Chicago prison inmates used bedsheets to escape: official

Chicago Tribune reporter Rosemary Regina Sobol has the latest details of two convicted bank robbers who escaped from the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Chicago early this morning. (Posted on: Dec. 18, 2012.)

Two convicted bank robbers escaped from the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in the Loop this morning by tying bedsheets together and shimmying down at least 15 stories to the ground below, officials say.

Joseph "Jose" Banks and Kenneth Conley were somehow able to climb out of the narrow slit of a window in the cell they shared and make their way down the south face of the federal jail, the spokesman said.

“A rope was fashioned out of bedsheets,’’ said a spokesman for the MCC. “I would imagine that they saved them up."

Conley and Banks, known as the Second-Hand Bandit who was convicted just last week, were discovered missing from their cell at the federal jail at 71 W. Van Buren St. around  8:45 a.m., according to Central District Police Sgt. Michael Lazzaro. The inmates were last checked at 5 a.m., he said.

The makeshift rope could be seen dangling along the south side of the MCC.

The MCC spokesman declined to say whether any guards were under investigation or whether anything was smuggled into them or how the narrow cell window was widened.

Hours after the escape, SWAT teams forced their way into a Tinley Park house where a relative of Conley is believed to live. But no one was found inside, and FBI officials said they believe Conley and Banks had been there hours earlier.

The SWAT officers left the home after about 20 minutes and walked down the street with dogs as neighbors followed, taking pictures with their phones. About two blocks down, the officers searched the Metra stop.

A woman who answered at the home of a relative of Conley said it was "very upsetting for everyone" and declined further comment.

Banks’ cousin, Theresa Ann Banks, pleaded for Banks to turn himself in.

“I just don’t want to see him get hurt or killed,” she said with a shaky voice. “(The family) is trying to hold themselves together. We just have to have faith in God and hope everything goes right.”

Theresa Ann Banks said she received a call about the escape from Banks' father, who heard about it on the news.

When Joseph Banks was arrested in 2008, Theresa Ann Banks said she visited him whenever she had a chance. “When I went to see him, he was calm, he was humble, he was happy to see me,” she said. “He was very positive every time I would go.”

Banks was described as black, 37, 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighing 160 pounds. Conley is white, 38, 6 feet and 185 pounds.

Banks, known as the Second-Hand Bandit, was convicted last Thursday of two bank robberies and two attempted holdups. He made off with a nearly $600,000 in the heists, and authorities say $500,000 is still unaccounted for.

Banks was an aspiring clothing designer who claimed to be a "sovereign citizen" who could not be tried in a federal court. He acted as his own attorney and had to be restrained during his trial.

During closing arguments, Banks repeatedly interrupted Assistant U.S. Attorney Renato Mariotti, commenting on the evidence and suggesting photo lineups were rigged. Mariotti raised his voice over the interruptions to remind the jury of the evidence at trial, including $40,000 found in Banks' safe deposit box as well as a fake beard he wore in the robberies.

Security footage played for jurors showed Banks jumping bank counters and wielding a handgun as he ordered employees to open vaults and ATMs at the banks. In one video, a bank worker was shown hyperventilating on the floor of a cash room, clutching his chest and neck.

One day during his trial, Banks had to be restrained to keep him from leaving the courtroom. He had fired his attorneys, so Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer told him he had to stay in court.

Banks eventually agreed to sit still. As the security staff wheeled him into a room to release him from the chair, he called out: "I feel like I'm Hannibal Lecter or something."

Security was beefed up when the jury reached its decision, with 10 deputy U.S. marshals in the courtroom when the guilty verdict was read.

"I'll be seeking retribution as well as damages," he told U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer.

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EU’s Almunia sets deadline for Google antitrust plan

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Union set Google an ultimatum on Tuesday, giving it a month to come up with detailed proposals to resolve a two-year investigation into complaints that it used its power to block rivals, including Microsoft.

The EU’s antitrust chief, Joaquin Almunia, delivered the deadline in a meeting with Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt in Brussels.

