A United 777 arriving from Shanghai was evacuated on the tarmac yesterday. The Captain reported smoke in the cabin shortly before landing, and once the jet was on the ground at O'hare, he ordered the evacuation of 273 passengers and crew. The incident occurred just before 4 p.m. yesterday. One passenger was complaining of back pain after the evacuation; she was transported to the hospital. Everyone else appears to be safe. The evacuation was orderly,......

Besides free booze at office parties, too much rich food, and the stress of gift buying, the holiday season also brings a couple of music-centric certainties: "Best Of" lists and benefit concerts. Keep an eye on Chicagoist for the former, and break out your taste for lutefisk tonight for the latter. Schubas will play host to a show benefiting the Swedish Covenant Hospital and featuring a lineup ripe with Chicagoist faves, playing both original music......

We love us some Xmas movies; but frankly there are plenty of swell, non-Holiday movie events coming up as well: -- The new Will Smith flick I Am Legend opens. Big deal, right? Well, if you're a fan of the Richard Matheson novel or of the previous cinematic incarnations like we are, then yes it is. To sweeten the deal we've just learned that a six-minute prologue for The Dark Knight will be shown beforehand,......

Alex Trebek, 67, had a heart attack, but he's doing fine. According to the Jeopardy website, "Alex Trebek, host of Jeopardy!, has had a minor heart attack. He is resting comfortably in a Los Angeles hospital, and he will be back in the studio for the next scheduled tapings in January." Get well soon, Trebek. Lordy, we'd be crushed if anything happened to that man. This is even scarier than when he shaved his mustache.......

Tomorrow Liar's Club is hosting the Fourth Annual Toy Drive To benefit the Schwab Rehabilitation Hospital Pediatric Playroom. They are hoping to provide toys and supplies to the KidsRehab program at the hospital. The folks at Liar's Club told us, "KidsRehab works with children who have sustained serious injury and need extensive physical, occupational and psychological rehabilitation." They need a whole bunch of stuff for the kids in the program (look after the jump for......

Unless you stayed inside all day yesterday (and that wouldn't have been a bad idea, because it was dis-gusting out there), you couldn't miss the super-slippery sidewalks all around the city. An ice storm Saturday night made traveling around the city extra-treacherous due to the thin coating of ice on sidewalks. Chicago city officials, being their normal helpful selves, urged people to salt their sidewalks and walk carefully when it's icy. And also to look......

Eeeeheeeheeehehehe. More snow is on the way tonight--maybe another four inches. Anybody got some good boot recommendations? Mama needs a new pair of shoes. Speaking of shoe shopping, Anthropolgie? We vehemently disapprove of the term "shootie." Please join us in this protest. "Shooties" appears to be catching on, so the time to act is now. No to shooties! The term and the shoes, now that we think about it. Loyola is buying Gottlieb Memorial......

We've looked all day and still can't top hedgehogs in bandages (they were bandaged at, no lie, Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital). That's the clear winner of awesomeness today. But there were other good contenders... Good luck getting this catchy pork song out of your head. Have 24 hours to burn? The annual 24-hour The Second City That Never Sleeps: Letters to Santa Benefit kicks off tonight at 7pm at Second City. This year's performers also......

Not a joke: A Hoffman Estates man was actually dragged by a car while defending his Christmas lawn decorations from vandals. Phillip OBrill proved he really isn't messing around when it comes to the award-winning holiday lights display on his lawn. He and his wife discovered up to eight diabolical vandals "stomping, ripping and breaking" his holiday decorations to pieces the other night. He stood in front of one of the vehicles as the hoodlums......

Investigations are still ongoing in Friday's Amtrak crash, but preliminary reports indicate that the train was going 25 mph faster than it was supposed to be. (The video is a lot less exciting than we were hoping for.) The Amtrak train's engineer told investigators he realized the speed limit was 15 mph in that stretch of track but accelerated to 40 mph anyway, National Transportation Safety Board Vice Chairman Robert Sumwalt told reporters Sunday. The......

Breaking news: An Amtrak train and a freight train collided at 48th and South Shields Ave about an hour ago, and passengers are being pulled out as we write this. Developing. UPDATE 12:27: Don Rashid from Stroger Hospital is on NBC5 saying that Stroger is in a "stage 3 disaster." The footage is showing color-coded triage areas, and so far the green zone is empty. 12:30 Witnesses are describing a sound "like an explosion" when......

An employee of the Cook County public defender's office was arrested today for accepting a package that contained 38 pounds of marijuana. Bad news for the proposed hospital plus helipad in Streeterville: According to two experts, the helipad is "high-risk." A building on the UIC campus was evacuated today after a biohazard alarm went off. Wonder what that sounds like. So the CTA funding bull bill that was supposed to come up for a......

Some news of the weird to keep us going: A pissed off son drove his Grand Am into the front of his parents' house and parked in the living room in Monee last night. While the police say the guy wasn't drunk, they say he was apparently "disgruntled" and may have carried out the sensational act on purpose. He didn't hurt anyone, but he did hurt the entertainment system when he parked on top of......

We were initially trying to believe Drew Peterson could somehow be innocent of any wrongdoing in his wife's disappearance, yet it's becoming increasingly difficult to think anything good about the Bolingbrook policeman. At best, he's a chronic philanderer, a domestic abuser, and a bad cop. At worst... the man's been married four times, and wife #3, Kathleen Savio, turned up dead, wife #4, Stacy Peterson, is missing, and wife #2, Vicki Connolly, has finally spoken......

First, you're diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, and then you wait months and months on the UNOS list (along with about 100,000 other Americans) for an organ. But your case is rare; you actually get the transplant you need. Hurray! Unless you're one of four transplant recipients in Chicago whose new organs gave them HIV and hepatitis C. This is the first time in more than 20 years that donor organs have transmitted the virus.......

