Chicago

President Obama is dispatching an advance team to Copenhagen to pave the way for a possible personal appearance before the International Olympic Committee next month. The decision doesn't necessarily mean Obama will be able to make an in-person appeal for his adopted hometown of Chicago, which is bidding to host the Olympics in 2016, a senior advisor to the president said Saturday. But the president wants to make sure he has the option to go, in case he can get away from healthcare discussions to make the trip.

In March 2002, a former Cook County police officer and his wife were convicted of bilking the government by submitting billings for security work that was never performed at one of the nation's most dangerous housing projects, the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. And ever since their convictions, James and Janice Skrzypek have waged a fight from behind bars to prove they were set up.

Once a month, Ilana Rosenzweig faces an angry crowd at the public meeting of the Police Board and tries to convince them that the bad old days of corrupt Chicago cops are coming to an end. It's a tough sell for the Los Angeles lawyer, who became chief administrator of Chicago's Independent Police Review Authority in September.

Surrounded by shade trees at the Queen of Heaven Catholic Cemetery, Kathleen Savio's grave is marked by a modest marble tombstone inscribed "Always In Our Hearts." Four years after her death was ruled an accidental drowning, officials this week said an autopsy on her exhumed body had determined she was killed. Savio's family has always suspected Drew Peterson -- whose divorce from Savio, 40, was just weeks from being finalized when she died -- of killing her.

On the Sunday in 2003 when Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. shouted "God damn America" from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ, he defined damnation as God's way of holding humanity accountable for its actions. Rattling off a litany of injustices imposed on minorities throughout the nation's history, Wright argued that God cannot be expected to bless America unless it changes for the better. Until that day, he said, God will hold the nation accountable.

In his books, speeches and campaign commercials, Sen. Barack Obama often harks back to his days as a civil rights attorney. It is fundamental to his autobiography, displayed on his campaign website and woven into his appeals for votes. In one of his television ads leading up to the South Carolina primary, Obama recalled "working as a civil rights attorney to make sure that everybody's vote counted."

After an unsuccessful campaign for Congress in 2000, Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama faced serious financial pressure: numerous debts, limited cash and a law practice he had neglected for a year. Help arrived in early 2001 from a significant new legal client -- a longtime political supporter. Chicago entrepreneur Robert Blackwell Jr. paid Obama an $8,000-a-month retainer to give legal advice to his growing technology firm, Electronic Knowledge Interchange.

Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign on Thursday disavowed the remarks of another Chicago pastor, who mocked Hillary Rodham Clinton and her pre-New Hampshire primary tears. In an Internet video recorded Sunday, Father Michael Pfleger, an activist Catholic priest and pastor visiting Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, of which Obama is a member, says: "When Hillary was crying, and people said that was put on, I really don't believe it was put on.

Father Michael Pfleger's face is well known in these parts, one of the many iconoclastic characters who inhabit a city with a long history of racial division and political activism. Pfleger, a white priest who has had numerous run-ins with Chicago's Catholic archdiocese involving his political activism, mocked Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ last weekend. As a guest speaker at Sen.

ATHENS -- A leading International Olympic Committee official heated up the war of words over the United States' portion of Olympic revenues Tuesday, and the escalation of rhetoric could burn Chicago's bid for the 2016 Summer Games. IOC member Hein Verbruggen of the Netherlands called the U.S. Olympic Committee's share an "immoral amount of money compared to what other people get."