The Chicago Tribune reported that "homicides were up 17 percent over last year in Chicago, and shootings had increased by 11 percent, according to police statistics." The Tribune, giving little by the way of explanation, cited unseasonable weather early in the year as a factor contributing to an unusually high humber in murders:

Largely contributing to the spike was the unusual number of homicides that occurred during the early part of the year, when the  city experienced unseasonable warmth. In the first three months of the year, homicides ran about 60 percent ahead of the 2011 rate.

Commenting Friday on the 500th homicide, Mayor Rahm Emanuel called the total "an unfortunate and tragic milestone, which not only marks a needless loss of life but serves as a reminder of the damage that illegal guns and conflicts between gangs cause in our neighborhoods."

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More than 24 hours after the escape, the robbers, Kenneth Conley, 38, and Joseph Banks, 37, the self-proclaimed “Moor,” remained at large today with dragnets of heavily armed federal and local law enforcement officers on their trail.

The men were last seen in a south suburb and are believed to be traveling together. The FBI offered a $50,000 reward this morning for the escapees’ capture, which is about $550,000 less than Banks reportedly took in just two robberies where, brandishing a pistol, he vaulted bank counters and stuffed stacks of money into a bag.

So-called Moors are typically black nationalists who, like their kissing cousins in the antigovernment “sovereign citizens” movement, deny the jurisdiction and authority of the government. For the Moors, that is based on the theory that they are the real sovereign natives of North America, and the whites who came later and their government have no right to rule them. As a rule, the various Moorish groups have produced little or no violence, even if their view of history is unique.

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According to the 21-year-old college student, a man on the Chicago Transit Authority's Blue Line boarded the train at the Oak Park stop, and then at the next stop, without warning or provocation, "he throws something in my face.”

That "something" turned out to be feces. "He had a sock full of his poop on me,” she said. “It was everywhere; on my face, my hair, my clothes."

The attacker then fled up the Austin Boulevard exit; she wasn't able to catch him. "The worst part is nobody had anything to wipe my face with,” she said. The woman waiting for paramedics to show up, who gave her towels and water. “They really aren’t prepared for a situation like that," she noted.

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Jettisoning to the national stage on a reported $3 million contract would be a dream come true for any other 17-year-old from Englewood, Chicago’s most impoverished neighborhood on the South Side, but for Keef, whose real name is Keith Cozart, the path to fame is complicated: Ordered to live in his grandmother’s house under house arrest earlier this year for pointing a firearm at a Chicago police officer, he is facing court charges for violating probation and is under investigation for his possible link to the shooting death of a fellow rapper on Chicago’s emerging “Drill music” scene.

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The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Jackson submitted his letter of resignation to House Speaker John Boehner on Wednesday. WBEZ also reported that Boehner spokesman Michael Steel has confirmed that he received the letter.

Jackson did not wage much of a campaign for re-election this year, but won his race anyway. His replacement will be chosen by a special election, which will have to be called by Gov. Pat Quinn, also a Democrat.

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On Tuesday, a federal court condemned the police "code of silence" that had protected the offending cop. The court awarded the plaintiff -- the assaulted bartender, Karolina Obrycka -- $850,000 in damages. The Chicago Tribune called it "one of the most embarrassing incidents in the police department's history" when a tape of the vicious beating was made public:

The shocking videotape showed off-duty Chicago police Officer Anthony Abbate throw a female bartender half his size against a wall in the Northwest Side tavern, slam her to the floor and pummel her with frenzied punches and kicks.

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From the Chicago Sun-Times:

"As part of the deal being negotiated by former U.S. Attorney Dan Webb, Jackson would resign his post citing health reasons, plead guilty to misusing campaign funds, repay the campaign funds used illegally and he would possibly serve time in prison, according to the report."

Jackson is accused of allegedly using those funds to redecorate his home, and reportedly to buy a $40,000 Rolex for a female friend.

“No one has pled guilty, but plea discussions are ongoing,” a source told the Sun-Times' Michael Sneed.

Jackson, who won reelection to his House seat on Tuesday, has recently spent time in the Mayo Clinic to be treated for depression bipolar disorder.

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Just days before the Chicago NATO summit last May, Senakiewicz drunkenly told undercover agents that he had two homemade explosives hidden in his Chicago residence in a hollowed-out Harry Potter book. A search of his home found the bombs to be as fictitious as the boy wizard -- there weren't even any Harry Potter books at the address. But the 24-year-old anarchist, who Tuesday pleaded guilty to one felony count of falsely making a terrorist threat, could face deportation.

The Chicago Tribune reported:

At a hearing in the Leighton Criminal Court Building, Judge Nicholas Ford imposed the 4-year prison term and recommended that Senakiewicz be admitted into a prison boot camp. If he successfully completes the program he could be released in as little as 6 months, but prosecutors said the Polish native would be subject to deportation on completing his sentence.

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Obama began his first campaign just two miles south of McCormick Place, the convention center where he celebrated his re-election as president. On Sept. 19, 1995, at the Ramada Inn Lakeshore, Obama announced his candidacy for the Illinois state senate to 200 supporters.

“Politicians are not held to highest esteem these days – they fall somewhere lower than lawyers,” he joked, before delivering the message the liberal Hyde Parkers in that room wanted to hear: “I want to inspire a renewal of morality in politics. I will work as hard as I can, as long as I can, on your behalf.”

It was a door-to-door campaign. Every evening that fall and winter, Obama drove his Saab through Englewood, one of Chicago’s poorest, most violent neighborhoods. He was a big hit with the little old ladies who answered the doors of worn two-flats and decaying houses. To the dismay of his campaign manager, who expected him to fill two petition sheets a night, Obama was offered fried chicken sizzling in stovetop pans and invited to sit down and explain where he’d gotten that funny name.

