Most metro areas in Illinois saw unemplyment go down last month.  But that doesn't tell the whole story.

12 of the 14 areas had numbers in August better than a year earlier.    But the State Department of Employment Security says most of the job growth has taken place in the Chicago area.

Bob Gough is a spokesman for the agency. 

"They are up over the year more than 4,600 jobs. But the statewide number is up only 3,700 plus jobs.  That means the rest of the state is lagging behind," Gough said.

An eastern Illinois man has been charged with murder in the 1990 death of his wife.  

Police arrested Gregory J. Houser of Monticello on Thursday after a warrant was issued charging him in the death of Sheryl Ann Houser.

Gregory Houser is being held at the Piatt County Jail and expected to be arraigned Monday. He has not entered a plea. Court officials were not sure whether he has an attorney.  

Sheryl Ann Houser was 29 when her 6-year-old son found her strangled with a rope around her neck in the garage of her home near Mahomet in October 1990.

A published report is questioning the accounts Illinois' top U.S. Senate candidates have given about their whereabouts during the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Chicago Tribune reports  Republican U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk has said he was in a meeting with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when Rumsfeld learned a second plane had hit the twin towers. But Rumsfeld was in a different meeting when he heard about the second attack.

As officials in Charlotte, N.C., consider when, if, and how to release video of the police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott earlier this week, lawyers for the family have released what they say is eyewitness video taken by Scott's wife.

The independent candidate for Congress in Illinois' 13th district has appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court in an effort to finally get his name back on the ballot.

When Harry Selker was working as a cardiologist in the 1970s, clot-busting drugs were showing great promise against heart attacks. But their life-saving properties were very time sensitive. "If you give it within the first hour it has a 47 percent reduction of mortality; if you wait another hour, it has a 28 percent reduction; another hour, 23 percent. And people were taking about 90 minutes to make that decision," he recalls. "So they were losing the opportunity to save patients' lives."

Congratulations are in order, kind of, for a few exemplary researchers and one massive multinational corporation.

This year's Ig Nobel awards — the rather-less-noble-than-the-Nobel awards for "improbable" research and accomplishments — were announced Thursday night.

The honorees included a man who lived as a goat, a man who lived as a badger, a man who put tiny pants on rats and tracked their sex lives, a team who investigated the personalities of rocks, and Volkswagen.

A group of villagers walks through Jiling, in the Nuwakot district of central Nepal, with eyes glued to the ground. They cut narrow paths around rice fields and yield to goats until they find what they are looking for: A brown, stinky, fly-covered pile.

"It's poop," laughs 40-year-old Chandra Kumari. Human poop.

Leading the expedition is Sanjaya Devkota, who works for the U.N. Habitat through the Global Sanitation Fund. He asks who's responsible for the offending pile.