Push for online sales taxes pick up steam in Congress

U.S. states could collect millions of dollars in online sales taxes, with members of both parties in Congress sponsoring legislation Thursday that would resolve states' decades-long struggle to tax businesses beyond their borders.

"Small businesses and states alike are suffering from the inability to collect due -- not new -- taxes from purchases made online," said Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., adding the legislation is a "bipartisan, bicameral, common-sense solution that promotes states' rights and levels the playing field for our Main Street businesses."

Legislation on the Amazon tax, named for the colossal Internet retailer, has languished for years.

In 1992 the Supreme Court decided the patchwork of state tax laws made it too difficult for online retailers to collect and remit sales taxes. So states can tax Internet only sales made by companies with a physical presence in the states. That means online retailers such as Amazon.com Inc. collect sales tax in some states and not in others.

The bills introduced on Thursday reconcile differences in legislation that the House of Representatives and Senate considered last year. The nearly identical details in the bills and strong bipartisan support mean the final bill could be sent to President Barack Obama this year.

Members of Congress recently assured state lawmakers they would pass a law in 2013.

In the last decade, Internet sales have gone from 1.6 percent of all U.S. retail sales to more than 5 percent, according to Commerce Department data, a proportion that will likely grow as shoppers make more purchases on handheld devices. In the third quarter of 2012,  "e-commerce" sales were $57 billion, the department said.

Large Internet retailers are worried the tax could drive up the cost of doing business. They would also have to create new systems and software to collect the surcharges, adding to their costs. Amazon said in July it prefers having the tax issue resolved at the federal level.

When the 2007-09 recession caused states' revenues to collapse, Republican and Democratic governors backed the tax as a financial solution that would not require federal aid.

A leader in the Republican party, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell went so far as to figure online tax revenue into his recent plan for overhauling the state's transportation funding.

"The revenue states are losing out on is legally owed, but because of a pre-Internet Supreme Court ruling, states aren't able to collect it," Sen. Deb Peters, R-S.D., said in a statement.

States and cities say they can recoup billions of dollars with the tax. Fitch Ratings estimates put the states' loss at $11 billion.

Some states are considering their own legislation. Florida is debating a bill that advocates say could bring the state more than $400 million.

Small retailers, meanwhile, have said the sales tax will will allow them to compete with massive online retailers.

"While store owners collect and remit state and local sales taxes their digital competitors are off the hook -- and benefiting because of it," said David French, the National Retail Federation's senior vice president for government relations, in a statement.

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Anxiety grows as Chicago Public Schools narrows closing list

After trimming the number of schools that could be closed to 129, Mayor Rahm Emanuel's school administration on Wednesday entered the latest and what is likely to be the most intense phase so far in trying to determine which schools should be shut.

Chicago Public Schools chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett is expected to pare the preliminary list before unveiling a final one at the end of March. She said administrators will determine which schools are saved in the coming weeks amid a final round of community meetings to hear arguments from parents, teachers and community groups about why their schools should stay open.

If a hearing Wednesday night in North Lawndale was any indication, CPS still has a long way to go to gain the public's trust.

"Our schools don't need to close," Dwayne Truss, vice chairman of CPS' Austin Community Action Council, said in front of hundreds of people packed inside a church auditorium in the West Side neighborhood. "CPS is perpetrating a myth that there's a budget crisis."

CPS initially said 330 of its schools are underenrolled, the chief criterion for closing. Members of a commission assembled to gather public input on the issue told CPS officials earlier this year that closing a large number of schools would create too much upheaval. The Tribune, citing sources, said the commission indicated a far smaller number should be closed than initially feared, possibly as few as 15.

CPS then started holding its own hearings and on Wednesday, while following many of the formal recommendations made by the Commission on School Utilization, said 129 schools still fit the criteria for closing.

The new number and the latest round of hearings sets the stage for the administration to counter questions about the district's abilities to close a large number of schools and the need to do so.

For many who have already turned up to school closing meetings, this final round of hearings will be even more critical. School supporters must show how they plan to turn around academic performance and build enrollment, and also make the case for any security problems that would be created by closing their school.

