Illinois

INDIANAPOLIS -- Wisconsin won the Big Ten Conference tournament with stout defense, and Coach Bo Ryan said that's what will carry the Badgers if they make a deep run in the NCAA tournament. Brian Butch scored 12 points, and No. 8 Wisconsin beat upstart Illinois, 61-48, Sunday to sweep the Big Ten regular-season and tournament titles for the first time. The Badgers held Penn State, Michigan State and Illinois below 43% shooting during the tournament, and Ryan said it's because the players are executing within the system.

Illinois will award its presidential electoral votes to the winner of the nationwide popular vote -- but only if several other states follow suit. A bill signed into law Monday by Democratic Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich made Illinois the third state, after Maryland and New Jersey, ready to bypass the Electoral College in November. The three states, with a combined 46 electoral votes, won't act unless states totaling 270 electoral votes -- enough to elect a president -- sign on.

The remains of an Ohio soldier who was captured in Iraq and was missing for nearly four years have been brought home. Members of Sgt. Keith Matthew "Matt" Maupin's unit say they met privately with his family and presented them with the 20-year-old soldier's Purple Heart and other decorations. The 70 members of the Illinois-based 724th Transportation Company of the U.S. Army Reserve were among hundreds to file past his casket during a memorial service in suburban Cincinnati.

Rob Walker is 28, and his brother, Michael, is 23 -- young enough to dream of life away from home but old enough to know they don't want to end up anywhere else. The Walker men are farmers, just as their father was before them, as his father was and so on back to the early origins of Illinois. Seven generations of Walkers have farmed this land that hugs the Indiana border in southeastern Illinois, a familial thread that spans 222 years of American history. The first Walker, Thomas, laid claim to the fertile property along the winding Wabash River in 1786.

It takes a particular sort of person to slog through a muddy forest after sunset, stand quietly in wading boots and long underwear and listen for the love songs of frogs. The amphibians peep, they grunt, and, yes, they croak during mating season. Western chorus frogs make a sound like a finger stroking the teeth of a comb and are among the first to herald the arrival of spring in Chicago. People like Nicky Strahl are there to record it. Her job: identify the whereabouts of some of the 13 species known to northern Illinois and report her findings to the Chicago Wilderness Calling Frog Survey.

Midwest flooding: An article in Wednesday's Section A about the rising water along the Mississippi River said the Great River Bridge connected Illinois and Missouri. The bridge stretches between the communities of Gulfport, Ill., and Burlington, Iowa.

As floodwaters slowly receded from much of Iowa on Wednesday, authorities focused their attention on a swollen Mississippi River that punched through at least two levees in western Illinois and increasingly threatened hamlets in Missouri. Federal officials said as many as 30 levees were in peril, mostly in rural stretches of northern Missouri and western Illinois. No large population centers were threatened. "The concern now is the Mississippi River between the Quad Cities and St.

A deadly fish virus has been found for the first time in southern Lake Michigan and an Ohio reservoir, spurring fears of major fish kills and the virus' possible migration to the Mississippi River. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources invoked emergency fishing regulations June 30 to stop the spread of viral hemorrhagic septicemia, or VHS, often described as "fish Ebola," which was found in round gobies and rock bass tested at a marina near the Wisconsin border in early June.

Barack Obama's gamble to compete against John McCain this fall across rural white strongholds in Republican-dominated swing states has delicate roots in the vast corn and soybean fields and small towns of southern Illinois.