1st quarter: Bears 7, Cardinals 0

GLENDALE, Ariz. -- The Chicago Bears were out of control Sunday: They needed to win in Arizona and get some help to stay in the hunt for an NFC wild-card berth.

Cardinals kicker Jay Feeley hit a 49-yard field goal to cut the Bears' lead to 7-3 with 33 seconds left in the first quarter.

The Bears started well, getting an early touchdown from their defense. They took a 7-0 lead with 8:53 left in the first quarter when Cardinals running back Beanie Wells lost his footing after taking the handoff near the goal line and then fumbling. The ball was recovered in the end zone by Zack Bowman for the Chicago score. 

Earlier, the Minnesota Vikings pulled off a significant road upset, beating the Houston Texans 23-6 at Reliant Stadium to improve to 9-6. The Vikings’ victory means the Bears (8-6) will be eliminated from the postseason race if they lose to the Cardinals. Entering Sunday, there were remote possibilities the Bears could make the playoffs at 9-7, but those options closed with the Vikings' win at Texas.

So, the Bears must win here and against the Detroit Lions next Sunday at Ford Field in order to have a chance to reach the postseason and avoid becoming the first team since the 1996 Washington Redskins to start a season 7-1 and not make the playoffs

When the day began Sunday, the Bears still held out hope of possibly earning a fifth or sixth seed in the NFC postseason tournament, depending on the outcome of games involving the Vikings, Redskins, New York Giants and Dallas Cowboys, all of whom had 8-6 records along with the Bears. The Redskins beat the Eagles 27-20, while the Cowboys were trailing the New Orleans Saints 31-24 late in the fourth quarter.

“We have to win out, we realize that,” Bears coach Lovie Smith said. “We know the road that we have to go to achieve our goal and that’s on the road, a long road trip you could say. None of that matters, though, without getting a win this week.”

The Cardinals (5-9) entered Sunday having lost nine of their last 10 games. Last Sunday’s 38-10 win over the Lions snapped a nine-game skid. The Bears have been similarly inept, dropping five of their previous six.

Sunday’s game figured to be a referendum on the talent and leadership ability of quarterback Jay Cutler, who had come up short in key games earlier this season. While the Cardinals are a far cry from the talented Houston Texans, Green Bay Packers and Seattle Seahawks teams the Bears faced, they still represented a signature opponent in the season when Cutler has to be a key factor.

“Winning is contagious and unfortunately losing is too,” Bears Pro Bowl receiver Brandon Marshall said. “And it’s all about a mind-set. I look back on teams I’ve been on the past six years and, you know, I’ve never been to the playoffs. So, I understand as someone sitting back and watching and observing ... I understand what losing is and I understand what winning is. And this is a winning team. This is a winning organization.

“So that’s what really frustrates me and other guys, you know, when you look at what has been going on these past few weeks. It’s that this is a winning team. You have high-character guys, you have guys that fight, you have guys that respond to adversity the right way. You have guys that work hard. So, you know, we’re close. We’re close and we have the guys, we have the guys upstairs and in the locker room to really get it done and we just need to do it.”

Arizona coach Ken Whisenhunt knew his team had no playoff motivation, but he didn't think they would mail it in the rest of the way.

“If you have the right players, they’re professionals, they work hard,” he said. “They want to win and I think that we’ve got enough young players that are trying to find their way and show that they can play. That’s part of it. It’s not easy from the standpoint of everything’s geared to making the playoffs and winning your division, and then when that hope is not there then you’ve got to rely on the way you prepare and the consistency that you’ve established. So it was good to see our team play the way they did last week after the loss the week before to Seattle, and it speaks a lot about the kind of guys that we have.”

The Cardinals and Bears face off for the 89th time Sunday in a series that dates to 1920 when the Cardinals franchise was in Chicago.

fmitchell@tribune.com

Twitter@kicker34

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Sri Lanka arrests 100 Chinese for cyber fraud, police say

COLOMBO (Reuters) – Sri Lanka on Saturday arrested at least 100 Chinese nationals accused of an internet fraud scheme targeting people in their home country, a police spokesman said.