If it fails to address the complaints, the world’s most popular search engine could face a lengthy battle with what is arguably the world’s most powerful antitrust authority. If found guilty, it could mean a fine of up to 10 percent of its revenue, or $ 4 billion.

“Since our preliminary talks with Google started in July, we have substantially reduced our differences regarding possible ways to address each of the four competition concerns expressed by the Commission,” Almunia said in a statement.

“On the basis of the progress made, I now expect Google to come forward with a detailed commitment text in January 2013.”

Almunia said he would seek feedback from rivals and users once he has received Google’s proposal.

Google said it continues to work co-operatively with the Commission.

The European Commission has been examining informal settlement proposals from Google since July but has not sought feedback from the complainants, suggesting it is not convinced by what Google has put on the table so far.

The EU watchdog’s two-year investigation has centered on complaints that Google unfairly favored its services over its rivals in search results, and that it may have copied material from travel and restaurant websites without permission.

The Commission is also looking into whether Google restricted advertisers from transferring their data to rivals.

The Commission’s decision to press Google to offer more far-reaching concessions comes in sharp contrast to the case U.S. regulators have against the company.

Sources told Reuters the U.S. Federal Trade Commission could drop their investigation into Google without requiring any major change in how the company does business.

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by Robin Emmott, Louise Heavens and Nick Zieminski)

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Ben Stiller’s Red Hour sells two more comedies to ABC Studios

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Ben Stiller‘s Red Hour Television is continuing to pump out comedies for ABC Studios.

Following the sale of “Complikated” in October, the production company has sold network’s production division two new series – “You’re Not Doing It Right” and “Between Two Kings” – a rep for Red Hour told TheWrap on Monday.

Comedian Michael Ian Black writes, stars and produces in the former, a half-hour single-camera comedy based on his book of the same name that explores his childhood, marriage, children and career. Set “in the wilds of Connecticut,” the show takes a hard look at what happens when you wake up, look around and don’t recognize the life you’re living as your own, Red Hour said.

“Between Two Kings” is written and executive-produced by Jeff Kahn, who has written for series like “Drawn Together” and “The Ben Stiller Show.” It follows the hardships of a divorced father raising an 11-year-old son while living in his elderly father’s home.

Both are being executive-produced by Stiller, along with Red Hour’s Debbie Liebling and Stuart Cornfeld.

Since signing an overall deal with ABC Studios at the end of 2011, Red Hour also has sold “Please Knock,” written by Kevin Napier, and “The Notorious Mollie Flowers,” written by Adam Resnick.

The sale of “You’re Not Doing It Right” and “Between Two Kings” were first reported by Deadline.

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Ancient Bones That Tell a Story of Compassion

Lorna Tilley

DISABLED Almost all the other skeletons at the Man Bac site, south of Hanoi, are straight. But the man now called Burial 9 was laid to rest curled in a fetal position that suggests lifelong paralysis.

While it is a painful truism that brutality and violence are at least as old as humanity, so, it seems, is caring for the sick and disabled.

And some archaeologists are suggesting a closer, more systematic look at how prehistoric people — who may have left only their bones — treated illness, injury and incapacitation. Call it the archaeology of health care.

The case that led Lorna Tilley and Marc Oxenham of Australian National University in Canberra to this idea is that of a profoundly ill young man who lived 4,000 years ago in what is now northern Vietnam and was buried, as were others in his culture, at a site known as Man Bac.

Almost all the other skeletons at the site, south of Hanoi and about 15 miles from the coast, lie straight. Burial 9, as both the remains and the once living person are known, was laid to rest curled in the fetal position. When Ms. Tilley, a graduate student in archaeology, and Dr. Oxenham, a professor, excavated and examined the skeleton in 2007 it became clear why. His fused vertebrae, weak bones and other evidence suggested that he lies in death as he did in life, bent and crippled by disease.

They gathered that he became paralyzed from the waist down before adolescence, the result of a congenital disease known as Klippel-Feil syndrome. He had little, if any, use of his arms and could not have fed himself or kept himself clean. But he lived another 10 years or so.

