Featured Articles from the Chicago Tribune

Don't mark your calendars yet. Reports that the world will end Saturday are greatly exaggerated, according to many evangelical Christian scholars. For starters, California radio host Harold Camping, 89, president of the Christian Family Radio Network, hasn't predicted the world will end this spring. He has predicted Jesus will return and believers will rise to heaven. The world won't end until October, he says. But mainstream biblical scholars say his forecast contradicts Scripture.

On the day Rahm Emanuel ascended to Chicago's mayoral throne, another man went to bed knowing it was he who'd awake in the king's castle. Rob Halpin, aka "Rahm's renter," still lives in the Ravenswood home he refused to relinquish to Emanuel last fall, but he doesn't plan to be there for much longer. His lease is up at the end of June. "We're looking at some places to move," Halpin said Monday afternoon, hours after Emanuel was sworn in as mayor. "We will be moving. " Halpin said inauguration day for him was like any other day, consumed largely with meetings related to his work as an industrial real estate developer.

What if you could eat pasta marinara and only count the tomato sauce? Or gobble a dish of mac and cheese and only worry about cheese calories? A new brand of noodle, made with soluble fiber from a Japanese yam, promises to deliver exactly that using a no-calorie, no-carbohydrate, no-gluten, no-fat noodle called the NoOodle. While it may sound like some sort of space-age franken-food, the shirataki yam (also called konyaku) noodle has been eaten by Asians for centuries. Still, it has taken America's growing concerns about gluten, carbohydrates, calories and diabetes to prompt a U.S. manufacturer to produce it here in a new line of heat-and-eat meals.

In today's tough employment market, one company has become the go-to option for the frustrated job seeker: Starbucks. That's a problem for McDonald's as it seeks to beef up its workforce for what's expected to be another year of sales growth. To nab the attention of top-flight candidates, the Oak Brook-based burger giant is tackling the image of a "McJob. " That means a weeks-long advertising and public-relations campaign leading up to April 19, when McDonald's Corp. plans to hire 50,000 store-level employees.

Latasha Jones visits the Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market in Indianapolis several times a week to stock up on fresh produce and baked goods. The grocery store, located on a busy thoroughfare just off Interstate 465, is a convenient stop on the way to work. "This is the only place I shop for groceries," said Jones, 27. "It's cheaper than the Supercenter, and it's always busy. " If Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has its way, the same scenario will be repeated many times across Chicago neighborhoods as the world's largest retailer unleashes a new strategy to gain access to the city.

"American Idol" viewers have voted off the singer widely considered the favorite to win the competition. In surprising results announced on Fox Thursday, James Durbin, a 22-year-old hard-rocker from Santa Cruz, Calif., was sent to the sidelines, the fifth straight male to be voted off after female singers were purged in the early going. That leaves jazz-tinged vocal growler Haley Reinhart, 20, from Wheeling, Ill., to do battle with two teenaged, primarily country performers, Lauren Alaina, 16, from Rossville, Ga., and Scotty McCreery, 17, from Garner, N.C. Durbin sang two hit songs during the competition the night before, Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" and The Clovers' "Love Potion No. 9. " It wasn't enough, apparently, for voters.

The Netflix warehouse in Carol Stream does not appear on any map. Your odds of finding it are slightly better than your odds of stumbling upon a rare insect in a field of weeds. One could drive to Carol Stream, stop in a random office park, climb from one's car and scream, "Reveal thyself, Netflix!" This is not advisable. But the temptation remains. If you subscribe to the DVD-rental service, the Netflix warehouse, which you know must exist somewhere; which a P.O. Box on every Netflix envelope suggests does exist; which processes your Netflix queue with alarming efficiency; which you b et will be as magical as you imagined if you ever stumble on it, overrun with dancing Oompa Loompas in matching jumpsuits of Netflix red, is one of those mythical New Economy temples.

By Nina Metz and Steve Johnson Tribune reporters On the bright side, Chicagoans will no longer have to get worked up about non-existent street locations, Jason Clarke's accent or the "Irish mob. " On the dark side, the news that Fox won't renew "The Chicago Code," the Shawn Ryan-helmed police drama set and shot here, means a whole lot of potential Chicago film industry paychecks won't be cut later this year. It's a loss, officials said, but it's not as if the city will be bereft of TV work, as might have been the case if a cancellation like this one had come five years ago. They painted a rosy picture of filming in the area and of "Code's" impact during its brief time here.

Gabrielle Berger envisioned Millennium Park's lush gardens and the city's soaring skyline as the backdrop for her June wedding when she booked the outdoor terrace of the Art Institute's Modern Wing almost a year ago. But art, of all things, has gotten in the way of the views sought by Berger and other brides, who have been told that the glass panels surrounding the terrace will be obstructed by a temporary art installation this summer. "A riot of color and play" is the museum's description of "Restless Rainbow," the collection of vinyl strips designed by artist Pae White for the terrace.

Colleagues struggled to come to grips with the loss of NBC5 Chicago sportscaster Daryl Hawks, who was found dead Thursday morning in an Atlanta hotel room. "He was an avid follower and participant in healthy living," said Larry Wert, president of NBC Local Media for the Central and Western Region. "It's hard to imagine we lost him. " Mr. Hawks, 38, was in Atlanta to cover Thursday night's NBA playoff game between the Chicago Bulls and Atlanta Hawks. He was found after he did not show up for the Bulls' morning shoot-around.

Picked up from school by his mother, an Aurora boy embarked on a whirlwind journey — a trip to Brookfield Zoo followed by back-to-back visits to popular water parks. But 6-year-old Timothy Pitzen has not been seen since Friday morning, when his mother checked them out of the Kalahari Resort in the Wisconsin Dells. Since then, authorities in three states — Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin — have searched for Timothy, who has been missing since his mother's apparent suicide in a Rockford hotel room over the weekend.