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CTA shooting. The hunt was on for a gunman who last night shot another man at close range in a walkway linking two downtown subway stations.
■ Chicago’s quietly repealed what the ACLU and others called an unconstitutional ban on aggressive panhandling.
■ The city’s planning to take over abandoned railroad tracks—aiming to create a new public transit route linking downtown and Lincoln Park.
‘Some Chicago election officials have never seen the like.’ Tribune columnist John Kass shares the story of a challenge to the candidacy of “a conservative Southwest Side teenager” running for alderman …
■ … whose past includes “waving a Trump flag and a ‘Hillary for Prison’ sign outside a polling place.” (Link from last month.)
■ Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle’s ex-security chief says she fired him to save her mayoral campaign.
Trump’s next lawman? The president says he’ll nominate former U.S. Attorney General William Barr to replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
■ Last year, Barr contended Trump was right to fire FBI Director James Comey.
■ The New York Times: An undocumented immigrant has been making Trump’s bed for years.
■ Trump’s fired secretary of state, Rex Tillerson: Trump is “undisciplined, doesn’t like to read.”
Duck, duck, go. The Trib’s Eric Zorn calls for an end to lame-duck political tenure: “In nearly every other job, when you get fired, you hand in your credentials immediately. … You don’t get several extra months to exercise the power and privilege of your position.”
Sneed: Less to say. The Sun-Times is cutting Michael Sneed’s longtime gossip-and-scoops column back to one day a week in print.
■ Columnist Steve Rosenbloom is signing off after decades at the Trib: “Who knows, in a couple of years I could be asking if you want paper or plastic.”
■ The chief of the TV company positioned to buy WGN-TV and -AM tells Crain’s he “doesn’t have an allergic reaction to radio,” but he also doesn’t see Nexstar building out a radio portfolio.
Robocall rebellion. Illinois and 38 other states are banding together to end the plague of automated phone messages …
■ … one of the few issues that seem capable of uniting a divided Congress. (Nov. 16 link.)
■ Why Barack Obama can’t be buried at his presidential center in Chicago.
Corrections.
■ Reader Crissy Terawaki Kawamoto writes: “I have to point out the Medill F” in yesterday’s Chicago Public Square: “You left out an e in Mueller.”
■ And Mike Braden noted an article missing from yesterday’s Square item about North Carolina’s election fraud investigation.