Michael Hawthorne

— Built in the 1950s for the brawny task of ferrying railroad cars, the last coal-burning steamship on the Great Lakes is billed today as a nostalgic vacation shortcut between Wisconsin and Michigan. But every day it sails between this old...

The Chicago Tribune won 13 awards from the Chicago Headline Club Friday night, including top awards in investigative reporting, breaking news, and local news coverage. The annual Peter Lisagor Awards ceremony hosted by the country's largest Society of...

Most parents are forced to guess if toys, furniture and other household products are exposing their kids to toxic chemicals. Heather Stapleton can figure it out in her laboratory. Stapleton, an environmental chemist at Duke University, is one of the...

Over the last week, we read "Playing With Fire," the chilling Tribune investigation by reporters Patricia Callahan, Sam Roe and Michael Hawthorne, with a growing sense of anger. Anger at how a confluence of industry manipulation and government neglect...

The problem facing cigarette manufacturers decades ago involved tragic deaths and bad publicity, but it had nothing to do with cancer. It had to do with house fires. Smoldering cigarettes were sparking fires and killing people. And tobacco executives...

Black and Latino toddlers may have significantly higher levels of toxic flame retardants in their bodies than white children, according to a new study that challenges one of industry's chief arguments for expanding use of the chemicals. The peer-reviewed...

In a move that promises cleaner air throughout the Chicago area, BP on Wednesday agreed to spend more than $400 million to settle legal complaints about chronic pollution problems at the oil company's sprawling refinery in northwest Indiana. Steps that...

Chicago's first round of testing for a toxic metal called hexavalent chromium found that levels in local drinking water are more than 11 times higher than a health standard California adopted last month. But it could take years before anything is done...

Trace amounts of sex hormones, prescription drugs, flame retardants and herbicides are being detected in treated drinking water pumped to more than 7 million people in Chicago and its suburbs. In the latest round of testing prompted by a 2008 Tribune...

Children living next to driveways or parking lots coated with coal tar are exposed to significantly higher doses of cancer-causing chemicals than those living near untreated asphalt, according to a study that raises new questions about commonly used...

Fed by a steady stream of coal barges, the aging power plants that loom over Chicago's Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods are by far the city's largest industrial sources of climate change pollution. No other polluter comes close to the 4.2...

Federal and state authorities today unveiled a legal settlement intended to finally complete the Deep Tunnel, the Chicago region’s massive flood- and pollution-control project. Relief from swamped basements and sewage overflows still is years away,...