The accused, all in Sri Lanka on tourist visas, are suspected of hacking into computers in China and then demanding their owners transfer them money, police spokesman Prishantha Jayakodi told Reuters.

Chinese police requested help from Sri Lanka, he said.

Officials at the Chinese embassy in Colombo were not available for comment.

China has been the top lender to Sri Lanka since the end of a 25-year war in May 2009 and thousands of Chinese are working in the country on Chinese-funded infrastructure projects.

(Reporting by Shihar Aneez; editing by Jason Webb)

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CBS’ ”The Job” Gets Premiere Date

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Survivor” maestro Mark Burnett‘s latest reality TV venture, “The Job,” will premiere February 8 at 8 p.m. on CBS, the network said Thursday.

The series, executive produced by Burnett and Michael Davies (of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” renown) and Jay Bienstock, will give contestants the chance to score jobs at prestigious American companies through several rounds of elimination challenges that will be observed by a panel of executives. As representatives from companies offer the competitors positions, the candidates will have to decide if they’ll take the jobs or continue on in pursuit of the big gig.

Former “The View” co-host Lisa Ling will host “The Job,” which is produced by Sony Pictures Television and Embassy Row.

CBS will announce the featured companies participating in the series early next year.

“The Job” will air in the time period of the network’s other work-related reality series, “Undercover Boss,” which returns April 19.

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Genetic Gamble : Drugs Aim to Make Several Types of Cancer Self-Destruct

C.J. Gunther for The New York Times

Dr. Donald Bergstrom is a cancer specialist at Sanofi, one of three companies working on a drug to restore a tendency of damaged cells to self-destruct.

For the first time ever, three pharmaceutical companies are poised to test whether new drugs can work against a wide range of cancers independently of where they originated — breast, prostate, liver, lung. The drugs go after an aberration involving a cancer gene fundamental to tumor growth. Many scientists see this as the beginning of a new genetic age in cancer research.

Great uncertainties remain, but such drugs could mean new treatments for rare, neglected cancers, as well as common ones. Merck, Roche and Sanofi are racing to develop their own versions of a drug they hope will restore a mechanism that normally makes badly damaged cells self-destruct and could potentially be used against half of all cancers.

No pharmaceutical company has ever conducted a major clinical trial of a drug in patients who have many different kinds of cancer, researchers and federal regulators say. “This is a taste of the future in cancer drug development,” said Dr. Otis Webb Brawley, the chief medical and scientific officer of the American Cancer Society. “I expect the organ from which the cancer came from will be less important in the future and the molecular target more important,” he added.

And this has major implications for cancer philanthropy, experts say. Advocacy groups should shift from fund-raising for particular cancers to pushing for research aimed at many kinds of cancer at once, Dr. Brawley said. John Walter, the chief executive officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, concurred, saying that by pooling forces “our strength can be leveraged.”

At the heart of this search for new cancer drugs are patients like Joe Bellino, who was a post office clerk until his cancer made him too sick to work. Seven years ago, he went into the hospital for hernia surgery, only to learn he had liposarcoma, a rare cancer of fat cells. A large tumor was wrapped around a cord that connects the testicle to the abdomen. “I was shocked,” he said in an interview this summer.

Companies have long ignored liposarcoma, seeing no market for drugs to treat a cancer that strikes so few. But it is ideal for testing Sanofi’s drug because the tumors nearly always have the exact genetic problem the drug was meant to attack — a fusion of two large proteins. If the drug works, it should bring these raging cancers to a halt. Then Sanofi would test the drug on a broad range of cancers with a similar genetic alteration. But if the drug fails against liposarcoma, Sanofi will reluctantly admit defeat.

“For us, this is a go/no-go situation,” said Laurent Debussche, a Sanofi scientist who leads the company’s research on the drug.

The genetic alteration the drug targets has tantalized researchers for decades. Normal healthy cells have a mechanism that tells them to die if their DNA is too badly damaged to repair. Cancer cells have grotesquely damaged DNA, so ordinarily they would self-destruct. A protein known as p53 that Dr. Gary Gilliland of Merck calls the cell’s angel of death normally sets things in motion. But cancer cells disable p53, either directly, with a mutation, or indirectly, by attaching the p53 protein to another cellular protein that blocks it. The dream of cancer researchers has long been to reanimate p53 in cancer cells so they will die on their own.

