The lawyer for a white Chicago police officer charged in the 2014 murder of a black teenager said yesterday that his client had feared for his life. He also said that dashboard camera footage released by police is unreliable, because video “distorts images”.

In horrifying detail, prosecutors described how three children, trapped in the back seat of their mother’s car, screamed for help before they drowned in four feet of water in an Illinois lake while their mother and her boyfriend escaped unharmed.

CHINA:

Christmas Eve court date for ‘Santa Claus’

A video of student Natasha McShane will form the dramatic centrepiece of the trial of the man accused of beating her with a baseball bat as she walked home from a night out in Chicago.

Oscar-winning film star Jennifer Hudson and her sister Julia have said they pray God will forgive Julia's ex-husband William Balfour for the murders of their mother, brother, and Julia's seven-year-old son.

A jury in Chicago has convicted Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson’s former brother-in-law of murdering her mother, brother and seven-year-old nephew in what prosecutors’ described as an act of vengeance by a jilted husband.

Moments after finding her mother's body, the sister of Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Hudson sobs as she pleads for help in a disturbing recording of her emergency call released to the news media.

THE Queen of England and US President Barack Obama will receive official invitations to visit Co Cork later this year.

NOBODY seems to have asked what Brian Cowen was doing in Vietnam around St Patrick’s Day 2008.

Jennifer Hudson's former brother-in-law killed three members of the Oscar winner's family because he was jealous about his ex-wife's new romance, according to prosecutors trying to jail the accused.

Police arrested the estranged brother-in-law of Jennifer Hudson in connection with the shooting deaths of the entertainer’s mother, brother and young nephew, taking him from a prison where he had been held on a suspected parole violation.

The older sister of Jennifer Hudson made a plea at a Chicago church for the return of her missing seven-year-old son, a day after the siblings’ mother and brother were found shot dead at the family home.

US authorities investigating the shooting deaths of Jennifer Hudson’s mother and brother are still searching for the missing seven-year-old nephew of the Oscar-winning actress.

Police say they believe one of two people found dead at a home on Chicago’s South Side is a relative of singer and actress Jennifer Hudson.

Prosecutors played the sex tape at the centre of R Kelly’s child pornography trial in open court, just hours after opening statements in which they accused the R&B singer of choreographing and starring in a video featuring “vile, disturbing and disgusting sex acts” with an underage girl.

Fire swept through a third-floor apartment in Chicago earlier today, killing six children and injuring their mother and three siblings, authorities said.

Prosecutors say a 29-year-old US man travelling with his mother desperately did not want her to know he had packed a sexual aid for their trip to Turkey.

TV talk show host Oprah Winfrey has been picked to serve on a jury in Chicago.

An angry crowd pulled a lorry driver from his cab and beat him up after his vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian in Chicago, authorities said.

IN what may be the first verdict of its kind, a Cook County jury awarded $2 million (€1.6m) on Tuesday to a woman who sued her fiance’s parents for allegedly covering up that he was dying of AIDS.

THE car-parts warehouse, with only one entrance, was a maze of crates and 55-gallon drums.

YESTERDAY’s tragedy at Rhode Island was the second deadly US club disaster in four days. Twenty one people were killed and more than 50 injured during a stampede in a Chicago nightclub.

With just three days left in office, Illinois Governor George Ryan pardoned four death row inmates he said were tortured by Chicago police into falsely confessing in the 1980s.

The State of Illinois has opened a marathon series of clemency hearings for nearly every prisoner on death row in what could be the most sweeping review of capital punishment in US history.

R&B singer R Kelly has appeared in a Chicago court for an initial hearing on child pornography charges.

A mob dragged two men out of a van after an accident and beat them to death with bricks, stones and their bare hands.

R&B star R Kelly, released from a Florida jail, reported to Chicago police today to face child porn charges stemming from a video that authorities say shows the Grammy winner having sex with a 13-year-old girl.