‘Yep—as bad as you think.’ A UN reporter who’s covered President Trump’s new national security adviser, John Bolton, for 13 years says Bolton “enjoys alienating allies and thinks diplomacy is appeasement.”
■ The Daily Beast: Bolton is “bloodthirsty and eager to encourage Trump’s most hawkish instincts.”
■ … and he chairs a “fake news” publisher infamous for spreading anti-Muslim hate.
■ A former U.S. aid worker’s 2005 letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “John Bolton put me through hell.”
■ … but two right-wing politicians praise Bolton as a “stalwart friend of Israel.” (Photo: Gage Skidmore.)
The march on March. The Cut explains tomorrow’s “March for Our Lives,” organized by survivors of the Stoneman Douglas shooting in Parkland, Florida.
■ Vanity Fair: What to watch.
■ Chicago students head east.
■ A tweet offering lodging for kids planning to protest in D.C. launched a movement of 1,500 families providing support for tomorrow’s rally.
■ A 16-year-old Maryland girl shot at her high school has died.
Supermarket terror. Updating coverage: At least two people were dead and close to a dozen others were hurt in an armed gunman’s assault on a store in France.
■ The New York Times: The Austin, Texas, bomber’s carnage spotlights the town’s decision 90 years ago to create a “Negro district.”
■ Onion satire: “Authorities Claim The True Austin Bomber Was Everyone Who Failed This Sensitive, Promising Kid.”
■ Tribune editorial: Those 20,000 votes for a Nazi running for Congress from the Chicago suburbs constitute an “embarrassment … on Republicans.”
‘If the police can completely foul up an investigation into the death of one of their own, they probably are fouling up investigations all over town.’ A Sun-Times editorial explains why you should care about the mysterious death of a Chicago
■ Columnist Neil Steinberg explains why he chose not to share a photo of a dead body he saw on the street last weekend.
Amazon’s Chicago. Crain’s John Pletz runs down what the company’s advance team saw in Chicago this week as it scouted for its HQ2 location.
■ The city and real estate developers hustled to clean up graffiti ahead of Amazon’s visit.
Too late for Toys R Us. Amazon has won a patent for a drone that can recognize and respond to human screaming and flailing.
Bike-sharing horrors. The Atlantic shares dozens of photos documenting huge graveyards for abandoned and broken bikes in China.
■ Chicago aldermen are moving ahead with a plan to allow free-floating car-sharing as soon as May: Find a car near you, drive it where you need to go and leave it in the nearest legal parking space.
■ Is ride-sharing killing the downtown Chicago parking lot?
Note to self: Ask for ‘no straw’ at the restaurant. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch—a swirling mass of plastic and other ocean-borne trash—is now three times the size of France.
■ Congressional leadership has blocked Trump’s proposal to gut the Environmental Protection Agency budget.
■ Trump’s top consumer protection official is backing away from lawsuits to protect consumers from predatory payday lenders.
Unrelated developments.
■ Scientists witness first reported case of killer-whale infanticide.
■ A robotic T. rex burst into flames at a dino theme park.
■ Snopes fact-check: Did the Obama campaign use the same questionable tactics as those of the embattled Cambridge Analytica? (TL;DR: No.)
■ John Bolton (yeah, him again) was an early beneficiary of Analytica’s Facebook shenanigans.
■ The lawsuits against Facebook are piling up.
Corrections to yesterday’s Square.
■ Reader Liz Poppens Denius notes it’s the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
■ Mike Braden spotted the omission of the word “the” in the phrase “Census figures show the Chicago region …”
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