They concluded that the people around him who had no metal and lived by fishing, hunting and raising barely domesticated pigs, took the time and care to tend to his every need.

“There’s an emotional experience in excavating any human being, a feeling of awe,” Ms. Tilley said, and a responsibility “to tell the story with as much accuracy and humanity as we can.”

This case, and other similar, if less extreme examples of illness and disability, have prompted Ms. Tilley and Dr. Oxenham to ask what the dimensions of such a story are, what care for the sick and injured says about the culture that provided it.

The archaeologists described the extent of Burial 9’s disability in a paper in Anthropological Science in 2009. Two years later, they returned to the case to address the issue of health care head on. “The provision and receipt of health care may therefore reflect some of the most fundamental aspects of a culture,” the two archaeologists wrote in The International Journal of Paleopathology.

And earlier this year, in proposing what she calls a “bioarchaeology of care,” Ms. Tilley wrote that this field of study “has the potential to provide important — and possibly unique — insights into the lives of those under study.” In the case of Burial 9, she says, not only does his care indicate tolerance and cooperation in his culture, but suggests that he himself had a sense of his own worth and a strong will to live. Without that, she says, he could not have stayed alive.

“I’m obviously not the first archaeologist” to notice evidence of people who needed help to survive in stone age or other early cultures, she said. Nor does her method “come out of the blue.” It is based on and extends previous work.

Among archaeological finds, she said, she knows “about 30 cases in which the disease or pathology was so severe, they must have had care in order to survive.” And she said there are certainly more such cases to be described. “I am totally confident that there are almost any number of case studies where direct support or accommodation was necessary.”

Such cases include at least one Neanderthal, Shanidar 1, from a site in Iraq, dating to 45,000 years ago, who died around age 50 with one arm amputated, loss of vision in one eye and other injuries. Another is Windover boy from about 7,500 years ago, found in Florida, who had a severe congenital spinal malformation known as spina bifida, and lived to around age 15. D. N. Dickel and G. H. Doran, from Florida State University wrote the original paper on the case in 1989, and they concluded that contrary to popular stereotypes of prehistoric people, “under some conditions life 7,500 years ago included an ability and willingness to help and sustain the chronically ill and handicapped.”

In another well-known case, the skeleton of a teenage boy, Romito 2, found at a site in Italy in the 1980s, and dating to 10,000 years ago, showed a form of severe dwarfism that left the boy with very short arms. His people were nomadic and they lived by hunting and gathering. He didn’t need nursing care, but the group would have had to accept that he couldn’t run at the same pace or participate in hunting in the same way others did.

Ms. Tilley gained her undergraduate degree in psychology in 1982 and worked in the health care industry studying treatment outcomes before coming to the study of archaeology. She said her experience influenced her interest in ancient health care.

What she proposes, in papers with Dr. Oxenham and in a dissertation in progress, is a standard four-stage method for studying ancient remains of disabled or ill individuals with an eye to understanding their societies. She sets up several stages of investigation: first, establishing what was wrong with a person; second, describing the impact of the illness or disability given the way of life followed in that culture; and third, concluding what level of care would have needed.

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McDonald's urging franchisees to open on Christmas

McDonald's Corp. is urging U.S. restaurant owners to take the unusual step of opening on Christmas Day to deliver the world's biggest hamburger chain with the gift of higher December sales, AdvertisingAge reported Monday.

The request -- which comes as McDonald's tangles with resurgent rivals such as Wendy's, Burger King and Yum Brands' Taco Bell chain -- would be a break from company tradition of closing on major holidays.

"Starting with Thanksgiving, ensure your restaurants are open throughout the holidays," Jim Johannesen, chief operations officer for McDonald's USA, wrote in a Nov. 8 memo to franchisees -- one of two obtained by AdvertisingAge.

"Our largest holiday opportunity as a system is Christmas Day. Last year, (company-operated) restaurants that opened on Christmas averaged $5,500 in sales," Johannesen said.

"The decision to open our restaurants on Christmas is in the hands of our owner/operators," McDonald's spokeswoman Heather Oldani told Reuters.