"We are prepared now to move to the next level of conversation with our community and discuss a list of approximately 129 schools that still require further vetting and further conversation," Bryd-Bennett said. "We are going to take these 129 and continue to sift through these schools."

In the past, political clout has played a role in the district's final decisions. Already this year, several aldermen have spoken out on behalf of schools in their wards.

On the Near Northwest Side, for instance, the initial list of 330 underused schools included about six in the 1st Ward. Ald. Proco "Joe" Moreno helped organize local school council members, school administrators and parents to fight any closing. He also took that fight to leaders in City Hall and within CPS' bureaucracy. Nearly all of the schools in the ward were excluded from the list of 129.

"It is effort and it's organizing and not just showing up at meetings and yelling. Anybody can do that," Moreno said. "Those schools that proactively work before those meetings and explain what they are doing, what they need and that they are willing to accept new students, that's when politics works.

"My responsibility in this juncture was to focus on these schools," he said. "I had to work on the inside, with CPS and with City Hall, and with my schools on the outside."

Most of the schools on the list of 129 are on the West, South and Southwest sides, many in impoverished neighborhoods that saw significant population loss over the last decade. Largely spared were the North and Northwest sides.

In all, more than 43,000 students attend those 129 schools on the preliminary list, according to CPS records.

The area with the most schools on the list is a CPS network (the district groups its schools in 14 networks) that runs roughly from Madison Street south to 71st Street and from the lake to State Street. The preliminary list includes 24 schools in that area.

The Englewood-Gresham network has the second-largest number, 19, while the Austin-North Lawndale network where Wednesday night's meeting was held still has 16 schools on the list.

CPS critics said the preliminary list is still too large to be meaningful and that the district's promise to trim it before March 31 is only a tactic to make the final number seem reasonable.

"They started out with such a far-fetched, exaggerated list of schools, many of which are nowhere near underutilized," said Wendy Katten, co-founder of the parent group Raise Your Hand. "They might appear to be looking like they're listening, but they're not. They have not done a thorough and substantive assessment of these schools."

Following the commission's recommendations, CPS last month removed high schools and schools performing at a high level academically from consideration. On Wednesday, the district said schools with more than 600 students or utilization rates of at least 70 percent have also been taken out of consideration for closing.

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Music kingpin Jimmy Iovine: “Most tech companies are culturally inept”

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre will launch a new paid subscription music service this summer branded under the successful Beats headphone brand, Iovine said on Tuesday.

Speaking at AllThingsD’s conference in Laguna Beach, the chairman of Interscope-Geffen-A&M sought to explain why his service will be better than the ones currently available. One reason? It’s being designed by creative people instead of geeks.

“Most technology companies are culturally inept,” Iovine said. “The way content companies never get tech right, never get culture right. They can hire anyone they want to sing in front of advertisements, but they never get curation right.”

Iovine then said that everyone offers the same service except for Apple, for which he reserved high praise. Steve Jobs was able to create a great service because he mirrored the current generation, boasting a background in both culture and technology.

However, this new Beats service will be “completely different” from iTunes, focusing on curating playlists for its users. Iovine spent a lot of time talking about how the order of songs matters, how Bruce Springsteen spent six months determining the eight-song order of “Born to Run.”

The Beats service customize what songs plays next for each user, relying on tastemakers like Nine Inch Nails leader turned composer Trent Reznor.

“My daughter plays Patsy Cline and Beyonce on the same playlist,” Iovine said. “We can’t just give them albums. They are telling us now. How loud do they have to scream it?”

Iovine, who helped launch both Eminem and Lady Gaga, has a vested interest in helping artists profit, too. While he seemed to praise Spotify, many musicians have complained that they do not get enough money from the service. Iovine said his service would enable artists to see who was listening to their music so they could get a better sense of their fan base.

Members of the audience thought that might raise privacy issues, but Iovine just flashed his smile and said he remained optimistic.

Beats bought music service MOG last summer and revealed in January that it is planning a new subscription service. Ian Rogers, former CEO of Topspin Media, will run the new service, code-named Daisy.