The p53 story began in earnest about 20 years ago. Excitement ran so high that, in 1993, Science magazine anointed it Molecule of the Year and put it on the cover. An editorial held out the possibility of “a cure of a terrible killer in the not too distant future.”

Companies began chasing a drug to restore p53 in cells where it was disabled by mutations. But while scientists know how to block genes, they have not figured out how to add or restore them. Researchers tried gene therapy, adding good copies of the p53 gene to cancer cells. That did not work.

Then, instead of going after mutated p53 genes, they went after half of cancers that used the alternative route to disable p53, blocking it by attaching it to a protein known as MDM2. When the two proteins stick together, the p53 protein no longer functions. Maybe, researchers thought, they could find a molecule to wedge itself between the two proteins and pry them apart.

The problem was that both proteins are huge and cling tightly to each other. Drug molecules are typically tiny. How could they find one that could separate these two bruisers, like a referee at a boxing match?

In 1996, researchers at Roche noticed a small pocket between the behemoths where a tiny molecule might slip in and pry them apart. It took six years, but Roche found such a molecule and named it Nutlin because the lab was in Nutley, N.J.

But Nutlins did not work as drugs because they were not absorbed into the body.

Roche, Merck and Sanofi persevered, testing thousands of molecules.

At Sanofi, the stubborn scientist leading the way, Dr. Debussche, maintained an obsession with p53 for two decades. Finally, in 2009, his team, together with Shaomeng Wang at the University of Michigan and a biotech company, Ascenta Therapeutics, found a promising compound.

The company tested the drug by pumping it each day into the stomachs of mice with sarcoma.

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Kraft's new recipe for sales: Updating products for men, millennials

The pot pie kit comes with pouches of Velveeta cheese, biscuit topping, vegetables and seasoning. The cook sautes chicken until done, then adds milk, vegetables and seasoning, and cooks for another minute. The chicken mixture goes into a baking dish and gets topped with the cheese. Finally, the biscuit mix, to which more milk has been added, goes on the very top. The Velveeta Cheesy Casserole is ready in about 18 minutes at 425 degrees.

Then there's Oscar Mayer's pulled pork that's sold in a clear plastic tub. It's precooked, shredded and seasoned. Kraft is selling the meat without the sauce so cooks can choose their own and add as much as desired.

These and other new products are part of Kraft Foods Group's efforts to attract new customers: millennials and men. The recession disproportionately affected men, who are now doing about 40 percent of the cooking, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Northfield-based Kraft has found that both groups are cooking more and looking for flexible recipes, ways to customize their food and have fun in the kitchen. So Kraft is updating its stable of mature brands in ways that appeal to them.

Millennials, age 18 to early 30s, are beginning to cook and don't want to do things like their parents did. So Kraft is offering more products that require some effort. Just not too much effort.

A Kraft study showed younger men cooking even more than their older counterparts — 42 percent of millennial men do all the cooking in the household, while 76 percent do at least some cooking. They also like to experiment with their dishes.

"Now they'll talk about cooking like guys would talk about a hobby 20 years ago," said Barry Calpino, vice president of breakthrough innovation at Kraft. "It's an adventure, it's an experience, it's fun, they talk about 'their signature.'"

Men feel they have more latitude as cooks, according to Robin Ross, associate director of culinary at Kraft. "Women want to please their families and for everyone to like what they make,'' she said. Men, she said, tend not to feel the same pressure. "Men have more of a free hand."

Kraft Foods, a $19 billion a year packaged North American grocery business, was spun off in October from Deerfield-based Mondelez International. Kraft CEO Tony Vernon promised mid-single-digit operating income growth rates for the company, and acknowledged it needs to develop new, more modern products for its brands and increase advertising support to make customers aware of them.

While Vernon hasn't released targets for his ad budget, Kraft has lagged competitors, investing the equivalent of 3 percent of sales toward advertising and marketing, compared with 4.5 percent of sales at competitors, according to the company.

