In the language of headline writers, he is "Muslim Man," hailed as a hero for hiding hostages during last week's terrorist attacks by Muslim fanatics in France.
After more than 40 years on the air, Bill Moyers has turned off his microphone. While the longtime face of public broadcasting had threatened to retire in the past, this time he has assured us that we have heard his final farewell. His voice and regular presence will be deeply missed, but his...
On Friday, news organizations reported that Mitt Romney is considering another presidential run in 2016. Meanwhile, word got out that respected Republican operative Rick Wiley is helping Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker staff up for a 2016 primary campaign. And to top it off, Mike Huckabee left...
You got an e-reader over the holidays. What should you load it up with?
In Paris on Sunday, the United States really led from behind — so far behind that President Barack Obama and other important U.S. officials stayed stateside as 40 other world leaders joined about 1.5 million Frenchmen in a stirring riposte to terrorism and anti-Semitism. Even Vice...
All right, Gov. Bruce Rauner. Now that you're on the job, it's only a matter of time before your first of many clashes with Illinois' political machine.
Whenever the following words appear in a story — George Zimmerman, arrested, domestic violence, weapons — I'm overcome with "shock and oh, brother."
Cameron Clarkson was a 16-year-old football player when he suddenly landed in the middle of a sex crime investigation at his St. Paul, Minn., high school. Lawyers grilled him on the details of his sexual history. School officials, in a statement to the press, cited him for not invoking the...
We enter 2015 in the United States with a strong and growing economic recovery. Over the course of that recovery, the private sector has created 11.2 million jobs. The federal deficit has gone from 9.8 percent of gross domestic product in 2009 to 2.8 percent in 2014. Our stock market closed...
Near the delivery room where my 11th grandchild was born there's a plaque reading: "Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see."
Over the past 17 years, I have lived a good life. It has always just been me and my mom and all of our pets. My mom raised me well, to be a strong, competent and independent woman. She taught me right from wrong and always led me in the right direction, standing by my side through every...
John Wrana, the 95-year-old World War II veteran killed by police, wasn't killed for selling illegal "loosie" cigarettes on the streets of New York.
After Chicago-area schools canceled classes two days last week because of brutally low temperatures and dangerous wind chills, many parents and other curmudgeons complained loudly.
I have my political differences with Republican Bruce Rauner, who will be sworn in Monday as Illinois' 42nd governor, but on at least one thing we see eyelet to eyelet: shirt collars.
Sigmund Freud said the founder of civilization was the first person who hurled an insult instead of a rock. He was almost right. The true founder was the first person to respond to an insult with an insult of his own.
Je ne suis pas Charlie.
In one of its first actions of 2015, the newly installed U.S. Congress has voted to extend the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act — a law created after the 9/11 attacks that provides a federal backstop for losses to life and property caused by acts of terror. President Barack Obama is...
The University of Chicago's proposal to locate the Obama presidential library in or adjacent to Jackson or Washington parks on the South Side is an opportunity to improve and revitalize these historic parks and their surrounding communities and institutions.
Thursday would have been Elvis Presley's 80th birthday. In honor of the date, Newsweek did a story about all the silly conspiracy theories that he is still alive. Forget for a moment that the "King of Rock 'n' Roll" as an octogenarian is a little hard to get your mind around.
I’d like to help clear up some political confusion from earlier this week.
When Mark Zuckerberg makes a New Year's resolution, people notice. This year, of course, the Facebook chief executive has segued from learning Mandarin to creating one of the Internet's largest book clubs. His "A Year of Books" Facebook page, which encourages Facebook users to read one new book...
The lengthy jury-selection process in the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the accused in the Boston Marathon bombing, isn't like ordinary jury selection: It includes an ideological litmus test.
The slaughter by Islamic fanatics on Wednesday of nearly a dozen French journalists, several of whom I have known for decades, is a bitter, heavy price for that nation to pay for being what it is: a haven of free expression and intellectual combat; a country that has taken in the foreign-born...
One of the enduring mysteries in what's commonly known as the Anthony Porter case was why a skeptical Cook County grand jury nevertheless returned a murder indictment against another man, Alstory Simon, after hearing dramatically conflicting testimony in early 1999.
Long after the news outlets had stopped talking about the failure of the Great Chicago Fire Festival to deliver its marquee moment, the ignition of the houses floating in the middle of the Chicago River, I continued to wake with a start. I had left tens of thousands of people standing in wait...
In the aftermath of the deadly assault on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical newspaper, much of the world has rallied in solidarity with the publication, its irreverent cartoonists and their right to free speech.
Though mayors of Chicago usually have two soft hands, and, in most cases, 10 soft fingers, we know they're not lazy.
Poverty? Isn't there an app for that?
I hardly need to tell you that flying these days is a miserable experience. In fact, it's so miserable that it's tempting to suspect that the suffering is deliberate — that airlines are making us miserable as part of a calculated strategy to extort more money from us.
In 2014, our country went cannabis crazy, bringing to 18 the number of states decriminalizing pot. Colorado opened boutiques selling "mountain high suckers" in grape and butterscotch flavors and posted signs that proclaimed the state is "where prohibition ends and the fun begins."
The Gallup polling organization is in the business of taking the pulse of the American public. A new survey detects a surprising shift in perceptions. It points not just to the nation's sour mood and disappointment with the drawn-out recovery, but also to a sense that something different is now...
Really, with the roads clear, no new snow, minimal wind and even the sun shining brightly on a clear, crisp day, we close our schools in January because it is ... cold?
