Free Republic

A badly burned body found on the floor of a River North parking garage early Tuesday has been identified as a 60-year-old real estate attorney, officials said. Louis S. Cohen, 60, was of the 200 block of Ivy Lane in Highland Park, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office. An autopsy Wednesday was pending and did not determine a cause and manner for Cohen’s death, the office said. Just before 6 a.m. Tuesday, police and fire crews responded to a fire in the 11th floor of a parking garage in the 300 block of North LaSalle Drive and found...

MONTERREY, Mexico - President Bush (news - web sites), seeking to mend relations with America's northern neighbor, said Tuesday that Canada will be eligible for a second round of U.S.-financed reconstruction contracts in Iraq In a breakfast meeting with new Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, Bush said he had told Martin of the shift in policy. Martin "understands the stakes" in rebuilding a free and peaceful Iraq, Bush said. He offered no details of what the contracts would be worth. Martin is eager to patch up the cross-border relationship after his predecessor, Jean Chretien, abstained from the Iraq war, angering...

PARIS (AP)--U.S. President George W. Bush was "foolish" for shutting France out of lucrative contracts to rebuild Iraq, a French newspaper quoted presidential candidate Howard Dean as saying. Dean, one of a handful of Democratic hopefuls for the 2004 election, told Sunday paper Le Journal du Dimanche, "We need French help in Iraq." "It's natural that there's going to be a cooperation between the French and the Americans in Iraq, that the French business community would be able to compete just like everybody else," Dean said in the interview. "The president is very foolish to take retaliatory trade actions against...