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The New Old Age Blog: A New Commission: Time to Cheer or Yawn?

The fate of the Class Act, which would have established the nation’s first voluntary public long-term care insurance program, was sealed in 2011 when the Obama administration shut it down, essentially calling it unworkable.

As long as the language remained part of the Affordable Care Act, supporters allowed themselves to hope, or perhaps fantasize, that the administration might return to the subject. How to care for an aging population, and who pays for that and how, are questions that won’t go away.

But Congress quietly administered the coup de grâce last month, during the fiscal cliff negotiations. The budget deal stripped the Class Act language from the Affordable Care Act. R.I.P.

In its place — thanks to the intervention of Senator Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia — the negotiators created a Commission on Long-Term Care, charged with developing plans for “a comprehensive, coordinated and high-quality system” ensuring long-term care for older adults and people with disabilities.

Its 15 members — three picks each for the president, the Senate majority and minority leaders, and the House speaker and minority leader — face a tight deadline. Within six months, they are supposed to recommend legislative or administrative actions, including actual legislative language. Then bills are to be introduced in both houses of Congress on the very next day they are in session.

Which sounds like urgency, but is it? Even Connie Garner, the longtime Kennedy staff member who directs the advocacy group called Advance Class, was skeptical. “What can you really do in six months?” she said. Actuaries and policy types had been working on the Class plan for 19 months before the plug was pulled. “And so what if you introduce a bill?” she went on. “You can introduce stuff and nothing happens.”

So when Advance Class held its monthly board meeting a few days after the Class Act officially bit the dust, Ms. Garner figured this push for a national long-term care approach was dead, along with her organization. She had prepared a valedictory, praising the group for at least putting the issue on the national agenda.

“But they said, ‘No, we’re going to keep Advance Class going; we’re going to fight the long fight,’ ” she recalled. So on we go.

Discouragingly, the commission has already hit delays: Its members were to be named within 30 days of the budget deal’s enactment, but only the Congressional Democrats have made appointments.

Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, nominated a veteran health policy scholar, Judy Feder, who is now at the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute; the labor executive Laphonza Butler, who heads California’s United Long-Term Care Workers Union; and Javaid Anwar, a Nevada internist.

Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, appointed Bruce Chernof, chief executive of the SCAN Foundation, which promotes quality care for the elderly; Judith Stein, founder of the Center for Medicare Advocacy; and George Vrandenburg, a retired corporate lawyer who has put his philanthropic muscle behind Alzheimer’s causes.

We have heard nothing yet from the White House or the Republican Congressional leadership.

Maybe that barely matters. “I can’t imagine anything coming out of this commission that won’t be totally forgotten a year from now,” said Jesse Slome, executive director of the American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance. “How many commissions have there been?”

Yet one thing that he and the proponents at Advance Class can agree on — maybe the only thing — is that this issue demands attention.

Otherwise, Mr. Slome says, we are stuck with what we have when it comes to older people who might need expensive care for 30 years, and disabled people who might need care for even longer. And what we have, he said, amounts to “a little here, a little there, a little Medicare, a lot of Medicaid, a little long-term care insurance and a lot of unpaid family caregiving.” (I would say very little long-term care insurance, and a vast amount of unpaid family care.)

Discussing the future of Medicare and Medicaid without including long-term care is pointless, Mr. Slome added. Ms. Garner notes that she meets frequently with Republicans and that they never dismiss the issue as unimportant.

Well, there’s a start.

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Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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American, US Airways to merge

AMR Corp., parent of American Airlines, and US Airways Group will merge, the companies said Thursday.

They would create the world's largest airline, edging out Chicago-based United Airlines, if the $11 billion merger is approved by regulators.

In Chicago, the two airlines have little overlap. American Airlines is the No. 2 carrier in the region, with about 27 percent of the market, 500 flights per day and 9,300 Chicago-based employees. O'Hare is American's second-largest hub, after Dallas-Fort Worth. 

