Gov. Pat Quinn on pension mess: ‘Everything is on the table’

Gov. Pat Quinn took his case for a budgetary crash diet directly to state lawmakers Wednesday, pushing a grim assortment of prison closures and spending cuts in a spending plan that he said was built around “hard realities.”

• Fewer restaurants interested in shorter Taste of Chicago

  Chicago restaurants are not exactly chomping at the bit to participate in Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to shrink and revamp the Taste of Chicago. Only 40 restaurants applied to participate for the five-day festival, prompting the city to extend Tuesday’s deadline until Friday.

• How Girl Scouts helped her ‘become person I am’

  On Mar. 12, 1912, widowed socialite Juliette Gordon Low founded the American Girl Guides — later the Girl Scouts — with 18 girls in Savannah, Ga. Its mission: Building self-reliance and citizenship. In 1917, the first African-American troop was started. The Girl Scouts stayed segregated …Read More

• Substitute teacher teacher fired in duct-taping incident

  A veteran Indian Prairie School District 204 substitute teacher was fired after the instructor allegedly ordered a student at Graham Elementary School in Naperville to bind his own wrists together with duct tape. The incident happened Thursday and involved a 10-year-old boy enrolled at the …Read More