A ‘ridiculous attempt … to violate the law.’ The Natural Resources Defense Council is sounding an alarm about embattled Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt’s decision to exempt most of southeast Wisconsin from federal limits on air pollution.
■ A Sun-Times editorial sides with environmentalists who want Gov. Rauner to slow down plans to blow through the state’s $109 million windfall from Volkswagen’s pollution-test cheating settlement.
‘I said something I probably shouldn’t have.’ A Chicago alderman who once vowed “If you never put a bike lane in my ward, that’s too soon” is welcoming Chicago’s new dockless (“leave-it-wherever”) bike-sharing pilot project.
■ A CTA Red Line station is about to become home to a grocery store.
■ The Wall Street Journal says Amazon has been phoning cities eliminated in its hunt for a second HQ, telling them what it didn’t like about their applications—including inadequate transportation.
‘What kind of panties do you wear at work?’ That’s just one of the inappropriate remarks a lawsuit filed by five female Chicago Fire Department paramedics accuses male superiors of making—and getting away with, under what the suit calls the department’s “code of silence.”
■ A Michigan high school has abandoned plans to require girls to wear “modesty ponchos” to prom.
■ As the Boy Scouts prepare to welcome girls, they’re changing the program’s name to “Scouts BSA.”
■ … and the Girl Scouts aren’t happy.
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Wanna own land? Cook County is offering vacant property at below-market rates to people who want to redevelop it into public space.
■ An interactive map lets you find out if any of these properties are available near you.
■ After one youth baseball team hurled racist insults at another in one of Chicago’s public spaces, the Tribune reports the league has disciplined a coach and several players.
‘A gaping hole in the wall … between church and state.’ The Tribune’s Eric Zorn calls for an end to the nearly $1 million the U.S. House and Senate spend each year on congressional chaplains and their offices.
■ A Tufts University law prof calls out Vice President Pence’s “peculiar sense of morality.”
■ CNN’s Chris Cillizza: Why Donald Trump faking a doctor’s note matters.
■ The Sun-Times’ Neil Steinberg on the unfolding 125th anniversary of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition: “It would be a double irony if today we looked back warmly … and ignored, once again, the lives of those who were excluded.”
■ Mayor Harold Washington’s press secretary looks back on Washington’s inauguration 35 years ago this week: “He brought on outsiders … who previously had stormed City Hall clamoring for fairness, and made them his commissioners.”
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