Of all the people I talked to before the verdict came down in the trial of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his brother, Robert, the person who came closest to predicting it correctly was Waukegan defense lawyer Jed Stone.

Stone predicted the former governor would be convicted of lying to an FBI agent, but not on the 23 other counts against him. That's what happened, although Stone didn't predict the jury would be hung on the other counts.

On Monday, Stone explained his reasoning:

Back in the 1960s, Chicago schools were taking heat for "Willis wagons," which were portable 20-foot-by-36-foot aluminum classrooms installed during the term of Schools Supt. Benjamin C. Willis.
Now, the buildings in Chicago's educational cross-hairs are "Butler buildings" on the Chicago City Colleges campuses.
Both the new City Colleges chairman, Gery Chico, and chancellor, Cheryl Hyman say the pre-engineered metal Butler buildings set the wrong tone for aspiring students.
"I don't think either one of us agree that the image that we want to project is of pulling up to a college campus and seeing Butler buildings," Chico said in an Aug. 5 meeting with the Chicago Sun-Times Editorial Board. "You find that at Olive-Harvey [and] Daley College. It is not right. ..."

Robert Chatterson Dickson, the new British consul general based in Chicago, has been here in his new job a little less than two weeks. But he's not completely new to the city: His wife grew up in Wisconsin and took a fellowship in Ann Arbor (they had first met earlier when he was press officer at the embassy in the Philippines and she was a freelance journalist), so when it was time for him to meet her parents, they decided Chicago would be a good location.

"I first met her parents in the Russian tea rooms here in Chicago," Dickson said.

Dickson's wife hasn't arrived at the new address in Chicago yet, so Dickson has been seeing the city on his own since he got here.

"If you come here for [only] a couple of days, you don't really get the sense of depth, the cultural stuff, the theater, the art galleries," he said. "Washington and the East Coast, which is what we really tend to hear the most about in the UK, seem an awfully long way away."

The litany of Burge cases - people who may have confessed only because they were tortured by former Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge or one of his associates - may not be over yet.

Over the weekend, Gov. Quinn's office announced the governor has made his first seven appointments to the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission. The commission was created by legislation last August and looks at all of the cases involving Burge and his underlings to see if there is any reason to reopen an investigation and ultimately recommend whether the claims should be prosecuted in court.

The chairman will be Patricia Brown Holmes of Chicago. Holmes was the chair of Governor Quinn's Cemetery Oversight Task Force and was a judge in Cook County, a former assistant United States attorney and corporation counsel for the City of Chicago. She is a partner at Schiff Hardin.

Here are the other appointees as released by Gov. Quinn's office: