In brief: Chicago to be home to Obama library

President Barack Obama’s presidential library and museum will be built in Chicago.

In a video released early Tuesday morning, the president and first lady Michelle Obama announced the library will be on the city’s South Side, though no decision has been made yet whether it will be built in Jackson Park or Washington Park.

“All the strands of my life came together and I really became a man when I moved to Chicago,” the president said in the video, which showed him seated with his wife. “That’s where I was able to apply that early idealism to try to work in communities in public service. That’s where I met my wife. That’s where my children were born.”

The Barack Obama Foundation said it would seek out “academic institutions, thought leaders, community partners, and other organizations” as it sketches out plans for the library.

While the University of Chicago “has pledged to make resources and infrastructure available,” the foundation said it plans to also work with three other universities that were finalists, including the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Convict identified as serial killings suspect

NEW BRITAIN, Conn. – A man who has been behind bars for a decade for killing a woman is suspected in the slayings of seven people whose bodies were found buried in the woods behind a Connecticut shopping center, a government official said Tuesday.

William Devin Howell, 45, has been identified as the suspect in the serial killings that have sent a chill through this working-class Hartford suburb of 73,000, the official said.

The official was briefed on the investigation but was not authorized to discuss the case and spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Monday, police announced the discovery of four more bodies last month in the woods where three partial skeletons were found in 2007. All seven victims were believed to have been killed a decade or more ago by the same person, investigators said. But police added – without explanation at the time – the killer was no longer a threat to the public.

Howell is serving a 15-year sentence for manslaughter in the 2003 killing of Nilsa Arizmendi, a 33-year-old woman who was last seen in his van in Connecticut, where he had been cutting grass and doing other odd jobs.

He was arrested in 2005 in Virginia, and a search of his van turned up blood from Arizmendi and another, unidentified person, police said. Arizmendi’s body has not been found.

Howell has not been charged in the crimes.

‘On Writing Well’ author Zinsser dies at 92

NEW YORK – William Zinsser, the much-consulted teacher, author, journalist and essayist whose million-selling book “On Writing Well” championed the craft of nonfiction and inspired professionals and amateurs to express themselves more concisely and vividly, died Tuesday at age 92.

Zinsser died at his Manhattan home after a brief illness, said his wife, Caroline Fraser Zinsser.

A newspaper and magazine reporter into his 40s, Zinsser became a mentor for countless authors, journalists and would-be writers. “On Writing Well,” published in 1976 and praised by the New York Times as worthy of “The Elements of Style,” caught on first among college students and professors, then with the general public, selling more than 1 million copies.

But Zinsser also valued the business executive trying to compose more understandable memos, the lawyer with a life story to share, the church volunteer eager to document her good work. He loved teaching those without special talent, he once explained, and helping them “solve their problems.”

Working on an old typewriter, Zinsser wrote more than a dozen other books, including “Writing to Learn,” “Writing With a Word Processor” and the memoir “Writing Places.” He also advised government agencies and corporations, played jazz piano, wrote songs and served as executive editor of the Book-of-the-Month Club. In recent years, he wrote an online column for The American Scholar and taught at Columbia University and The New School for Social Research. After his eyesight failed, he invited students to his apartment and listened to them read from their work.