By contrast, US Airways flights account for just 2 percent of the airline seats flying out of Chicago's airports, and the carrier has 170 employees in Chicago.
 
The combined airline will keep the American Airlines name but be run by US Airways CEO Doug Parker, while American's CEO, Tom Horton, becomes nonexecutive chairman.

gkarp@tribune.com

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Dorner case: Human remains found in debris of burned cabin

Charred human remains have been found in the burned cabin where police believe fugitive ex-cop Christopher Dorner was holed up after trading gunfire with law enforcement, authorities said.

If the body is identified to be Dorner’s, the standoff would end a weeklong manhunt for the ex-LAPD officer and Navy reserve lieutenant, who is accused of going on a revenge-fueled spree following his firing by the Los Angeles Police Department several years ago. Four people have died allegedly at Dorner’s hands.

The last burst of gunfire Tuesday came after the suspect, attempting to flee law enforcement officials, shot to death one San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy and seriously injured another. He then barricaded himself in a wooden cabin outside Big Bear, not far from ski resorts in the snow-capped San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles, according to police.

Just before 5 p.m., authorities smashed the cabin's windows, pumped in tear gas and called for the suspect to surrender. They got no response. Then, using a demolition vehicle, they tore down the cabin's walls one by one. When they reached the last wall, they heard a gunshot. Then the cabin burst into flames.

Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said he would not consider the manhunt over until a body was identified as Dorner.

"It is a bittersweet night," said Beck as he drove to the hospital where the injured deputy was located. He is expected to survive, but is expected to need several surgeries. "This could have ended much better, it could have ended worse. I feel for the family of the deputy who lost his life."

According to a manifesto Dorner allegedly posted on Facebook, he felt the LAPD unjustly fired him several years ago, when a disciplinary panel determined that he lied in accusing his training officer of kicking a mentally ill man during an arrest. Beck has promised to review the case.

Dorner, 33, vowed to wage "unconventional and asymmetrical warfare" against law enforcement officers and their families, the manifesto said. "Self-preservation is no longer important to me. do not fear death as I died long ago."

Last week, authorities had tracked Dorner to a wooded area near Big Bear Lake. They found his torched gray Nissan Titan with several weapons inside. The only trace of Dorner was a short trail of footprints in newly fallen snow.

On Tuesday morning two maids entered a cabin in the 1200 block of Club View Drive and ran into a man who they said resembled the fugitive, a law enforcement official said. The cabin was not far from where Dorner's singed truck had been found and where police had been holding press conferences about the manhunt.

The man tied up the maids, and he took off in a purple Nissan parked near the cabin. About 12:20 p.m., one of the maids broke free and called police.

Nearly half an hour later, officers with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife spotted the stolen vehicle and called for backup. The suspect turned down a side road in an attempt to elude the officers but crashed the vehicle, police said.

A short time later, authorities said the suspect carjacked a light-colored pickup truck. Allan Laframboise said the truck belonged to his friend Rick Heltebrake, who works at a nearby Boy Scout camp.

Heltebrake was driving on Glass Road with his Dalmatian, Suni, when a hulking African American man stepped into the road, Laframboise said. Heltebrake stopped. The man told him to get out of the truck.

"Can I take my dog?" Heltebrake asked, according to his friend.

"You can leave and you can take your dog," the man said. He then sped off in the Dodge extended-cab pickup — and quickly encountered two Department of Fish and Wildlife trucks.

As the suspect zoomed past the officers, he rolled down his window and fired about 15 to 20 rounds. One of the officers jumped out and shot a high-powered rifle at the fleeing pickup. The suspect abandoned the vehicle and took off on foot.

Police said he ended up at the Seven Oaks Mountain Cabins, a cluster of wood-frame buildings about halfway between Big Bear Lake and Yucaipa. The suspect exchanged gunfire with San Bernardino County sheriff's deputies as he fled into a cabin that locals described as a single-story, multi-room structure.

The suspect fired from the cabin, striking one deputy, law enforcement sources said. Then he ducked out the back of the cabin, deployed a smoke bomb and opened fire again, hitting a second deputy. Neither deputy was identified by authorities. The suspect retreated back into the cabin.

