* With unemployment rates climbing, workers forced to retrain for high-demand jobs

Retraining programs seem to hold the best hope for unemployed workers to change their situation. However, the reality seems to be that workers who take retraining do little better than those who don’t.

Too often, they want the retraining program that will have them back in the job market in the shortest amount of time. They are competing for the available jobs with everyone else in their situation. And until businesses are ready to hire again, the scarcity of open positions means it may not matter how well-qualified a worker is.

* Big jump in Chicago gas prices

* Chicago Home Sales Rise in February, But Prices Drop

Chicago home sales jumped 41 percent in February from a year ago. The median price dropped 19 percent.

* Local home sales up 32% in February

The median price in the Chicago area — at which half the homes sell for more and half for less — fell to $165,000 in February, a 10.3% decrease from last year, according to the release, and down from $175,000 last month.

* [Will County] Home sales up across the board

* Lake County home sales up 43 percent in February

* Illinois farmers buying land back from shell-shocked banks

Prices for raw land in exurban Chicago have plummeted to around $10,000 an acre from $50,000 an acre or more during the peak of the housing boom…..And for banks that lent heavily to residential developers, there’s a lot of raw land on the books. Case in point: First Midwest Bank, with $7.7 billion in assets, had $113 million in seriously delinquent residential development loans as of Dec. 31; nearly $33 million, or 29%, of that was secured by raw land, according to an investor presentation the bank made in February.

* Yellow lights shorter in Chicago

Most Chicago yellow lights last three seconds, the bare minimum recommended under federal safety guidelines. In the suburbs, yellows generally stay on for four to four-and-a-half seconds….City officials insist, however, that Chicago’s three-second yellows adhere to sound engineering principles and predate the installation of red-light cameras by decades. And they say the number of red-light-running violations caught on camera is tiny compared with the volume of traffic, proof that yellows in the city are not a trap.

* Duncan had list of favor-seekers

When U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan ran Chicago Public Schools, his office quietly kept a log of elected officials and others seeking to help kids win admission to the most coveted schools in the system, a former top Duncan aide said Monday.

That list has now come under the scrutiny of both federal officials and the schools inspector general as part of a probe of whether clout played a role in admissions to Chicago’s elite schools, sources said.

* Duncan’s staff kept list of politicians’ school requests

The log is a compilation of politicians and influential business people who interceded on behalf of children during Duncan’s tenure. It includes 25 aldermen, Mayor Richard Daley’s office, House Speaker Michael Madigan, his daughter Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, former White House social secretary Desiree Rogers and former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun.

* CPS board to review school food service

* Daley to Chicago Teachers Union: Only shared sacrifice can avert drastic budget cuts

Daley was asked whether the threat to raise class size to 37 students might prompt him to sign off on another school property tax hike on the heels of last year’s $43 million increase.

“You can’t raise real estate taxes. People can’t even pay ‘em today. That’s the difficulty. I’m just telling you,” the mayor said during a news conference at Mozart Park fieldhouse, 2036 N. Avers, called to make yet another push for property tax relief.

* Mayor Daley considers extending deadline to apply for property tax relief

The Chicago Tax Assistance Center has received just 20,000 applications — and only after a surge prompted by a TV news report last week about the lack of interest. To date, 5,000 of those homeowners have received debit cards totaling $600,000.

* Learning from the NIU tragedy

* Strike up the bandwidth; Google parade marches through Peoria

Woodruff High School cheerleaders traded their pompoms for special signs Monday, cheering not for the school’s team, but for Google.

Each of the six cheerleaders held a sign with a letter spelling out Google. At the Google parade, Mayor Jim Ardis, members of the City Council and County Board and about 50 people marched to music from Woodruff’s pep band in another push to attract Google to Peoria.

* Pekin council approves 2011 city budget

* City won’t publicize fire station closings, but union does

* Woodland School raises $12,000 for Haiti relief