Don Thompson took over as chief executive at McDonald's in July and has the difficult task of growing sales from last year's strong results in a significantly more competitive environment.

McDonald's monthly global sales at established restaurants fell for the first time in nine years in October, but unexpectedly rebounded in November.

The November surprise was partly due to a 2.5 percent rise in sales at U.S. restaurants open at least 13 months.

"Our November results were driven, in part, by our Thanksgiving Day performance," Johannesen wrote in a Dec. 12 memo to franchisees.

Oldani said 1,200 more McDonald's restaurants were open on Thanksgiving this year versus last year -- not 6,000 more as AdvertisingAge reported.

Still, the company has a high hurdle when it comes to posting an increase in restaurant sales this month because its U.S. same-restaurant sales jumped 9.8 percent in December 2011.

"It's an act of desperation. The franchisees are not happy," said Richard Adams, a former McDonald's franchisee who now advises the chain's owner/operators.

The push to open on the holidays goes against McDonald's cultural history, said Adams. In his first published operations manual, McDonald's Corp. founder Ray Kroc said the company would close on Thanksgiving and Christmas to give employees time with their families, Adams said.

"We opened for breakfast on Thanksgiving the last couple years I was a franchisee. It was easy to get kids to work on Thanksgiving because they want to get away from their family, but not on Christmas," Adams said.

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University of Chicago's Indiana Jones mystery solved

A mystery at the University of Chicago unfolded like the dotted lines on an old map in classic Indiana Jones movies.

Last week, the university posted photos of a package it had received, addressed to none other than Henry Walton Jones, Jr., better known to most as Indiana Jones. Inside was a replica of the fictional U. of C. professor Abner Ravenwood's journal from the "Raiders of the Lost Ark" film. With no explanation, the university reached out via Tumblr, asking visitors to the blog help solve the mystery. Was it a hoax? A clever admissions stunt? A misaddressed Christmas gift? Senior Admissions Adviser Grace Chapin found out the answer Monday morning, and it was none of the above.

The journal and packaging originated from Guam, where an Ebay seller who specializes in replica Indiana Jones props sent it off to the highest bidder who lives in Italy. On its way, the smaller package, addressed to Indy at U. of C., fell out of a larger package. Not realizing what had happened, USPS apparently inserted the correct zip code and shipped it to Chicago.

“What we can piece together, USPS honored the postage, which happens to be fake,” she told RedEye, adding that the Ebay seller confirmed Monday he had received a letter from USPS explaining what happened.

But before the mystery was solved, the university received tons of suggestions and conspiracy theories as to the origin of the package (see photos of it here). It even made international news, with outlets from Norway to Spain to Germany asking for permission to use the photos.

“We’ve been so amused that other people have thought this was so funny,” she said. “This is how fun the world is at this point, something being sent from Guam to Italy and it finds its way to us.”

Chapin said the Ebay seller has told the university it can keep the journal, and that currently several groups on campus are offering to put it on display or archive it, though no solid plans have been made. 

Want more? Discuss this article and others on RedEye's Facebook page. 

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Massachusetts fines Morgan Stanley over Facebook research

BOSTON (Reuters) – Morgan Stanley, the lead underwriter for Facebook Inc’s initial public offering, will pay a $ 5 million fine to Massachusetts to settle charges that its bankers improperly influenced its research analysts when the Internet company went public.

Massachusetts’ top securities regulator, William Galvin, charged that Morgan Stanley improperly helped Facebook disclose sensitive financial information selectively, perpetuating what he calls “an unlevel playing field” between Wall Street and Main Street.

Morgan Stanley has been under criticism since the social media company went public in May for having revealed revised earnings and revenue forecasts to select clients on conference calls before the media company’s $ 16 billion initial public offering. A Morgan Stanley spokeswoman did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Galvin, who has been aggressive in policing how research is distributed on Wall Street ever since investment banks reached a global settlement in 2003, said the bank violated that settlement. He fined Citigroup $ 2 million over similar charges in late October.