The gun battle was captured on TV by KCAL-TV Channel 9 reporter Carter Evans, who said he was about 200 feet from the cabin. As Evans described on air how deputies were approaching the structure, he was interrupted by 10 seconds of gunfire.

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Why Netflix has “no motivation” to release ratings for “House of Cards”

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – Netflix has ‘no motivation’ to disclose viewership numbers for its original shows regardless of their success, chief creative officer Ted Sarandos said on Tuesday. Speaking at AllThingsD’s conference in Laguna Beach, Sarandos both mocked Nielsen numbers and insisted that Netflix has no need to toot its own horn.

“I honestly have no motivation to do it,” Sarandos said of releasing numbers. “I don’t sell ads, so ratings don’t matter in that way.”

The question has surfaced repeatedly since Netflix released “House of Cards,” an expensive and well-received original show created by Beau Willimon and starring Kevin Spacey. While Sarandos said the show has been the most watched show on Netflix in every country where the service is available, he would not go much further.

Entertainment executives are particularly curious about the show’s performance to gauge Netflix’s foray into original programming and to compare its audience to that of shows on regular TV. Netflix will soon release other new series from successful Hollywood talent, including a new season of “Arrested Development.” The show’s creator Mitch Hurwitz and cast member Will Arnett joined Sarandos on stage during the session as well.

Sarandos gave several explanations for why Netflix has no reason to get into the numbers game. For one, they don’t sell advertisements against specific shows, so ratings have no impact on their bottom line. They don’t sell their shows to cable operators either, so they don’t need ratings to justify charging a certain fee. They make money from subscriptions and ratings have no impact on those numbers.

Netflix customers also watch the shows differently than they do normal television since they can watch them at any time on many devices. Sarandos said comparing Netflix ratings and TV ratings would be like apples and oranges.

When a reporter pressed Sarandos on the issue, he remarked that actors don’t believe in Nielsen numbers anyways. Arnett then commented that creative people just want to tell stories and welcome a new way of doing so.

When asked what he does when Spacey calls to ask about numbers, Sarandos replied, “I don’t tell him. I just tell him I’m thrilled.”

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well: Getting the Right Dose of Exercise

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

A common concern about exercise is that if you don’t do it almost every day, you won’t achieve much health benefit. But a commendable new study suggests otherwise, showing that a fairly leisurely approach to scheduling workouts may actually be more beneficial than working out almost daily.

For the new study, published this month in Exercise & Science in Sports & Medicine, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham gathered 72 older, sedentary women and randomly assigned them to one of three exercise groups.

One group began lifting weights once a week and performing an endurance-style workout, like jogging or bike riding, on another day.

Another group lifted weights twice a week and jogged or rode an exercise bike twice a week.

The final group, as you may have guessed, completed three weight-lifting and three endurance sessions, or six weekly workouts.

The exercise, which was supervised by researchers, was easy at first and meant to elicit changes in both muscles and endurance. Over the course of four months, the intensity and duration gradually increased, until the women were jogging moderately for 40 minutes and lifting weights for about the same amount of time.

The researchers were hoping to find out which number of weekly workouts would be, Goldilocks-like, just right for increasing the women’s fitness and overall weekly energy expenditure.

Some previous studies had suggested that working out only once or twice a week produced few gains in fitness, while exercising vigorously almost every day sometimes led people to become less physically active, over all, than those formally exercising less. Researchers theorized that the more grueling workout schedule caused the central nervous system to respond as if people were overdoing things, sending out physiological signals that, in an unconscious internal reaction, prompted them to feel tired or lethargic and stop moving so much.

To determine if either of these possibilities held true among their volunteers, the researchers in the current study tracked the women’s blood levels of cytokines, a substance related to stress that is thought to be one of the signals the nervous system uses to determine if someone is overdoing things physically. They also measured the women’s changing aerobic capacities, muscle strength, body fat, moods and, using sophisticated calorimetry techniques, energy expenditure over the course of each week.