During the company's most recent earnings call, Vernon underscored double-digit sales growth for Lunchables, Velveeta, and MiO, a liquid concentrate used to flavor water, citing new products and subsequent advertising. However, he acknowledged work to do with Jell-O, to capitalize on "yogurt's explosive growth," and with Planters "to re-establish category leadership and profitable growth."

On Friday, Kraft shares closed at $45.53, up 2 percent from the Oct. 1 spinoff.

Simply being a smaller company, Calpino said, means Kraft can lavish attention on brands like Velveeta, which hadn't seen much attention in decades.

"Five or six years ago, I'm not sure we'd do innovation reviews" on Velveeta, Calpino said. "It wasn't even on the list."

Phil Lempert, a supermarket industry expert, said the millennial generation poses challenges for big food companies, which are not known for rapid change. Companies like Kraft, he said, have to "keep it fresh, keep it changing." Young people, he said, "never want to wake up and have the same meal in an entire lifetime.'' He also said that unlike their predecessors, millennials are more interested in "ethnic foods and adventure than ever before."

Lempert said a lot of millennials' tastes are "being driven by food trucks,'' serving products like tacos with a few different meats with a level of high quality and bold flavors. In turn, that has raised millennials' expectations on everything from a restaurant meal to a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.

Lynn Dornblaser, director of innovation and insight at Mintel International, said the fact that Kraft offers some of its new products like easy-to-use, three-pack sauce packets should be a hit because millennials love to cook, but hate to clean.

"Cleaning is a barrier to cooking from scratch," she said. It's the same for male cooks. Even making a white sauce for pasta, Dornblaser said, "you've got dishes to wash, measuring to do, steps to follow."

So products like Kraft's new Velveeta casseroles, pulled pork, Fresh Take cheese and bread crumb mixtures and Velveeta Toppers cheese sauce pouches "offer the ability for consumer to be a little creative with what they're cooking but without too much bother," she said.

Last year, Velveeta launched Cheesy Skillets dinner kits, the brand's biggest launch in more than 20 years. It's a stark departure for a brand best known for Shells & Cheese and its ability to melt over nachos. Consumers saute beef, add cheese sauce from a pouch, cook the pasta, mix, and add hamburger toppings such as shredded lettuce and diced tomato.

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Hot plate sparked fire that killed 2 kids, fire department says

A 3-year-old boy and 2-year-old girl died this morning after they and two other children were left home alone in the Englewood neighborhood, officials say. (Posted Dec. 22nd, 2012)

A young boy and girl died in a fire this morning after they and two other children were left home alone in the Englewood neighborhood on the South Side, officials say.

The girl, 2, and the boy, 3, were found in a back bedroom after firefighters cut through burglar bars on the brick and stone two-flat in the 6400 block of South Paulina Street.

"Please, sergeant, please," a relative pleaded with an officer outside the home. "They're 2 and 3 years old."

A hot plate being used for heat sparked the fire while the four children, alone in the apartment, slept in two bedrooms, according to fire officials. Police said the children's mother and aunt were being questioned.

The surviving children, a 7-year-old boy and his 4-year-old brother, were rescued by an aunt and interviewed by investigators at a neighbor's home.

Darnell, 7, said he and Marquis, 4, had fallen asleep watching Batman cartoons. The two other children -- his 2-year-old sister and 3-year-old cousin -- were asleep in another bedroom. When he woke up, the fire was already burning.

"When the fire started, everything shut off," Darnell said.

The boy said he and Marquis were in a bedroom by the kitchen and "the fire was in the front room where the couch is at. When we saw the fire, it was like in the front room, then it was by the bathroom door."

Darnell said his aunt came rushing through the front door. "When (she) saw the fire, she called all our names. When I opened the door, she told me, 'Come on, the fire's getting closer.' I coughed, my auntie was choking. My sister was banging on the door.

"When we got outside, police passed us, then drove backward and came up because there was a fire," he said.

Darnell and Marquis were brought to a neighbor's house, where investigators from the Bomb and Arson unit and the Office of Fire Investigations (OFI) talked to them.

The investigator from OFI squatted down while talking to the boys. Only Darnell spoke. Marquis was quiet the entire time. Darnell spoke to a Tribune reporter afterward as he sat with four neighbors, all adults, in their home.

The children were later taken into protective custody by the Department of Children and Family Services.

