‘False.’ PolitiFact dings Mayor Lightfoot for her suggestion—noted in the June 3 edition of Chicago Public Square—that Chicago police might have been encouraged to “just lay back, do nothing” about violence.
■ Want to live next door to the mayor? $1.15 million could put you in the adjacent home.
■ Gov. Pritzker’s promising a “think big” push for property tax reform.
‘I defeated the bad guy, but now he’s my friend.’ With help from Lightfoot, Police Supt. Johnson and the Make-A-Wish Foundation, Chicago’s newest superhero, 6-year-old Galacto, yesterday took down his nemesis—who happened to be his brother.
■ A 6-year-old with autism didn’t want to go to his last day of school, so the principal offered to walk him there.
■ A Chicago Public Schools teacher pleads: Stop ranking schools.
How many? For the first time in 30 years, Illinois will join the ranks of states that track the population of gambling addicts.
■ The sponsor of a massive gambling expansion bill awaiting the governor’s signature says it’ll make the state even more “pro” gambling.
■ Chicago’s soon-to-be-legal pot industry is hiring.
■ … Iowa, which yesterday hosted 19 candidates at a forum where each got five minutes to deliver a “speed-dating” pitch.
It started in Chicago. Actress and comedian Elaine May, who launched her career as a member of the Compass Players—a Second City precursor at the University of Chicago—last night won her first Tony Award. Also at the Tonys:
■ For the first time, an actor in a wheelchair won.
■ Accepting the best actor award for his role as a fictional journalist, Bryan Cranston praised “all the real journalists around the world … in the line of fire with their pursuit of the truth.”
Google’s news plunder. A new report from the News Media Alliance journalism industry association estimates—conservatively—that Google last year made $4.7 billion dollars by crawling and scraping news publishers’ content without compensating publishers.
■ The New York Times: “It’s more than the combined ticket sales of the last two Avengers movies.”
■ The report’s timing—a day before a congressional hearing on Big Tech’s power over journalism—is no coincidence.
■ The Daily Beast: Venerable progressive news site ThinkProgress is in deep trouble …
■ The Society of Professional Journalists (of which your Square publisher is a member) has some headaches of its own …
■ … complicated in part by a board member who’s called for impeachment of its president and who in turn has been condemned for a blog post about youthful sex.
‘There doesn’t need to be a Straight Pride parade because we’ve already got a Straight Pride World.’ Neil Steinberg takes aim at an “embarrassing” stunt taking shape in Boston.
■ On Twitter, comedian Eva Victor explains to her boyfriend why they have to go to the parade.
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■ And thanks to reader Pam Spiegel for noting a hyphen missing from the pot item above.