By the end of the four-month experiment, all of the women had gained endurance and strength and shed body fat, although weight loss was not the point of the study. The scientists had not asked the women to change their eating habits.

There were, remarkably, almost no differences in fitness gains among the groups. The women working out twice a week had become as powerful and aerobically fit as those who had worked out six times a week. There were no discernible differences in cytokine levels among the groups, either.

However, the women exercising four times per week were now expending far more energy, over all, than the women in either of the other two groups. They were burning about 225 additional calories each day, beyond what they expended while exercising, compared to their calorie burning at the start of the experiment.

The twice-a-week exercisers also were using more energy each day than they had been at first, burning almost 100 calories more daily, in addition to the calories used during workouts.

But the women who had been assigned to exercise six times per week were now expending considerably less daily energy than they had been at the experiment’s start, the equivalent of almost 200 fewer calories each day, even though they were exercising so assiduously.

“We think that the women in the twice-a-week and four-times-a-week groups felt more energized and physically capable” after several months of training than they had at the start of the study, says Gary Hunter, a U.A.B. professor who led the experiment. Based on conversations with the women, he says he thinks they began opting for stairs over escalators and walking for pleasure.

The women working out six times a week, though, reacted very differently. “They complained to us that working out six times a week took too much time,” Dr. Hunter says. They did not report feeling fatigued or physically droopy. Their bodies were not producing excessive levels of cytokines, sending invisible messages to the body to slow down.

Rather, they felt pressed for time and reacted, it seems, by making choices like driving instead of walking and impatiently avoiding the stairs.

Despite the cautionary note, those who insist on working out six times per week need not feel discouraged. As long as you consciously monitor your activity level, the findings suggest, you won’t necessarily and unconsciously wind up moving less over all.

But the more fundamental finding of this study, Dr. Hunter says, is that “less may be more,” a message that most likely resonates with far more of us. The women exercising four times a week “had the greatest overall increase in energy expenditure,” he says. But those working out only twice a week “weren’t far behind.”

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Downtown condo market showing signs of life

Downtown Chicago's condo market is on the rebound after many moribund years, as sales volume and pricing improve in a market constrained by a lack of inventory.

It's a rare piece of good news for downtown condo owners as well as for developers pondering projects and trying to line up financing.

With a steady stream of apartment projects delivering in the next two years, the lack of new condo construction could signal opportunities for companies interested in pursuing smaller projects in key neighborhoods because the demand is there. Until those projects materialize, condo owners looking to sell face a better market than they have in several years.

Sales of existing downtown condos rose 31.2 percent last year, to 4,675 units sold, while the median sales price of $300,000 was a gain of about 2.6 percent from 2011, according to data from Appraisal Research Counselors.

Another piece of good news for current condo owners: Of the 65 downtown buildings studied by the firm, the average sales price per square foot of units sold during the second half of last year rose while the number of distressed condo sales in those buildings saw a substantial drop. Distressed sales, which accounted for  28 percent of sales since 2010, fell to 17 percent of sales during the second half of 2012.

In addition, only 1,104 newly constructed condo units remain unsold downtown.

"When we see more transactions occurring, that's a really good indication of demand," said Gail Lissner, a vice president at the firm. "The look of the condo market has changed in terms of unsold inventory."

Lissner's remarks came Tuesday during a lunchtime briefing on the local housing market.

Most of the unsold inventory, more than 500 units, is in the South Loop and the bulk of it is in the newly named and repositioned 500-unit South Loop Luxury by Related.

The three buildings, once called One Museum Park West, 1600 Museum Park and Museum Park Place 2 were taken over by New York-based Related Cos. in July have been renamed the Grant, Adler Place and Harbor View, respectively.

Since December, 40 units there are under contract, according to Related Midwest, which officially launched sales in the project Tuesday.

Other new projects reporting positive sales trends are Park Monroe Phase II, a 48-unit adaptive reuse project with 16 sales and CA3, a 40-unit building with 18 sales.