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My relationship with Vanessa came at the tail end of a time in my life when sex felt more like theater, when I thought living meant merely saying yes to everything. I didn’t know anything about power or intimacy or trust, even though I played with these concepts continuously, recklessly, in private homes and sex clubs, with strangers I met online, and old friendships I needlessly complicated. Fear was something I thought I could talk myself out of, if only I had the right words. I knew so many words at that time, but I didn’t know what any of them really meant.

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He will put this groundbreaking "bionic" leg to the ultimate test Sunday when he attempts to climb 103 flights of stairs to the top of Chicago's Willis Tower, one of the world's tallest skyscrapers.

If all goes well, he'll make history with the bionic leg's public debut. His whirring, robotic leg will respond to electrical impulses from muscles in his hamstring. Vawter will think, "Climb stairs," and the motors, belts and chains in his leg will synchronize the movements of its ankle and knee. Vawter hopes to make it to the top in an hour, longer than it would've taken before his amputation, less time than it would take with his normal prosthetic leg — or, as he calls it, his "dumb" leg.

A team of researchers will be cheering him on and noting the smart leg's performance. When Vawter goes home to Yelm, Wash., where he lives with his wife and two children, the experimental leg will stay behind in Chicago. Researchers will continue to refine its steering. Taking it to the market is still years away.

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Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle will submit a budget proposal Thursday that calls for a tax of a nickel for each bullet and $25 for each firearm sold in the nation's second-largest county, which encompasses Chicago.

Preckwinkle's office estimates the tax will generate about $1 million a year, money that would be used for various county services including medical care for gunshot victims. Law enforcement officials would not have to pay the tax, but the office said it would apply to 40 federally licensed gun dealers in the county.

Through last week, the city reported 409 homicides this year compared to 324 during the same period in 2011. Although the violence still doesn't approach the nearly 900 homicides a year Chicago averaged in the 1990s, officials say gang violence was largely to blame for a rash of shootings earlier this year.

Preckwinkle insists the ordinance is far more about addressing gun violence than raising money for a county that faces a deficit of more than $100 million next year.

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Democrats know who tends to lack ID.  They know that the threat of in-person voter fraud is wildly exaggerated.  Besides, Republican officials could hardly have been clearer about the real purpose behind these laws and courts keep striking them down as unconstitutional.  Still, Republican support remains sky high, with only one third of Republicans recognizing that they are primarily intended to boost the GOP's prospects.

How can Republican voters go on believing that the latest wave of voter ID laws is about fraud and that it’s the opposition to the laws that’s being partisan?

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For the nation’s beleaguered labor movement, the six-day strike by the Chicago Teachers Union that ended on Tuesday is proof that a strike is not suicide, as has been the fate lately for most unions.

Indeed, as the end neared and they were heady with an apparent win, the teachers’ talk catapulted from standing up for teachers to standing up for organized labor and ultimately to speaking for bullied, and exploited, workers.

In the buildup to the dispute, it didn’t seem likely that the union would be able to walk away. Not after the Illinois Legislature required the union to win a strike vote by 75 percent of its members, and not after Mayor Rahm Emanuel fearlessly carried out a number of steps that only riled up the union. But it did, with the three-year deal that its 26,000 teachers will soon vote on.

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According to the firsthand account of one delegate, posted at the Daily Kos, “an overwhelming majority” voted to end the strike in the packed, “standing room only” meeting.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel called the deal an “honest compromise," CNN reported. Meanwhile an announcement from the CTU (which outlines how key contract issues fare in the deal) stated, “We have tremendous victories in this contract; however, it is by no means perfect.”

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Though a tentative settlement was reached between the Chicago Teachers Union and Chicago Public Schools negotiators, it is anyone's call whether the deal will be accepted Tuesday afternoon by union delegates who chose not to do so when they were first presented with the plan on Sunday night.

This slide show takes you through the strike so far.

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Emanuel fired back Sunday night by instructing city attorneys to seek a court order forcing Chicago Teachers Union members back into the classroom. "This was a strike of choice and is now a delay of choice that is wrong for our children," he said in a statement.

Presented with a choice on whether to ask members to vote on a contract that union president Karen Lewis had at one point called "a fight for the very soul of public education," the union's 800-member House of Delegates told their leaders they needed more time to talk to the rank and file before ending the city's first teachers strike in 25 years.

Teachers had only a few hours to review a summary of a proposed settlement worked out over the weekend with officials from the nation's third largest school district. That wasn't enough time, they said, to digest a complicated contract that addresses two issues central to the debate over the future of public education across the United States: teacher evaluations and job security.

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The union is trying to win assurances that laid-off but qualified teachers get dibs on jobs anywhere in the district. But Illinois law gives individual principals in Chicago the right to hire the teachers they want, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel argues it's unfair to hold principals accountable for their schools' performance if they can't pick their own teams.

The district has offered a compromise. If schools close, teachers would have the first right to jobs matching their qualifications at schools that absorb the children from the closed school. The proposal also includes provisions for teachers who aren't hired, including severance.

It wasn't clear if the union had accepted the proposal, but Lewis said it "did not intend to sign an agreement until these matters are addressed."

Union leaders and district officials were in talks for more than 15 hours yesterday, and union leaders held another meeting this afternoon. Though it was closed to journalists, CBS reports that "delegates could be seen through the windows cheering and applauding, some on them on their feet and pumping their fists in the air."

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