Extra, Extra

• Number one place not to smoke weed/hash: work. A longtime Cook County employee was busted in the stairwell of the County Building on Wednesday for allegedly smoking hash.


• New allegations of brutality by Chicago police have surfaced. In his lawsuit, one man claims he was beaten during a traffic stop. In that vein, two hundred people attended a town hall meeting on the city's West Side Wednesday night to complain about police misconduct and brutality.


• We should never forget all the good ones, though. Police say a Chicago man confessed to drinking a staggering amount of liquor and then causing a crash that killed an officer from the sheriff's department over the weekend.


• The federal government filed a lawsuit Wednesday charging that a chain of suburban restaurants subjected its female employees to sexual harassment. Buona Beef. Seriously? We won't touch that one with a ten foot ... Never mind.


• What's with the fake shoes? A collaboration between the movie and music industries and Evanston police has led to the arrest of a store owner who allegedly had more than 700 DVDs, 250 CDs and 100 pairs of Nike shoes -- all counterfeit -- in his north suburban cell phone store.


• We hate this crap. The treating animals bad part. In the months since the Deerfield Village Board agreed to bring a circus to town, a residents group has spent countless hours trying to persuade neighbors to stay away from the big top because they say performance elephants are treated poorly.


• Trying to make it all Kermit friendly -- the city has signed an $8.7 million contract to buy as many as 300 Toyota hybrid vehicles that use electric power and plans to buy the first Chicago police cars ever to run on alternative fuel.

"THE CURVE90" by RUNFAR