"These are all great indicators of strong sales," Lissner said. "Price stabilization has occurred in the market. You don't hear people talking about bottoming out. That was so yesterday."

mepodmolik@tribune.com | Twitter @mepodmolik

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Hadiya's dad: 'Thanking God that these two guys are off the streets'

Two reputed gang members were out for revenge from a previous shooting when they opened fire on a group of students in a South Side park last month, killing 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton in a heartbreaking case that has brought national attention to Chicago's rampant gun violence, police said.

Michael Ward, 18, and Kenneth Williams, 20, were each charged with first-degree murder, attempted murder and aggravated battery with a firearm in the Jan. 29 attack that also left two teens wounded.

Ward confessed to police that he and Williams mistook a Pendleton companion for rivals who had shot and wounded Williams last July, police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said at a news conference Monday night at the Area Central police headquarters.

Ward told police that he and Williams got out of their car, crept up on the group and opened fire in Harsh Park, McCarthy said. Williams then drove them from the scene, he said.

"The offenders had it all wrong. They thought the group they shot into included members of a rival gang. Instead it was a group of upstanding, determined kids who, like Hadiya, were repulsed by the gang lifestyle," said McCarthy, flanked by two dozen detectives and gang investigators who worked the case.

Detectives arrested the two Saturday night as the suspects were on their way to a suburban strip club to celebrate a friend's birthday, McCarthy said. Pendleton had been buried only hours earlier in a funeral attended by first lady Michelle Obama.

"I don't even know what to say about that," McCarthy said. "They were going out to celebrate at a strip club."

Williams did not confess and police have not recovered a weapon, McCarthy said. Both are due in bond court Tuesday.

Hadiya's father, Nathaniel Pendleton, said Monday night that news of the charges marked the first time since his daughter's slaying that he had a "legitimate" smile on his face.

"I'm ecstatic that they found the two guys," he told the Tribune during a brief telephone interview from Washington, D.C., where he and wife Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton will attend the State of the Union address Tuesday as guests of President Barack Obama. "(I'm) thanking God that these two guys are off the streets, so that this doesn't happen to another innocent person."

Danetria Hutson, 15, who held Hadiya in her arms after she was shot, said she and others in the group have had nightmares since the shooting.

In addition to waking up in the middle of the night, Hutson, also a sophomore at King, said she and other in that group also haven't been able to bring themselves to hang out at parks since that day.

"A lot of us were actually paranoid because the guys were still out there," Hutson said in a telephone interview. "They knew where we went to school."

On Monday night, Hutson was a little frustrated because of the "ignorance" portrayed in social media, where some people are suggesting that Ward and Williams weren't involved in Hadiya's slaying. But Hutson felt a sigh of relief today when charges were announced against them.

"I just want to see how her family reacts," she said. "It gave me some closure, but I don't think (Hadiya's) family will get closure."

McCarthy said that two days before the killing, police had stopped Ward in his Nissan Sentra as part of a routine gang investigation. That information wound up being the starting point for detectives when witnesses in the shooting described seeing a similar car driving away from the shooting scene, he said.

Through surveillance and interviews — including several fruitful interviews with parolees in the neighborhood — detectives were able to home in on Ward and Williams, McCarthy said. On Saturday night, the decision was made to stop the two if they were spotted. Police watched as they departed in a caravan of cars headed to the strip club in Harvey. They were stopped near 67th Street and South King Drive and taken in for questioning.

McCarthy said Williams was shot July 11 at 39th Street and South Lake Park Avenue, and an arrest was made. But that gunman was let go after Williams refused to cooperate, McCarthy said.

McCarthy also noted that at the time of Hadiya's slaying, Ward was on probation for a weapons conviction. McCarthy said weak Illinois gun laws allowed Ward to avoid jail time because of the absence of mandatory minimum sentences.

"This incident did not have to occur," McCarthy said. "And if mandatory minimums existed in the state of Illinois, Michael Ward would not have been on the street to commit this heinous act."

In announcing the charges, McCarthy praised the "meticulous" detective work that led to the arrests, but he also expressed frustration that despite a $40,000 reward for information in the shooting, no one who had knowledge of the crime came forward.

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