Madigan expecting 2nd child
Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan says she and her cartoonist husband are expecting their second child. The 41-year-old is due in March. She has been married to Pat Byrnes since 2003. The couple's first child, Rebecca, was born in January 2005. Madigan says she plans a short maternity leave after the birth. She says she feels very blessed and she and her husband are looking forward to expanding the family.
'Genius grants' awarded
A woman who helps students go to college with their "posse," a psychiatrist who treats combat veterans and a museum director on Alaska's Kodiak Island are among the 24 winners of this year's MacArthur Foundation "genius grants." The $500,000 fellowships were announced Monday by the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Recipients can use the money however they wish. Other winners of this year's fellowships include a blues musician, a painter, a playwright, an inventor, a medieval historian, a forensic anthropologist who investigates human rights violations, a biomedical scientist studying how to temporarily reduce metabolism and a spider silk biologist researching new synthetic materials.
School chief to step down
The Catholic schools chief of the Chicago Archdiocese Monday said he will step down by the school year's end. After six years on the job, Nicholas Wolsonovich will leave his post as superintendent of the archdiocese's 256 schools in Cook and Lake counties. Archdiocese officials declined to specify the reason for Wolsonovich's departure. "He hasn't indicated where he's going. He's just going to step back for a while," spokeswoman Susan Burritt said. An Ohio native and the first parent to hold the job, Wolsonovich said in a statement his decision followed "a great deal of prayer, personal reflection and consultation with family and colleagues." Archdiocese officials will form a committee to search for a successor. Nearly 98,000 students attend Archdiocese schools in Cook and Lake counties.
Senators question VA
Sens. Dick Durbin and Barack Obama want the secretary of Veterans Affairs to explain how a surgeon with a history of malpractice complaints in Massachusetts was hired at a VA medical facility in southern Illinois. The senators wrote to VA Secretary R. James Nicholson on Monday, calling the hiring of Dr. Jose Veizaga-Mendez at the Marion VA Medical Center "extremely distressing." Veizaga-Mendez, resigned from the hospital last month, shortly before the hospital suspended inpatient surgeries because of a spike in post-surgical deaths.