When firefighters arrived around 3:30 a.m., they weren't able to get into the home because of intense heat and fire, a Chicago Fire Department official said. Fire was heavy throughout the basement and first floor, he said.

Firefighters cut through burglar bars on the windows, he said.

Firefighters eventually found the two children cuddled up in a bed, fire officials said at a news conference.

The basement windows were all shattered. A white Christmas tree, smudged with smoke, stood near front room window.

A neighbor told an investigator that the second-floor tenants recently moved out of the brick and stone two-flat.

pnickeas@tribune.com

Twitter: @PeterNickeas

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Slave-Revenge Film ‘Django Unchained’ Tracking Strongly With African-Americans

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Django Unchained” – about a bounty hunter who partners with a freed slave to take down a plantation owner – is tracking extremely well with African Americans, the Weinstein Company said Thursday.

Quentin Tarantino wrote and directed the violent Western, which stars Christoph Waltz, Jamie Foxx and Leonardo DiCaprio, respectively. Opening on Christmas Day, it’s a front-runner in several Academy Award categories.

Despite the violence, it’s one of the few holiday offerings that would by nature of its subject matter appeal to an African-American audience.

“We think this film is going to resonate with everyone,” the Weinstein Company’s head of distribution Erik Lomis told TheWrap Thursday. And while he didn’t offer specific figures on the degree of interest among African-Americans the company’s pre-release research indicated, he did say that it is “looking very, very strong for us” with that demographic.

That’s good news for “Django,” which will open against Universal’s “Les Miserables” in a very crowded holiday box office. Analysts see a first weekend in the $ 25 million range for “Django,” and predict it ultimately will surpass $ 100 million domestically.

Last week “Django” received Golden Globes nominations for picture, director, screenplay and two supporting actors, Waltz and DiCaprio.

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Genetic Gamble : Drugs Aim to Make Several Types of Cancer Self-Destruct

C.J. Gunther for The New York Times

Dr. Donald Bergstrom is a cancer specialist at Sanofi, one of three companies working on a drug to restore a tendency of damaged cells to self-destruct.

For the first time ever, three pharmaceutical companies are poised to test whether new drugs can work against a wide range of cancers independently of where they originated — breast, prostate, liver, lung. The drugs go after an aberration involving a cancer gene fundamental to tumor growth. Many scientists see this as the beginning of a new genetic age in cancer research.

Great uncertainties remain, but such drugs could mean new treatments for rare, neglected cancers, as well as common ones. Merck, Roche and Sanofi are racing to develop their own versions of a drug they hope will restore a mechanism that normally makes badly damaged cells self-destruct and could potentially be used against half of all cancers.

No pharmaceutical company has ever conducted a major clinical trial of a drug in patients who have many different kinds of cancer, researchers and federal regulators say. “This is a taste of the future in cancer drug development,” said Dr. Otis Webb Brawley, the chief medical and scientific officer of the American Cancer Society. “I expect the organ from which the cancer came from will be less important in the future and the molecular target more important,” he added.

And this has major implications for cancer philanthropy, experts say. Advocacy groups should shift from fund-raising for particular cancers to pushing for research aimed at many kinds of cancer at once, Dr. Brawley said. John Walter, the chief executive officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, concurred, saying that by pooling forces “our strength can be leveraged.”

At the heart of this search for new cancer drugs are patients like Joe Bellino, who was a post office clerk until his cancer made him too sick to work. Seven years ago, he went into the hospital for hernia surgery, only to learn he had liposarcoma, a rare cancer of fat cells. A large tumor was wrapped around a cord that connects the testicle to the abdomen. “I was shocked,” he said in an interview this summer.

Companies have long ignored liposarcoma, seeing no market for drugs to treat a cancer that strikes so few. But it is ideal for testing Sanofi’s drug because the tumors nearly always have the exact genetic problem the drug was meant to attack — a fusion of two large proteins. If the drug works, it should bring these raging cancers to a halt. Then Sanofi would test the drug on a broad range of cancers with a similar genetic alteration. But if the drug fails against liposarcoma, Sanofi will reluctantly admit defeat.

