Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • Page 1-1

123456 EARLY EDITION NORTHWEST CHICAGOTRIBUNE HOLIDAY GIVING Volunteers make a difference The Literacy Volunteers of DuPage County teach reading and writing to immigrants and others. You can help. METRO MAGAZINE JANE BYRNE SECTION 13 ARTS ENTERTAINMENT SECTION 7 FOODS YOU LOVE (BUT ADMIT IT) WHAT ABOUT THE KIDS? A GUIDE TO FAMILY-FRIENDLY SHOWS ON TV SEXISM MAY HAVE BEEN FORMER WORST ENEMY OTHER THAN HERSELF UTICA, ILLINOIS Astory in three parts 24 hours a day go to chicagotribune.com SPORTS A hook in Zook? Top candidate for Illinois football job known for work ethic, defensive expertise. NATION New labs criticized Widely expanding bioterror research puts U.S. at greater risk, some say.

PAGE 9 WORLD Intimidation in Iraq Insurgents use scare tactics on ordinary citizens to erode support for U.S. PAGE 4 By David Greising and Ameet Sachdev Tribune staff writers In 40 years of business, Patrick Ryan has built the second-largest insurance broker from modest beginnings in Chicago. Now to Mayor Daley, co-owner of the Chicago Bears, dinner host to President Bush and namesake of Northwestern football fighting to prove Aon has done no wrong in the face of an expanding investigation into the insurance industry by New attorney general, Eliot Spitzer. very comfortable with our past Ryan said Friday during a wide-ranging, two-hour interview in his modest office on the third floor of the 80-story Aon Center. No allegations have been brought against Aon, but Spitzer has subpoenaed records.

Spitzer has charged Aon arch- rival Marsh McLennan Cos. with cheating clients by rigging bids to steer their business to favored insurance companies. Those firms, in turn, paid lucrative commissions to Marsh McLennan, Spitzer alleges. No steering happened at Aon, Ryan said. can talk to 1,000 Aon brokers, and I would defy you to find one who would say they ever placed by steering their clients toward a favored insurance company solely so Aon would earn a bigger commission, Ryan said.

just do it and they get paid that From the outside, Aon Corp. seems as clean and unassailable as the white granite skyscraper along Randolph Street that bears its name. And there has been no one at Aon so unassailable as Ryan. But peel back the and problems stand out. Ryan has presided over a way of doing business at Aon reflecting an old Chicago style of corporate and political govern- Aon chief not fazed by insurance probes PLEASE SEE AON, PAGE19 As rivals targeted, Ryan says his firm steer clients By Judith Graham Tribune staff reporter A month ago, Debbie Pratt had never heard of Kathy Lazar.

Their husbands, Gary Pratt and Ron Lazar, were perfect strangers. Now, the Ohio couples share an extraordinary connection: Debbie has kidney, and Ron has The couples participated in an officially arranged organ swap. In medical circles, the procedure is called a living donor kidney exchange, a way of arranging kidney transplants that is so new it yet made its way to Chicago. But about to change. Eight Illinois medical centers are developing plans to launch a statewide kidney exchange program, perhaps as early as next year.

Participants would be people with kidney disease and friends or family members who want to donate an organ but for medical reasons. The goal is to arrange swaps Perfect fit: 2 couples exchange gift of life PLEASE SEE TRANSPLANT, PAGE14 By Russell Working Tribune staff reporter As presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko barnstormed Ukraine this fall, he was often greeted by signs that read, son-in-law, go His opponents have circulated leaflets and posters portraying him as Uncle Sam, his wife as a CIA agent and the United States as a mosquito sucking the blood of the Eastern European nation. The reason for the attacks was his Chicago-born wife, Kateryna Chumachenko Yushchen- ko. The daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, the Prospect High School graduate has found herself in the maelstrom of one of the most bitterly fought elections. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have taken to the streets to protest a Nov.

21vote that many say was stolen from Viktor Yushchenko, who seeks U.S.-born wife fights for Ukraine PLEASE SEE UKRAINE, PAGE21 If the sky could hold a grudge, it would look the way the sky looked over northern Illinois that day. Low, gray clouds stretched to the edges in a thin veneer of menace. Rain came and went, came and went, came and went. The technical name for what gathered up there was stratiform cloud cover, but Albert Pie- trycha had a better way to describe it: It was a Gothic-sounding word for a Gothic-looking sky. A sky that, in its own oblique way, was sending a message.

Pietrycha is a meteorologist in the Chicago forecast office of the National Weather Service, a tidy, buttoned-down building in Romeoville, about 25 miles southwest of Chicago. a setting that seems a bit too ordinary for its role, too bland for the place where the first act of a tragedy already was being recorded. Where the bad intentions were just becoming visible, simmering in the low-slung clouds. Where a short distance away, disparate water and old sandstone soon would slam into each other like cars in a freeway pileup, ending eight lives and changing other lives forever. The survivors would henceforth be haunted by the oldest, most vexing question of all: whether there is a destiny that shapes our fates or whether it is simply a matter of chance, of luck, of the way the wind blows.

It was a busy day for Pietrycha and his colleagues. The classic ingredients for a warm air to the south, cooler air north and a hint of wind seemed imminent most of the morning. Spring and early summer are boom times for tornadoes, the most violent storms on Earth. What bothered Pietrycha was a warm front that loitered ominously across southern Illinois. If the moist, humid air moved north too quickly in the daylight hours, clashing with A wicked wind takes aim How do you outrun the sky? On a fateful day in April, the people of Utica bore the brunt of the awesome power of a tornado.

NewsTribune photo by Kemp Smith From U.S. Highway 6 and Illinois Highway 251near the Illinois River in Peru, the tornado is seen enveloping the sky as it rages toward Utica. By Julia Keller Tribune staff reporter Part one Ten seconds. Count it: One. Two.

Three. Four. ive. Six. Seven.

Eight. Nine. Ten. Ten seconds was roughly how long it lasted. Nobody had a stopwatch, nothing can be proven definitively, but the consensus.

The tornado that swooped through Utica at 6:09 p.m. April 20 took some 10 seconds to do what it did. Ten seconds is barely a icker. a long, deep breath. no time at all.

an eternity. Radar image from April 20, 2004, 6:09 p.m. Utica Utica PLEASE SEE UTICA, PAGE12.