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President Donald Trump on Thursday said he was considering a pardon for Martha Stewart. The president also said that he was considering commuting the sentence of disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. The president told reporters about his thinking while on a flight to Texas. The president earlier in the day announced that he would pardon conservative pundit Dinesh D'Souza. This story is developing. Please check back for updates.

“Wilding” is the term for mobs of violent young people taking over upscale neighborhoods and wreaking havoc, looting, mugging and attacking innocent people just for the fun of it. A “good” neighborhood is no guarantee of safety anymore in Chicago. The breakdown of civil order, in other words, is well underway in the Windy City. Bit by bit, civilization is slipping away in Chicago. But if you want to know how bad things have gotten there, the major media outlets are no help. The last thing they want is for people to stay away from The Mag Mile – the...

More than 200 headstones were spray-painted with swastikas at a Illinois cemetery overnight Saturday. The cemetery is the resting place for more than 1,300 veterans and is planning to host a Memorial Day event on Monday, a local CBS affiliate reported. Staff at the Sunset Hills Cemetery in Glen Carbon are working to clean up the vandalism before the event.

Armed with advanced gadgets and mapping, officers can get to crime scenes “in time to see the guy still shooting.” But what does it mean for residents’ privacy? Just after 3 a.m. on May 4, a police officer received an alert that gunshots had been fired near an alley in a neighborhood known as the Back of the Yards. The alert came from a hidden street sensor called a ShotSpotter, and the officer was able to pull up a map of nearby police cameras and review the video. Without leaving a room the size of a walk-in closet, he watched...

SCIOTA, IL (CBS Local) – An Illinois high school valedictorian has hired a lawyer after claiming that school officials demanded he remove all religious references from his graduation speech. Sam Blackledge was set to deliver the speech at West Prairie High School on May 19. According to the 18-year-old, school administrators informed him that he needed to take out anything that mentioned God and Jesus minutes before Blackledge was scheduled to go on stage. “It was terrible. I felt like I wanted to cry,” the valedictorian said, via The Kansas City Star. “Christ is the only reason I was a...

On July 4, 1960, the Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard rang in Independence Day with a dire Associated Press report by one Norma Gauhn headlined “American Dialects Disappearing.” The problem, according to “speech experts,” was the homogenizing effect of “mass communications, compulsory education, [and] the mobility of restless Americans.” These conformist pressures have only intensified in the half-century since the AP warned “that within four generations virtually all regional U.S. speech differences will be gone.” And so as we enter the predicted twilight of regional American English, it’s no surprise that publications as venerable as the Economist now confirm what our collective...

Art exhibit has been dubbed the Chicago Gun Share Program. Each bike slot is filled with an AR-15 to show just how easy it is to get a gun in US. Exhibit was created by the Brady Campaign and Center to Prevent Gun Violence. 'We're hoping the Chicago community can take advantage of this...and learn how simple it is for a civilian to obtain a weapon of war.' Also included in the exhibit is a screen that allows people to donate to the Brady Center. At least 862 people have been shot in Chicago in 2018 and 173 people have...

Barack Obama made a habit of stealing private land to create more public parks. Now, in a highly ironic turn of events, public park activists have filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Chicago and the Chicago Park District to block construction of the planned Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park on the city’s South Side. The Obama Presidential Center has been mired in controversy from the start. In March 2015, the Chicago City Council approved an ordinance for Chicago Park District land in Jackson Park to be transferred to the City of Chicago to lease to the Obama...

As you may have heard, Illinois has a pension problem. Now, that’s not Illinois’ only problem, of course. Illinois also has a crime problem, an education problem, a quality-of-life problem, a transportation problem, a public corruption problem, an unemployment problem, and a population shrinkage problem. Frankly, there isn’t enough room in this column to list all of Illinois’ problem, but that’s a start. The Chicago Fed – that’s the Chicago branch of the Federal Reserve System – has proposed an idea for dealing with a part of Illinois’ pension problem. Since the problem is that many state and local government...

If former President Barack Obama wants the Obama Presidential Center to define his legacy, he’s going to have to let life go full circle. That means climbing off his presidential high horse and returning to his roots as a community organizer. Once Obama announced his library would be in Chicago, it was as if the former president had suddenly turned into a greedy real estate developer. And unfortunately, the manner in which the project was unveiled wasn’t inclusive. Jeanette Taylor, the education director for the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, Taylor said she asked the former president why he wouldn’t sign...