Massachusetts says that a senior Morgan Stanley banker helped a Facebook executive release new information and then guided the executive on how to speak with Wall Street analysts about it. The banker, Galvin’s office said, rehearsed with Facebook’s Treasurer and wrote the bulk of the script Facebook’s Treasurer used when calling the research analysts.

The banker “was not allowed to call research analysts himself, so he did everything he could to ensure research analysts received new revenue numbers which they then provided to institutional investors,” Galvin said in a statement.

Retail investors were not given any similar information, Galvin said, saying this case illustrates how institutional investors often have an edge over retail investors.

(Reporting By Svea Herbst-Bayliss with additional reporting by Suzanne Barlyn in New York; Editing by Theodore d’Afflisio)

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TV network aimed at millennials set for summer

NEW YORK (AP) — Participant Media plans to launch a cable network aimed at viewers 18 to 34 years old with programming it describes as inspiring and thought-provoking.

The as-yet-unnamed network is set to start next summer with an initial reach of 40 million subscribers, the company announced Monday.

Targeting so-called millennials, Participant is developing a program slate with such producers as Brian Graden, Morgan Spurlock and Brian Henson of The Jim Henson Company.

Evan Shapiro, who joined Participant in May after serving as President of IFC and Sundance Channel, will head the new network.

Parent company Participant Media has produced a number of fiction and nonfiction films including “Charlie Wilson’s War,” ”An Inconvenient Truth” and Steven Spielberg’s current biopic “Lincoln.”

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Well: A Running Bias Against Really Dedicated Runners

From the moment it appeared online last month, an editorial in the journal Heart became a Rorschach test for opinions about runners.

Do you roll your eyes when they start talking about their races and times? Do you snigger when you see bumper stickers that simply say “26.2,” the number of miles in a marathon, or “13.1,” the half-marathon distance? Do you lose patience with family members who have to go for a run — even if it means waking up at 4 a.m. before leaving on a vacation?

Then perhaps the editorial will appeal to you. It was titled “Run for your life… at a comfortable speed and not too far.” The authors, Dr. James H. O’Keefe Jr. of Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., and Dr. Carl J. Lavie of the Ochsner Health System in New Orleans, wrote that those who run slowly and keep their mileage down gain health benefits. But those who run for more than about 40 minutes a day and those who run faster than eight minutes a mile actually increase their risk of death.

Too much or too intense running, the two cardiologists said, “appears to cause excessive ‘wear and tear’ on the heart.”

The editorial got extensive news attention, often tinged with schadenfreude. “What do you get if you finish a marathon? A finisher’s medal and a risk of death! ” said MSN-Now. The Wall Street Journal’s article was headlined “One Running Shoe in the Grave.”

On the other side, of course, were aggrieved runners. Runner’s World instantly published a rejoinder titled “The Too-Much-Running Myth Rises Again.” The Heart editorial, it said, was “twisting the data.”

Meanwhile, some runners panicked. “I got 650 e-mails in four hours,” said Dr. Aaron Baggish, associate director of the cardiovascular performance program at the Massachusetts General Hospital. (Dr. Baggish cycles, he runs — more than 30 marathons so far — and he competes in triathlons. “I certainly exceed any dose of exercise that has been said to be bad for you,” he noted.)

By now the evidence has been thoroughly dissected. Suffice it to say that leading exercise researchers agree with Runner’s World and have stacks of journal articles to bolster their arguments.

Dr. Benjamin Levine, a competitive tennis player and director of the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine at Texas Health Resources and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, said: “You can always find one or two papers and studies that, if you spin the right way, can seem to reflect your argument.”

But, he added, while health benefits rise most sharply as people go from sedentary to moderately active, there is no good evidence that they decline, or even level off, for distance runners. “Our data and other data are quite convincing,” Dr. Levine said.

Dr. O’Keefe is not swayed. In an as yet unpublished editorial, he recommends running just two or three miles at a relaxed pace a few times a week, interspersed with days of swimming, a couple of sessions of weight lifting and some yoga. In an interview, he said that was his own exercise regimen.