“For us, this is a go/no-go situation,” said Laurent Debussche, a Sanofi scientist who leads the company’s research on the drug.

The genetic alteration the drug targets has tantalized researchers for decades. Normal healthy cells have a mechanism that tells them to die if their DNA is too badly damaged to repair. Cancer cells have grotesquely damaged DNA, so ordinarily they would self-destruct. A protein known as p53 that Dr. Gary Gilliland of Merck calls the cell’s angel of death normally sets things in motion. But cancer cells disable p53, either directly, with a mutation, or indirectly, by attaching the p53 protein to another cellular protein that blocks it. The dream of cancer researchers has long been to reanimate p53 in cancer cells so they will die on their own.

The p53 story began in earnest about 20 years ago. Excitement ran so high that, in 1993, Science magazine anointed it Molecule of the Year and put it on the cover. An editorial held out the possibility of “a cure of a terrible killer in the not too distant future.”

Companies began chasing a drug to restore p53 in cells where it was disabled by mutations. But while scientists know how to block genes, they have not figured out how to add or restore them. Researchers tried gene therapy, adding good copies of the p53 gene to cancer cells. That did not work.

Then, instead of going after mutated p53 genes, they went after half of cancers that used the alternative route to disable p53, blocking it by attaching it to a protein known as MDM2. When the two proteins stick together, the p53 protein no longer functions. Maybe, researchers thought, they could find a molecule to wedge itself between the two proteins and pry them apart.

The problem was that both proteins are huge and cling tightly to each other. Drug molecules are typically tiny. How could they find one that could separate these two bruisers, like a referee at a boxing match?

In 1996, researchers at Roche noticed a small pocket between the behemoths where a tiny molecule might slip in and pry them apart. It took six years, but Roche found such a molecule and named it Nutlin because the lab was in Nutley, N.J.

But Nutlins did not work as drugs because they were not absorbed into the body.

Roche, Merck and Sanofi persevered, testing thousands of molecules.

At Sanofi, the stubborn scientist leading the way, Dr. Debussche, maintained an obsession with p53 for two decades. Finally, in 2009, his team, together with Shaomeng Wang at the University of Michigan and a biotech company, Ascenta Therapeutics, found a promising compound.

The company tested the drug by pumping it each day into the stomachs of mice with sarcoma.

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Emanuel explores Midway privatization

Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration will explore the possibility of privatizing Midway Airport but will take a shorter-term, more tightly controlled approach than was employed by former Mayor Richard Daley's team on the city's first go-round.

Chicago's last try, a 99-year lease that would have brought in $2.5 billion, died in 2009 when the financial markets froze up.

The city's latest intentions are expected to be formally announced Friday, ahead of a Dec. 31 deadline for deciding whether to retain a slot for Midway in the Federal Aviation Administration's airport privatization pilot program. The city put off this decision several times previously.

The move, preliminary as it is, is sure to be politically charged, given the anger over the way Daley's 75-year parking meter privatization deal has played out, with proceeds used to plug operating deficits and meter rates rising sharply.

With that historical backdrop, Emanuel is suggesting a more conservative approach. It includes a shorter-term lease of less than 40 years; a "travelers' bill of rights" aimed at ensuring any changes will benefit passengers; and a continuing stream of revenue for the city, giving it a shot to capture some growth.

And unlike the parking meter and Chicago Skyway lease deals, a new Midway transaction would not allow proceeds to be used to plug operating deficits or to pay for operations in any way, Emanuel said in an interview Thursday.

"I will not let the city use it as a crutch to not make the tough decisions on the budget," he said.

But while a shorter lease and greater city control may play well locally, those sorts of terms may not appeal to investors, experts said in interviews this month.

"The shorter the lease term, the lower the bid prices are going to be — that's just the math," said Steve Steckler, chairman of the Infrastructure Management Group, a Bethesda, Md.-based company that advises infrastructure owners and operators. "I'd be shocked if investors offered more than $2 billion for a 40-year lease," Steckler said.

Emanuel said: "Nobody knows until you talk to people. … I'm the mayor and I'm not agreeing to … 99 years. I'm saying it's either 40 years or less." His office has not offered an estimate of what such a deal could bring in, saying it would be premature.

