Jeffrey Bils

The fourth word on the spelling test Monday in Barbara Gabel's 6th-grade class was "believing." As in "I have trouble believing we are really here today," Gabel told her pupils...

Decrying the Cook County Jail system as a socially bankrupt substitute for the help that most inmates really need, Rev. Jesse Jackson on Saturday unveiled an aggressive campaign to triple...

Hours after voters had shown the door to Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dawn Clark Netsch and her school-tax plan, one of the state's top Republicans, Senate President James "Pate" Philip, suggested...

The Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy and its only unionized employees have approved their first labor contract. The three-year contract with secretaries, clerical staff, security officers, custodians and maintenance personnel...

A Wood Dale teenager died and three people were hospitalized Tuesday morning after a car and a van collided in unincorporated Itasca. Joseph Abbruscato, 17, was pronounced dead at GlenOaks...

The sound of crackling and popping woke Kris and Mike Chirillo. Moments later, their house was engulfed in flames. "We got out literally just in time," Kris Chirillo said Saturday...

No doubt the "Big Tuna" would have been horrified. Complete strangers pressing their noses against his living room bay window, peering inside. Knocking at his front door, demanding entry, then...

Ask a handful of "experts" about the school-finance plans offered up by the two major candidates for Illinois governor, and half of them concede, apologetically, that their grasp of the...

Amanda Carl's sign was one of hundreds held aloft in a crowd of thousands, but the message was poignant: "My sister, Tracy Carl, gone too soon, dead at 15." It...

Hundreds of police officers stood at attention as pallbearers lifted the casket of Sgt. Tim Simenson into a hearse, each of them perhaps sharing the same thought: It could have...