The Chicago Teachers Union, having rejected a new teachers contract, is in a high-stakes battle with Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration.

And with more than $25 million a year in dues coming from 28,000 teachers and other school employees, CTU president Karen Lewis and her 77-member staff are a well-funded adversary for the mayor and his schools chief, Forrest Claypool, a Chicago Sun-Times examination of the union’s financial filings shows.

The teachers union operates four separate tax-exempt corporations: the union itself, a political action committee, a charitable foundation and a not-for-profit company that, until recently, owned and operated an apartment tower at 55 W. Chestnut.

Before they entered the darkened house, Justin Doyle and his friends checked to make sure it was empty. They knocked on the front door and cased the exterior. Then they threw a rock through the window.

The three teens knew the owner of the house they planned to burglarize that night in 2008 was in the hospital. They had not anticipated that his friend was asleep inside. Awakened by the breaking glass and fearful for his life, the man grabbed a gun from a dresser drawer. When one of the teens opened the bedroom door, the man fired.

The youngest of the three intruders, a slight 14-year-old in a red hoodie named Travis Castle, was killed.

Six years ago, I entered San Quentin State Prison for the first time. I had never been in a prison before, especially one with as ominous a reputation as San Quentin.

When I arrived, I was escorted through a series of gates that eventually led to the main courtyard. On my left was the adjustment center that houses death-row inmates, some of the notorious criminals in California.

On my right was the Catholic Chapel, surrounded by a well-manicured garden. I was, as they say at San Quentin, at the gate between heaven and hell.

Gov. Bruce Rauner has created a special cabinet to streamline education and issues regarding young people across Illinois.

Rauner signed an executive order on Thursday morning at a middle school in Riverton, outside Springfield, creating the Governor’s Cabinet on Children and Youth. He says the cabinet will bring together all state entities that deal with children into a central unit. He’s calling it the Children’s Cabinet.

The governor says he wants the cabinet to make sure state resources are used effectively and working together. State Secretary of Education Beth Purvis says that the current system in Illinois is “fragmented.”

Two Mississippi and Alabama hospitals and the county that includes the cities of Biloxi and Gulfport, Miss., have squared off in Chicago federal court with many of the country’s biggest financial institutions over so-called interest rate swaps — an issue now impacting governments and other public bodies throughout the country, including Chicago’s public schools system.

In the class action complaint filed Feb. 18, Harrison County, Miss., the Magnolia Regional Health Center, of Corinth, Miss., and Cullman Regional Medical Center, of Cullman, Ala., targeted 33 defendant financial institutions and subsidiaries involved with “interest rate swaps transactions” dating as far back as 2007.

The complaint alleged the transactions, under which one party agrees to pay a fixed interest rate for a fixed amount of principal and time in exchange for a “floating, market-based rate” from the lender, violate federal antitrust law.