Strike / 'Incompetent' / Trump nemesis dies

No Chicago Public Square Friday. Back Monday. But don’t forget you can get updates between editions by following Square on Facebook and Twitter. And now, the news:

Strike. Chicago teachers are off the job and on the picket lines.

Teachers tell Block Club Chicago why they’re striking.
Where kids can go during the strike. (Cartoons in this edition: Keith J. Taylor, entirely deserving of your vote now in the Reader’s soon-to-close Best of Chicago poll.)
The Chicago Reporter: How contract talks broke down.
A new satire site, The Chicago Machine: “Mayor Lightfoot is struggling to take care of the 400,000 students … bused to her Logan Square home this morning.”

But at least … Chicago Park District workers have a deal, averting a strike there.
After alarms sounded by parks advocates, the City Council is holding off on Lightfoot’s plan to legalize placement of cellphone towers in Chicago parks.

Pot sales limits. Aldermen have OK’d sale of recreational cannabis across Chicago—with the exception of a smaller-than-originally-proposed exclusion zone.
One council member is proposing daily limits on the purchase of e-cigarettes and other vaping crap.
Naperville voters get to decide in March whether to legalize recreational pot sales within their borders.
Marijuana companies are recruiting.

‘Incompetent.’ A Chicago police detective and sergeant have been suspended after a report concluded they botched investigation of the case of a sergeant whose wife—also a cop—reported finding him shot dead.
A federal lawsuit accuses Illinois Department of Children and Family Services staffers of conducting “sham investigations” into the abuse of 5-year-old AJ Freund months before his beating death.
Tribune columnist Dahleen Glanton: Maybe it’s time to hold child welfare workers criminally liable when kids under their supervision are killed.
A Chicago principal has retired abruptly—to “pursue other options”—after release of video showing her looking on as a security guard pushed a 9-year-old student out of her school into bitterly cold weather.

Trump’s ‘meltdown.’ CNN’s Brian Stelter reviews a day of White House chaos and asks whether news organizations are “fully conveying the gravity of the crisis.”
President Trump sent Turkey’s president a letter that Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin says shows the world “we ain’t seen nothing yet re: the depths of his mental instability” …
 … and that a source tells the BBC President Erdogan tossed “in the bin [trash].”
Developing story: Trump’s European Union ambassador, Gordon Sondland, has been telling on the president in congressional testimony today.
The New York Times: Sondland’s ascendance “is an object lesson in the pitfalls of handing influential foreign posts to diplomatic naïfs.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is telling his team to plan on beginning—and wrapping up—impeachment proceedings before Christmas.

Trump nemesis dies. U.S. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, chair of a committee empowered to investigate almost any part of the federal government and one of those leading the impeachment inquiry, is dead of complications from longstanding health problems.
Trump, who assailed Cummings while he was alive as a corrupt “racist,” praised him today on Twitter as a “highly respected political leader” whose “work and voice on so many fronts will be very hard, if not impossible, to replace!
Tribune columnist Steve Chapman: “Attorney General William Barr to nonbelievers: Go to hell.”
Trump’s pick for the federal Commission on Presidential Scholars is a guy whose books include The Illuminati Secret Laws of Money.

Booked. Presidential candidate Cory Booker is joining Elizabeth Warren in backing progressive challenger Marie Newman against conservative incumbent Chicago Congressman Dan Lipinski in the Democratic primary.
FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver: How Bernie Sanders endorsements from Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar could affect the presidential race.

Come on in, Chicago. This weekend brings the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s Center’s annual Open House Chicago celebration—insider tours of more than 350 cool places around the city and suburbs, all open to the public for free.
Here’s the full list, which you’ll want to take some time to study.
Construction’s about to begin on Chicago’s biggest condo building since the recession a decade ago—a structure that’ll change the city’s skyline.


Thanks to reader Mike Weiland for a reminder that the Chicago Architecture Center changed its name last year.

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