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As a boy, Ron Glaser tied ropes to the twisting branches of cottonwood trees and swung over the irrigation ditches crisscrossing the fertile stretch of land along the Rio Grande known as the North Valley. “We had one right behind the Smith’s over here by Solar Road,” he says. “Some of these kids still use … Read more

Olga’s Psychic Boutique is a squat, beat-up house up the street from a gas station in northern Chicago. Hanging in one of its windows is the international calling card of those on mysticism’s payroll: the gold neon outline of a giant hand with its fingers spread wide. If I was still confused, I could read … Read more

My name is Sherry and I carry a mace — the medieval spiked ball on a stick made for liquefying skulls, not the sissy spritzer you pick up at Walgreens — as long as a golf club. I am 5’6″ with legs like an Olympic sprinter’s, breasts like Pamela Anderson and abs tight enough to … Read more

Consumer demand for electricity and construction of new power-generating facilities is rising, but even after last summer’s massive blackout, investment in the nation’s strained electricity transmission grid is lagging, partly because of federal-state turf contests. Reliability of the grid, experts say, is threatened. According to the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), a not-for-profit corporation … Read more

NovaMed Eyecare Inc., an owner and developer of outpatient surgery centers, posted modest earnings for the fourth quarter, an improvement from a year-earlier loss that was due in part to the introduction of new cosmetic and pain-management surgical procedures. NovaMed earned $1.34 million, or 6 cents per diluted share, for the quarter ended Dec. 31. … Read more

About 100 miles west of Chicago, one answer to Illinois’ future energy supply may be blowing in the wind. In January the state’s first large-scale wind farm — 63, 213-foot tall turbines turning wind into electricity –- got its finishing touches from Navitas Energy Inc., a Minneapolis-based wind farm developer and subsidiary of Spain-based Gamesa … Read more

Nicor Inc., parent company of natural gas utility Nicor Gas, reported a 10.7 percent drop in fourth quarter earnings from the same year-ago period under the pressure of increased operating costs and sub-par results from the gas distribution portion of its business. Nicor earned $35.1 million for the quarter ended Dec. 31, or 80 cents … Read more

A colder than usual year and sinking interest expense helped NiSource Inc.’s earnings leap ahead for the quarter ended Dec. 31, but earnings for all of 2003 dropped a whopping 77 percent from the previous year’s earnings due mostly to the sale of discontinued operations assets. “They took a beating on what they sold,” said … Read more

About 277,000 tons less of carbon dioxide made it into the air in 2002, according to the Center for Resource Solutions, a non-profit environmental organization in San Francisco. And it’s all because of little things called green tags. By January, sales of those little green tags brought Mainstay Energy LLC’s revenues to about $100,000. And … Read more

Hand-to-hand combat, a bagpipe player, men in uniform and gunfire. Were it not for the cookies and coffee, it could have been war. On Tuesday night students in the Niles Police Department’s Citizens Police Academy (CPA) had their final class before they accept graduation certificates at next week’s graduation ceremony. The class kicked off with … Read more