Free Republic

CREAL SPRINGS-Residents in one Williamson County town are receiving enormous phone bills, that have been inflated with thousands of dollars worth of calls to sex lines. Police say someone is tapping into to the phone lines and homes and churches. So church leaders at the First Baptist, United Methodist and the Assembly of God Church in Creal Springs have noticed big phone bills. The calls are to numbers they know they didn't make. "Those charges are to 900 numbers which are sex numbers," said Creal Springs police chief Phil Jeralds. He believes someone is breaking into the junction box outside...

Dodge City was once known as a true frontier town of the Wild West, where lawlessness and gunslinging were common during the cattle drives of the late 1800s. But the city also became an unusual reference point during the first public debate Tuesday on whether Peoria should serve as a pilot city for a statewide concealed-carry law. At-large City Councilman Gary Sandberg questioned how residents will be able to possess concealed handguns at restaurants, taverns and other locations of Peoria that abut nearby cities that wouldn't have a concealed-carry law, such as Peoria Heights and West Peoria. Sandberg also wondered...

A 31-year-old man said he intended to fire only a “warning shot” when he accidentally killed a woman who’d been part of a group who robbed him Tuesday night on the South Side. “I’m trying to fire a warning shot — like stay the hell back,” the man said in an interview Wednesday. He did not want his name printed. Police say the man’s story appears to check out. The dead woman was identified as Barbara McComb, 21, of the 4200 block of South Calumet Avenue, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office. She was pronounced dead early Wednesday...

Rebuffed this month by skeptical lawmakers when it sought finances to buy a prison in rural Illinois, the Obama administration is struggling to come up with the money to replace the Guantánamo Bay prison. As a result, officials now believe that they are unlikely to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and transfer its population of terrorism suspects until 2011 at the earliest — a far slower timeline for achieving one of President Obama’s signature national security policies than they had previously hinted. While Mr. Obama has acknowledged that he would miss the Jan. 22 deadline for closing the...

A father has been hit with an unusual restraining order: Keep his daughter away from any religion that is not Jewish. After the girl's parents split up, the father went to a Catholic church and had the girl baptized, CBS station WBBM-TV reports. Joseph Reyes, 35, had his daughter baptized and sent his ex-wife a picture of the ceremony. Rebecca Reyes says she only learned of her daughter's Baptism when Joseph sent her the picture, and that he sent it out of malice. Joseph Reyes denies this. "I sent it because Rebecca asked me for pictures," he said. Rebecca Reyes...