We now join another one of our irregular weekend crime & punishment updates, already in progress. Weird shit doesn't only happen on Craigslist: A woman answered a newspaper ad for a roommate and ended up getting robbed and sexually assaulted. It's easy to scare people away from the big bad internet when people meet up for a "Casual Encounter" and it turns out bad. Unfortunately, the traditional classifieds don't seem much safer, now do they?......

The note says "To Inspector of Buildings: Meet me next door at the restaurant. Harry Sometimes the coziness of local politics can be infuriating, like when Children's Memorial Hospital is represented by the law firm "Daley & George, whose partners once included Mayor Daley and still include the mayor's brother, Michael." Gah, that's no good. Or that a Blagojevich donor and associate was apparently able to buy a vacant Aurora hospital on the DL,......

Mary Mitchell goes to town today with an article about Chicago police officers Tasing an 82-year-old woman. The Illinois Department of Aging (who knew?) received an anonymous tip that Lillian Fletcher, alone in her West Side home, needed help; they dispatched the police to do well-being check. When police got to Fletcher's door, she refused to let them in, and when they pushed their way in, she got a hammer. Police spokeswoman Monique Bond tells......

NBC5 is trotting out a sweeps special they've named "The Woman Who Knew Too Much" (video), an exclusive interview with Anne Lockett, a key witness in the 1993 Brown's Chicken massacre. Lockett waited nine years to tell police that her ex-boyfriend James Degorksi and his friend Juan Luna told her about committing the crime, and in these interviews attempts to explain what took her so long. Degorski is still awaiting trial, but his alleged accomplice......

Autopsy results released yesterday in the death of Gefery Johnson revealed that the 42-year-old Gresham resident died of cocaine intoxication and not from being shocked by a taser while being arrested by police. In August, police responded to a domestic disturbance call at Johnson's family residence, where he "became really combative with police" and resisted arrest. Police subdued Johnson with pepper spray and the taser. He was pronounced dead at St. Bernard Hospital. Johnson's death,......

Add to the preparations plan for future marathons: Hand out more maps and make sure emergency personnel use them. The AP and Sun-Times are reporting that the ambulance driver carrying Chad Schieber, the runner who suffered cardiac arrest and died that morning, made a bad situation worse. The driver couldn’t find the UIC Medical Center’s emergency room entrance, passed by Stroger Hospital, and took the patient to the nearby West Side VA emergency room where......

Don't settle for another Wednesday of Pushing Daisies, Gossip Girl and Girl Scout cookies that have been in the freezer for months (not ... that ... we do that ...). There's a shitton of stuff going on tonight! PostSecret's Frank Warren will be at the UIC Barbara's Bookstore tonight at 7:30 p.m. for a reading/signing/Q&A about the newest PS book, A Lifetime of Secrets. Please, someone ask him how he feels about lolsecretz. The Cook......

Where Do Cows Go to Retire?...

Everyone expects to be shuffled through several waiting rooms without any pants on during a regular doctor visit, but it can be very frustrating to wait when you have to go to the emergency room. Adventist GlenOaks Hospital in the western suburb of Glendale Heights has embraced the idea that time is crucial in emergency situations, spending $7 million on an emergency room with no waiting rooms. Emergency room patients now skip the waiting room......

Crook County Board President Todd Stroger unveiled his $3.2 billion budget Wednesday. Stroger has struggled to give the appearance that his government is small and fiscally responsible, eliminating about 735 positions over the last three fiscal years, and reducing 1,800 positions from this year's budget. Now he claims that bringing the county's tax take to $888 million by 2009 — by tripling the county sales tax and doubling gas and parking taxes — is necessary......

In a completely heartbreaking story, 10-year-old Arthur Jones was shot and killed yesterday afternoon in Englewood. Jones, a fifth-grader at Oliver Holmes Elementary School who just had his class picture taken, was walking with his friends at around 4:30 on Garfield and Halsted when they heard gunshots. Jones started running towards his house, but he was shot in the neck. He died shortly thereafter at the hospital. According to ABC7 Investigators are saying that they......

Members of SEIU Local 20 held a one-day strike Monday at Roseland Community Hospital. Most hospital workers strike over staffing levels and quality of care issues, but this strike was purely economic. "People aren't lined up to work at Roseland. And we think by the hospital adjusting the pay rate so that it's comparable to other South Side hospitals, that speaks to better recruitment, better retention and ultimately better patient care," Local 20 President Byron......

Patrick Ivuti of Kenya won today's running of the Chicago Marathon in a photo finish over Moroccan Jaouad Gharib. Both runners crossed the finish line at the same time, but Ivuti crossed 5/100th of a second before Gharib. But Ivuti's win, and Ethiopian Berhane Adere's defense of her women's title, were secondary stories to the decision by race officials to cut short the race due to the dangers they posed to participants by unseasonably warm......

It seems like Cook County politics becomes more and more like a bad soap opera every time we open the newspaper. While Todd Stroger is threatening more cuts and tax hikes to cover the tab on the bloated executive payroll, Tony Peraica is giving speeches about prosecuting the crooks. Forrest Claypool wrote an op-ed piece earlier this week about the disaster that the County's health care system has devolved into, and Todd Stroger won't even......

The Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center site is being considered for redevelopment as the Olympic Village, moving the proposed site west off the lakefront. Colliers Bennett & Kahnweiler Inc. has already received bids on the land, which Medline Industries Inc., Michael Reese's parent company, is trying to unload. The hospital is in discussions with Cook County to form a potential partnership, although no formal agreement has been reached yet. Among the benefits of moving......