A law enforcement source Sunday said the group beaten at a Tinley Park restaurant Saturday was made up of white supremacists, and those who assaulted them were protesters attacking their beliefs.

Two men died after being shot early Monday in the Southwest Side Pilsen neighborhood. The two men, ages 26 and 27, were sitting on the front steps of a house in the 2200 block of South Leavitt at 12:40 a.m., when someone approached on foot and shot them, Chicago Police spokesman Veejay Zala said. The 26-year-old was shot in the head and was dead on the scene, Zala said. The 27-year-old was shot in the abdomen area and was taken to a hospital, where he later died. The men were outside eating tacos when the shooting occurred, police said. …

Several thousand protesters spent five hours peacefully chanting, singing and marching against war. At the end, nearly 40 young veterans dramatically took their military medals and hurled them toward McCormick Place, where world leaders met behind closed doors. It was supposed to end there — at Michigan and Cermak. But a “Black Bloc” of about 100 anarchists wanted something else. The group, which chanted “What do we want? Dead cops!” as it left Grant Park at 2 p.m., surged to the front of the protest crowd and tried to break through the imposing line of Chicago cops in riot gear …

MIAMI — The last place where their friends in the Occupy Miami movement saw Jared Chase and Brent Vincent Betterly was at an apartment building that authorities here condemned last week, five days before the young men became two of Chicago’s “NATO 3” terror suspects. Chase, Betterly and others in a small splinter group of activists flocked to the dirty, graffiti-marked apartment block in this city’s poor Overtown neighborhood in early February, after police ended a 108-day-old Occupy encampment next to the county government building in downtown Miami. They dubbed their new settlement “Fort Peace” and lived rent-free thanks to …

THE WATCHDOGS: Eight months before leaving office, Mayor Richard M. Daley hired a friend, Patricia C. Bobb, as inspector general of the Public Building Commission of Chicago in a move to block his nemesis, City Hall Inspector General Joseph Ferguson, who wanted to examine the multimillion-dollar construction deals approved by the commission and expose bogus minority subcontractors. Bobb hasn’t done much, records show. And now Mayor Rahm Emanuel plans to replace her as early as next month.

The Chicago NATO Summit yielded some progress Sunday on reopening NATO truck routes through Pakistan to Afghanistan while the U.S., NATO and new French President Francois Hollande decided not to rock the alliance over France pulling combat troops from Afghanistan this year. President Barack Obama played hometown host in a scripted summit at the highly fortified McCormick Place, where the real action was at sideline talks on Afghanistan-related issues. The NATO delegates were insulated from any exposure to the melee taking place blocks away between protesters and police. First lady Michelle Obama entertained spouses — and in the case of …

About 200 protesters sang and cheered loudly outside a police station at Belmont and Western early Monday morning as marchers arrested in violent clashes several hours earlier were freed.

Under the hot mid-day sun, Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy wiped his brow and took unexpected compliments from a few of the thousands of folks from across the country who marched down Michigan Avenue to protest the NATO Summit. “Thank you for keeping this peaceful,” a woman dressed in pink said. “No, thank you,” said McCarthy, who walked alongside the protesters and uniformed officers sporting Chicago-blue helmets and wooden clubs. When a man wearing a colorful mask came to McCarthy with a plea — “An old woman was assaulted. Help her” ­— Chicago’s top cop personally escorted the alleged offender …

Hoping to recover $24.1 million in taxpayers’ money that was invested with a troubled venture capital firm involving former Mayor Richard M. Daley’s son, federal authorities have given 34 private investors a choice: Pay up, or end up in court.

Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans spoke out against the wars and NATO Sunday morning in Grant Park with an anti-war concert and rally and a march to near McCormick Place, where the NATO Summit was taking place, and at another rally at which many of them gave back their medals.

Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski flew to Downstate Marseilles Sunday to bestow honorary medals from the Polish government on Gov. Pat Quinn, the leader of the Illinois National Guard and 13 National Guard soldiers. The Polish army has partnered with the Illinois National Guard in Afghanistan and Iraq for years. Illinois National Guard soldiers have co-deployed with every Polish rotation to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003. Prior to deployment, Polish Soldiers travel to Illinois to conduct training at Marseilles Training Center. Komorowski got perhaps the warmest, heartiest welcome of all 28 heads of state from President Barack Obama as the dignitaries …

More than 2,000 people who were falsely convicted of serious crimes have been exonerated in the United States in the past 23 years, according to a new archive compiled at two universities. The new national registry, or database, painstakingly assembled by the the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law and the University of Michigan Law School, is the most complete list of exonerations ever compiled. The database compiled by the researchers contains information on 873 exonerations for which they have the most detailed evidence. The researchers are aware of nearly 1,200 other exonerations, for which they …

Hours after bloody clashes with police broke out in the South Loop, several hundred protesters returned to the Loop Sunday night — and ended up camped in front of the Art Institute where Michelle Obama and world leaders were gathered.

Deal with it. In a nutshell, that was President Barack Obama’s kidding message to Chicagoans carping about all the traffic restrictions and security measures in place for the NATO Summit. “I’ve been asking: Why is everybody making such a big fuss? This isn’t as big as Taste of Chicago,” the president quipped to a Sun-Times reporter. Of course, NATO doesn’t come with ribs and turkey legs, either. Obama chatted briefly after a meeting with Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai. Obama said he looked foreward to 2014 when “We have ended our combat role, The Afghan war as we understand it is …

A Chicago Police officer suffered a concussion Saturday night when a protester punched him through the window of his van during an impromptu march in the Loop, Police Supt. Garry McCarthy said Sunday. It happened in a scrum as protesters marched on Jackson Avenue in the Loop Saturday night. McCarthy said “the march kind of overran” the officer, who was alone in the van, when the assault happened. “He was at the front of the march, the march kind of overran him,” McCarthy said. “The officer drove off to get out of the crowd for his own safety.” The van’s …

NATO Secretary-General Anders Rasmussen on Sunday praised President Barack Obama’s leadership of NATO and the president’s choice of Chicago for the summit. Obama rival Mitt Romney wrote a letter to the editor of a Chicago newspaper arguing that Obama has provided weak leadership, not leaning hard enough on European NATO members to meet their funding obligations of the alliance, which the United States heavily subsidizes. “Mr. President, I would like to thank you very much for your strong leadership, for your dedication to our alliance,” Rasmussen told Obama after a pre-Summit meeting. “America has always been a source of strength …