The real question, though, is why does running arouse such passions? You don’t hear gleeful chortling about the health hazards to master swimmers or cross-country skiers or cyclists who do 100-mile “century” rides.

Dr. Paul Thompson, a cardiologist and exercise researcher at Hartford Hospital who is also an endurance athlete, cites two factors. First, he said, among runners “a lot of people use their athleticism in an attempt to show they are a superior human being.”

Paula Broadwell said she ran in the mountains of Afghanistan with Gen. David H. Petraeus, maintaining a pace of six or seven minutes a mile while interviewing him. The Wall Street Journal published her available race times, in an article that gushed over her speed.

But it was clear to runners that she could not possibly have run that fast, even at sea level. Her best time in a race was 7:21 minutes a mile, and most people race faster than they normally run. Even that pace barely put her in the 70th percentile for her age.

When runners use their prowess, real or exaggerated, to suggest superiority, they generate resentment, Dr. Thompson noted. As a result, he said, “people love to find studies that support the bias that too much exercise is bad.”

Why is this not an issue in other sports? Runners, Dr. Thompson and others say, are just so much more plentiful than other athletes; if you find yourself resenting an athlete who fancies himself superior, odds are that athlete will be a runner. And running appears so easy — anyone can run, it seems. Anyone can finish a marathon, even Oprah Winfrey did it. So those who do not run can feel a little defensive.

Added to that is all the running talk by devotees who may not realize how annoying and boring their monologues can be. Dr. Baggish said his patients often bring in huge folders full of decades worth of data — heart rates on various runs, finishing times in races.

“They can talk about it until the cows come home,” he said.

So it might behoove runners to keep their running talk and braggadocio to their running friends. There may be something more than health concerns behind those cracks from friends and family about failing knees and backs and heart attacks among runners.

“When I see runners in my office, I always encourage them to bring their spouses,” Dr. Baggish said. Often a wife, for example, will start to complain: her husband “can’t enjoy Christmas Day with the family because he has to run.” A husband might say he just can’t understand why his wife has to be out there all the time running.

“That sort of inconvenience translates into concerns about health,” Dr. Baggish said.

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Reyes goes craft with Windy City deal

Independent breweries are still a niche category in the marketplace, but interest in them continues to grow.

Reyes Beverage Group, a division of global food and beer distributor Reyes Holdings of Rosemont, said Sunday it has reached an agreement to purchase Windy City Distribution, a well-regarded distributor of craft beers.

Brothers Jim and Jason Ebel founded Windy City in 1999. The firm operates as a distributor across eight northern Illinois counties for more than 40 craft breweries, such as Tyranena, Lagunitas and Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales. The Ebels also are the brewers behind Warrenville-based Two Brothers beer.

The deal, which is expected to close by the end of the year, is yet another sign of the coming-of-age of the craft beer scene, which is now much more part of the mainstream beer industry. In 2012, 442 craft breweries opened, according to the Beer Institute. The Brewers Association, a trade association, said sales of craft brews increased 14 percent in the first half of 2012 and volume jumped 12 percent.

While the beer industry overall has shown limited growth, the explosive interest in craft beer is enticing giants such as Anheuser-Busch, the maker of Budweiser, and MillerCoors, both of which have struggled to enter the craft market on their own. Since acquiring Chicago's Goose Island in 2011, Anheuser-Busch has aggressively expanded that well-known label. Earlier this year, it revealed plans to increase Goose Island's distribution to all 50 states, making it one of the few craft brands with a true national footprint.

Reyes' Chicago Beverage Systems and Windy City will not integrate their operations. Windy City's president, Bob Collins, and his management team will join Reyes. Chicago Beverage Systems distributes Miller, Coors and Heineken brands, among others.

"Windy City Distributing will be a new entity in our network focused solely on the craft beer market," said Ray Guerin, chief operating officer of Reyes Beverage Group. "I look forward to working with Windy City to learn more about servicing the craft beer industry while providing Reyes Beverage Group's expertise to help Windy City expand."

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Both companies are privately held.

mmharris@tribune.com

Twitter @chiconfidential

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