Disorder in the council. A Chicago City Council meeting screeched to a halt yesterday, derailed by a fight over Mayor Lightfoot’s choice to head the city’s embattled Law Department.
■ In a statement issued after the meeting, Lightfoot complained, “A small group of aldermen brazenly created a spectacle.”
■ And so, much of the council’s business—including a vote on whether to rename Lake Shore Drive in honor of Chicago’s founder, Jean Baptiste Point DuSable—gets pushed to Friday.
■ Streetsblog Chicago’s John Greenfield: “Canceling an effort to honor the Black pioneer … would be rather awkward for Chicago’s first African-American female and LGBT mayor.”
Unforked? Stalled by the pandemic, the City Council’s table is set for a plan to limit restaurants’ distribution of “single-use foodware.”
■ Also proposed: Permanent extension of the city’s electric scooter pilot.
■ NBC News: The pandemic drove massive increases for e-bike usage in Chicago and elsewhere.
■ The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has extended for one more month the nationwide pandemic ban on evictions.
Too-silent night. If Sunday’s tornado warnings didn’t awaken you—as was the case for many in the Chicago area—here’s how to set up severe weather alerts on a smartphone …
■ … and on Amazon’s Alexa-powered smart speakers.
■ An unborn baby died after his mother was injured in the Woodridge tornado.
■ Security camera footage captured the height of the storm.
Nurse strike. Almost 900 nurses employed by Cook County launched a one-day walkout today.
■ Another 2,500 county workers may strike Friday.
F-bomb shelter. A Student Press Law Center lawyer says the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of a high school cheerleader suspended over her profane Snapchat rant—“F___ school f___ softball f___ cheer f___ everything”—reaffirms that “students shouldn’t be treated as second-class citizens, especially when they’re off-campus.”
■ The young woman whose anguished words now hold a place in history says the ruling signals students that “you shouldn’t be scared to express yourself because of the school.”*
‘I don’t know what planet they were on.’ A federal judge handing down the first sentence in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol took the opportunity to condemn Republicans seeking to rewrite the history of that day.
■ A Florida man has become the first member of the extremist Oath Keepers group to plead guilty in the federal probe of that day.
■ House Democrats have launched a Judiciary Committee investigation to determine if Donald Trump’s administration ran an unlawful shadow operation to target his political enemies.
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* Standard disclaimer: Your Square columnist is congenitally prejudiced in favor of student freedom.