"No final decisions have been made, but we can't make a decision until we evaluate fully if this could be a win for Chicagoans," Emanuel said.

A private operator would take over management of such revenue-producing activities as food, beverage and car rental concessions and parking lots. The FAA would continue to provide air traffic control, while the Transportation Security Administration would continue to provide security operations. The city would retain ownership.

Few details were provided about how privatization would affect travelers and Midway employees. Emanuel said specifics will emerge over time.

By year's end, the city will send the FAA a preliminary application, a timetable and a draft "request for qualification," a document the city will put out early next year to identify qualified bidders for the project. A review of the potential bidders will be conducted in the spring.

Last year, Emanuel expressed hesitation in pursuing a private lease for Midway unless a careful vetting process was in place, saying taxpayers were correct to be wary, given the city's history.

The evaluation process will be deliberate and open to public view, he said Thursday.

He pledged to create a committee of business, labor and civic leaders that will provide updates to the public on a regular basis and that will select an independent adviser to vet the transaction. The committee will deliver a report to the City Council, and there will be a 30-day review period before any vote.

"I set up a different process and a different set of principles that stand in stark contrast to what was discussed or done in the past," Emanuel said.

The FAA pilot program frees cities from regulations that require airport revenue to be used for airport purposes. It allows money to be withdrawn for other uses.

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3 charged with murder in Indianapolis house explosion

A man and woman who lived in an Indianapolis house that exploded in November killing two neighbors and damaging scores of homes, have been charged with felony murder and multiple counts of arson for allegedly blowing up the home, prosecutors said.

Monserrate Shirley and Mark Leonard, who lived in the home that exploded, and Leonard's brother, Bob Leonard Jr., were charged on Thursday in connection with the explosion and arrested on Friday, authorities said.

The personal property insurance on the home had been raised recently to $304,000 and photographs and personal financial records removed before the explosion, prosecutors allege.

The three face murder charges in the deaths of neighbors Jennifer and John Longworth and multiple other charges for the injuries to 12 other area residents in the blast and for the 33 neighborhood homes that had to be demolished, Marion County Prosecutor Terry Curry told a news conference.

This was a “thoroughly senseless act” that cost the lives of two young people, Curry said.

Investigators believe a programmable microwave that exploded from the inside out was the source of ignition and valves that regulate natural gas into the home and to a fireplace were removed, allowing gas to build up over hours, Curry said.

Authorities are still working to determine whether others were involved.

The three suspects are expected to appear in court Monday morning.

The blast destroyed five houses including the Longworths' home located next door to Shirley's home in the Richmond Hill subdivision on the city's far south side. The late-night explosion, which was heard from miles away, damaged about 90 more homes and sent residents fleeing, some in their pajamas.

"We have to acknowledge that we are helpless to alleviate the pain and anguish of such innocent victims and their families," Curry said.  "However, what we as a public safety community can do and must do is devote our best efforts to see that justice is served on behalf of those victims."

Officials ordered the demolition of 33 homes of the mostly heavily damaged homes and say the blast caused an estimated $4.4 million in damage.

On Nov. 19, authorities launched a homicide investigation into the blast after city arson investigators, along with agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, concluded it was not an accident.

Officials said they believed the explosion was intentional and caused by natural gas, but released no other details. Federal authorities are offering a $10,000 reward for information in the case.

Authorities told Fox 59 in Indianapolis that the home was filled with natural gas for six to eight hours prior to the explosion.

Attorney Randall Cables has said Shirley and Leonard were away at a southern Indiana casino when the explosion happened. Shirley's daughter was staying with a friend, and the family's cat was being boarded.

Shirley has said Leonard had replaced the thermostat and that the furnace was working. Cable has said the daughter told her mother she had smelled an odd odor in recent weeks, but they hadn't reported it.

John Longworth was an electronics expert and his wife was a second-grade teacher.

Curry also said that Shirley and Leonard attempted to cause damage to their home the weekend prior to the explosion but their attempt failed. Curry stated their actions the weekend before mirrored the actions taken the weekend of Nov. 10, including going to a casino for the night, boarding their pet cat and leaving their daughter at a babysitter’s house.

Associated Press, Fox 59 and Reuters contributed

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