The Obama Foundation is trying to generate as much public support as possible ahead of the city of Chicago's first municipal vote to approve construction permits that would allow the Obama Presidential Center to be built on historic parkland. The foundation's chief engagement officer, Michael Strautmanis, emailed "friends" of the project late last week asking them to show up at City Hall at 5 a.m. Thursday to demonstrate to city officials that local residents are behind it. Attendees were told to pick up Obama swag — T-shirts and buttons — from the organization's local headquarters ahead of Thursday. Although the...

A resource officer may have prevented a massacre after a 19-year-old former student allegedly brought a gun inside an Illinois school and opened fire. The suspect shot at the Dixon High School resource officer, who returned fire and struck the gunman, City Administrator Danny Langloss said. The officer was not hit by gunfire and the suspect had non-life threatening injuries. No students or staff members were injured in the incident. The suspect was placed in police custody.

Illinois homeowners, who already pay some of the nation's highest property taxes, should pay about 40 percent more for the next three decades to wipe out the state's crippling pension debt, according to a trio of economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. The economists argue that paying off the state's $129.1 billion in unfunded pension obligations cannot be done with revenue from new taxes such as a tax on marijuana sales or on financial transactions. Would you pay 40 percent more in property taxes if it would wipe out the state's crippling pension debt? Yes No See results...

It’s a yearbook controversy, which has a Valley charter school issuing an apology to parents Monday night. Parents who just received the yearbook from Sonoran Science Academy were in disbelief after seeing a page in which a student with a Muslim first name was voted “most likely to bomb the U.S.” Bree Brown has an 11-year-old daughter at the school and said her daughter showed her the post over the weekend and appeared disturbed by it. “I looked down and read, most likely to bomb the U.S. and I just sat there for a second and thought, no way. This...

Activists filed a federal lawsuit Monday to block construction of the Obama Presidential Center on Chicago’s historic public parklands. Protect Our Parks Inc. accused organizers of an “institutional bait and switch” by initially advertising the center as the 44th president’s official library. “In August 2016, the City and the Park District publically announced that the Obama Presidential Library, promised to include all of the former President’s official records, would be built in Jackson Park,” the lawsuit reads. “Then, in May 2017, after the Defendants’ public announcement that a true ‘Presidential Library’ would be built, the Obamas did an about face...

An intoxicated Plainfield man was so irate over being locked out of Burger King he stripped off his clothes and struck an officer a few times, police said. Officers were sent about 2:15 a.m. Sunday to the East Jefferson Street Burger King in Shorewood after employees complained of a man standing outside the drive-thru and pounding on the window, Deputy Police Chief Eric Allen said. “He was visibly upset the business was closed and was banging on the drive-thru, screaming at the employees inside,” Allen said. “He was heavily intoxicated.” Manuel Silverio, 30, hit the window one more time after...

A Metra track inspector and two mechanics have been paid a total of $1.2 million in overtime in the past five years. That payout, one lawmaker tells 2 Investigator Brad Edward, is out of control. “There’s excessive overtime being paid,” says State Rep. David Olsen (R-Downers Grove). “That creates mistrust from taxpayers.” In all, Metra’s overtime costs soared above $119 million from 2013 to 2017, according to interviews and records. 2 Investigators counted 351 employees who earned at least $100,000 in that span. Topping the list is a mechanic who earned more than $366,000 in overtime. “I think that …...

An audible gasp went out in the breakout room I was in at last month’s pension eventcosponsored by The Civic Federation and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. That was when a speaker from the Chicago Fed proposed levying, across the state and in addition to current property taxes, a special property assessment they estimate would be about 1% of actual property value each year for 30 years. Evidently, that wasn’t reality shock enough. This week the Chicago Fed published that proposal formally. It’s linked linked here. It surely ranks among the most blatantly inhumane and foolish ideas we’ve seen...

An audible gasp went out in the breakout room I was in at last month’s pension event cosponsored by The Civic Federation and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. That was when a speaker from the Chicago Fed proposed levying, across the state and in addition to current property taxes, a special property assessment they estimate would be about 1% of actual property value each year for 30 years. Evidently, that wasn’t reality-shock enough. This week the Chicago Fed published that proposal formally. It’s linked here. It surely ranks among the most blatantly inhumane and foolish ideas we’ve seen yet....

Glennon: Statewide property tax proposed by Chicago Fed By Mark Glennon - An audible gasp went out in the breakout room I was in at last month's pension eventcosponsored by The Civic Federation and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. That was when a speaker from the Chicago Fed proposed levying, across the state and in addition to current property taxes, a special property assessment they estimate would be about 1% of actual property value each year for 30 years. Evidently, that wasn't reality-shock enough. This week the Chicago Fed published that proposal formally. It's linked here. It surely ranks...