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ternoon union gathering where a vote could stamp needed approval on any deal.
• Rank-and-file teachers prepared to return to the streets for morning rallies to press the union's demands that laid-off instructors be given first shot at job openings and for implementation of a teacher evaluation system that is not too heavily weighted on student test results.
• Contract talks pushed on for more than 15 hours Thursday with little word of progress until negotiators called it quits close to 1 a.m. Friday. Chicago School Board President David Vitale said the two sides had worked past the contentious evaluations issue, though he didn't elaborate, and had begun crunching numbers on financial matters.
• Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said the two sides had many "productive" conversations but she declined to describe the talks in detail. She and Vitale said they hope students can be back in class Monday.
• "It was a long day. There were some creative ideas passed around, but we still do not have an agreement," Lewis said.
• ___

• ESCUINTLA, Guatemala (AP) -- Villagers and farmers living at the foot of a Guatemalan volcano say they were awoken by a massive roar when the long-simmering Volcan del Fuego exploded with a series of eruptions that darkened the skies and covered the surrounding sugar cane fields with ash.
• "It thundered and then it got dark as the ash began falling," said Miriam Curumaco, a 28-year-old homemaker from the village of Morelia who was evacuated along with 16 family members to a makeshift shelter at a nearby elementary school. "It sounded like a pressure cooker that wouldn't stop."
• As the Volcan del Fuego, or Volcano of Fire, spewed rivers of bright orange lava down its flanks on Thursday, authorities ordered more than 33,000 people in 17 nearby communities evacuated. Many of those near the volcano are indigenous Kakchikeles people who live in relatively poor and isolated communities.
• Hundreds of cars, trucks and buses, blanketed with charcoal gray ash, drove away from the volcano, which sits about six miles (16 kilometers) southwest of the colonial city of Antigua, toward the Guatemala city. Thick clouds of ash reduced visibility to less than 10 feet in the area of sugar cane fields surrounding the volcano. The elderly, women and children were evacuated in old school buses and ambu

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