GOP strategist Ed Rollins accused Liz Cheney of moving to Wyoming simply to run for office following her Tuesday bid to challenge Wyoming’s senior Sen. Mike Enzi for his seat.

Her candidacy will be portrayed as “a housewife who’s kind of bored who moved back to Wyoming after a long time to run for the Senate,” Rollins told The Hill. “Unfortunately for Liz, that’s not a state like California or New York where you can carpetbag very easily, and even though she was born there she hasn’t been there for a long time.”. . .

Working from a list of people deemed most likely to become shooters or victims, a Chicago Police commander is expected to start knocking on their doors Friday and deliver letters warning them not to commit any violent crimes.

The “custom notifications” are a pilot program in the Austin District on the West Side. Austin District Cmdr. Barbara West plans to deliver letters to 20 people on a so-called “heat list,” officials said.

The heat list stems from work by Andrew Papachristos, a Yale University professor who studied murders between 2005 and 2010 on the West Side. He found 70 percent of the killings were in a social network of 1,600 people out of a total population of 80,000.

The citywide social network of violence includes more than 16,000 people, police Supt. Garry McCarthy said. The department narrowed that list to more than 400 “hot people” most likely to commit shootings or become victims — or 20 people per police district. . .

Chicago Public Schools officials announced late Thursday that 2,113 teachers and other employees would be laid off Friday, largely due to a giant pension obligation increase that’s straining the system.

“In fiscal year ‘14 we’re facing a historic deficit of $1 billion that is driven primarily by a $400 million increase in our annual teacher pension payments,” said CPS spokesman Becky Carroll. “Absent pension reform in Springfield, we have very few options available to us to close that gap, and that has resulted in bringing this crisis to the doorsteps of our schools.”. . .

The city of Detroit filed thousands of documents in its bankruptcy caselate Thursday, as Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr builds a case that the city is insolvent and must execute a dramatic restructuring with the court’s support.

Orr restated his case that the city cannot pay its bills and has nearly $20 billion in liabilities.

Among the documents are more than 3,000 pages listing all of the city’s creditors, which number more than 100,000.

The list includes the names of all of the city’s active employees and its retirees, a list of properties that have tax claims with the city, numerous bondholders, business creditors and companies that insured Detroit debt.. . .

[. . .] Florida Sen. David Simmons, R-Maitland, who helped draft the 2005 law — the nation’s first — said Holder hadn’t done enough research before calling to overturn “stand your ground.”

“The U.S. Supreme Court adopted ’stand your ground’ 90 years ago [on federal lands] … I found it inappropriate for him to make inappropriate criticism of any law,” said Simmons, a lawyer of 36 years. “The attorney general is simply inaccurate. This is common-sense legislation that protects the innocent.”

Simmons said the possibility of the law being overturned in Florida was “exceedingly limited, somewhere between zero and 1 percent.”

Kareem K. Jordan, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Central Florida, also doubted the current makeup of Florida legislators would repeal the law.

“We have a state in terms of the Legislature and the governor who are fairly conservative,” Jordan said. “The only chance of repeal would be to elect brand-new people to office. But with the culture of this state, I highly doubt that will be the case.”. . .

Jimmy Carter says the jury made the right call in finding George Zimmerman not guilty.

“I think the jury made the right decision based on the evidence presented, because the prosecution inadvertently set the standard so high that the jury had to be convinced that it was a deliberate act by Zimmerman, that he was not at all defending himself,” Carter told Atlanta NBC affiliate WXIA-TV.

On Saturday, Zimmerman was found innocent by a jury in Florida. He shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in February 2012, Zimmerman maintains in self defense.

The former president and Georgia governor discussed the verdict, and what it says about race in America, in an on-camera interview with the station.

“It’s not a moral question, it was a legal question, and the American law requires that the jury listen to the evidence presented,” Carter said. “The action that was taken in the courtroom was not to bring in the race issue at all. The prosecution avoided that subject quite clearly.”. . .

Anthony Weiner has come under intense fire from Jewish leaders for invoking Nazi Germany while criticizing the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program.

“Last year, more than 700,000 in New York were stopped — the overwhelming majority of them were young men of color. Ninety-seven percent of them did nothing wrong,” Weiner told largely black congregants in Staten Island’s First Central Baptist Church Sunday.

“And the mayor stood up and said, ‘Wait a minute, statistically this’ and ‘statistically that.’ Well, you can have 100 percent statistical reduction in crime if you stop everybody.

“You could have 1938 Germany, because everyone has to show their papers.”. . .

Chris Brown faces possible jail time after a judge revoked his probation Monday in connection with his conviction in the beating of his girlfriend Rihanna.

Brown’s alleged failure to hand over his drivers license and insurance information to another driver after a minor traffic crash in May triggered the probation revocation, but the singer will remain free until a trial is held.

Brown, 24, was already facing a probation violation trial after prosecutors accused him of not completing the community labor ordered for his 2009 felony assault conviction. . .

Confined to the basement of a CIA secret prison in Romania about a decade ago, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the admitted mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, asked his jailers whether he could embark on an unusual project: Would the spy agency allow Mohammed, who had earned his bachelor’s in mechanical engineering, to design a vacuum cleaner?

The agency officer in charge of the prison called CIA headquarters and a manager approved the request, a former senior CIA official told The Associated Press.

Mohammed had endured the most brutal of the CIA’s harsh interrogation methods and had confessed to a career of atrocities. But the agency had no long-term plan for him. Someday, he might prove useful again. Perhaps, he’d even stand trial one day.

And for that, he’d need to be sane.

“We didn’t want them to go nuts,” the former senior CIA official said, one of several who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the now-shuttered CIA prisons or Mohammed’s interest in vacuums.

So, using schematics from the Internet as his guide, Mohammed began re-engineering one of the most mundane of household appliances. . .

The son of an Oak Brook man who was a key figure in the probe of Rod Blagojevich’s attempt to sell President Barack Obama’s old Senate seat, was selected for a prestigious internship in the Obama White House.

Raghuveer Nayak’s son, who is a student attending Yale University, will serve as a summer 2013 intern, according to a list released by the White House on Tuesday. . .

Broccoli is getting a moment of redemption in the White House.

President Obama said Tuesday that the vegetable is his favorite food, according to pool reports. This redemption comes more than two decades after President George H.W. Bush declared that he didn’t like broccoli and was not going to eat it anymore.

Obama briefly stopped by the Kids’ State Dinner, hosted by First Lady Michelle Obama. One kid journalist at the event asked the president what his favorite food was, and broccoli was the answer. . .

Russia said Tuesday that its scientific analysis of a suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria on March 19 showed it probably had been carried out by insurgents using sarin nerve gas of “cottage industry” quality delivered by a crudely made missile. The finding contradicted conclusions presented by Western nations, including the United States, that the Syrian government had been responsible.

The Russian analysis, announced at a United Nations news conference by its ambassador, Vitaly I. Churkin, was based on what he said was evidence collected directly by Russian forensics specialists who had been permitted by the Syrian government to visit the site, Khan al-Assal in northern Syria. Mr. Churkin said he had informed Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, who has been unsuccessfully pressing the Syrian authorities to permit his own team of chemical weapons experts to visit the country.

Russia is the Syrian government’s most powerful ally and has repeatedly blocked Western-led efforts at the United Nations Security Council to intervene in the Syrian conflict, suspecting that such a step would lead to possible military action that would remove President Bashar al-Assad by force. The Russians have said Mr. Assad and his antagonists should negotiate an end to the conflict, which began as a peaceful uprising against Mr. Assad in March 2011 and has evolved into a civil war. . .

U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry — who spent the Fourth of July on sun-splashed Nantucket even as the chaos from a military takeover rocked Egypt — drew fire from Republican critics who said it’s a bad time for the nation’s top diplomat to be seen cavorting on an island getaway.

“It doesn’t look good, and I think it sends the wrong message” said Republican strategist Brad Marston. “If I were advising him, I’d already have him on a plane.”

As first reported on bostonherald.com, Kerry, who owns a house and a yacht on the ritzy retreat, was seen yesterday strolling down Federal Street away from July Fourth festivities on Main Street in jeans and a light-colored polo shirt. . .

Six men were killed and at least 28 other people were wounded in shootings throughout the city so far this holiday weekend. . .

At least 16 people were killed and five others wounded when an American drone strike hit a suspected Haqqani militant compound in a remote tribal region of northwestern Pakistan late Tuesday, according to government and intelligence officials.

The strike was the deadliest since Pakistan’s new prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, took power a month ago and demanded an end to the drone attacks. A local government official said the house was being used by the militants for the past few months.

“At least four missiles were fired from two drones at a house of local tribesmen in Sarai Darpa Khel village at 11 p.m. last night,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A local militant source said that the militants who were killed were from the Haqqani network, a militant group that is responsible for orchestrating and executing attacks against American and Afghan forces across the border in Afghanistan and is believed to be active in the region.

The attack took place in Sarai Darpa Khel, in North Waziristan, near the border with Afghanistan and just southwest of Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan.

According to residents, after the attack the site was quickly cordoned off by Taliban insurgents to recover the bodies from the debris of the house that was attacked. . .