…and we’re back.
‘Get rid of the left turn.’ A civil engineering professor explains how limiting or forbidding left turns would make city traffic safer.
■ On its way to Gov. Pritzker: A bill requiring that the state cover 100% of the cost of walking and biking infrastructure on state roads, just as it does for cars and trucks.
■ Block Club Chicago: “Tow Trucks Are Dropping Destroyed Cars Around Woodlawn, Neighbors Say—And They Have No Idea Why.”
Election direction. The state Senate is sending the House a bill that would give Chicagoans the right to elect at least some of their school board as soon as 2024.
■ Lawmakers sent the governor decisive action on a state budget with no tax or fee hikes for individuals …
■ … and on a state ethics law overhaul.
■ Politico’s Shia Kapos reviews what remains undone in “a legislative session gone wild.”
‘She does not know how to be a team player.’ A Chicago alderman is among those sounding the alarm about a failed push by Mayor Lightfoot’s floor leader to redraw the wards of the mayor’s critics.
■ President Biden’s assigned Vice President Harris to lead an effort to protect voting rights nationwide.
‘This was a massacre.’ Biden commemorated the hundredth anniversary of a white mob’s looting and burning of Tulsa’s Greenwood district with what media writer Tom Jones calls one of the most powerful speeches of his presidency.
■ N’DIGO publisher Hermene Hartman: “Reparations for Tulsa should be the clarion call of today’s Black leadership.”
■ Columnist Clarence Page: “Chicago had a ‘Black Wall Street’ too.”
■ A Tribune investigation for the first time documents the effect of last spring’s “spasm of chaos”: More than 2,100 businesses damaged throughout Chicago.
‘The cohesive tissue that brought them all together … kind of dissolved.’ One expert tells The Associated Press two of the most prominent far-right extremist groups have fallen into disarray in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
■ One alleged insurrectionist hopes to raise funds for his defense by auctioning off photos of himself in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. (Cartoon: Keith J. Taylor.)
■ Sun-Times columnist Phil Kadner warns: “The truth is already being … twisted into some sort of patriotic display of free speech.”
‘I did not write or even see the tweet, or create the podcast.’ Yet the editor of the Chicago-based Journal of the American Medical Association is quitting, taking responsibility for a colleague’s assertion in a Journal podcast that structural racism no longer exists in the U.S. …
‘We are not Wheaton.’ A Tribune editorial condemns Mayor Lightfoot’s call to make permanent Chicago’s pandemic-triggered ban on late-night liquor sales.
■ For the second year in a row, Lincoln Square’s summer concert series won’t happen.
Welcome … um … everyone. For the first time in almost a year, no states are on Chicago’s COVID-19 travel restrictions list.
■ Chicago’s Cultural Center reopens today.
■ Biden’s pushing free beer as a way to get Americans vaccinated.
■ Chicago news veteran Matt Rodewald: “I’m from a blue state and traveled to Florida. Here’s what it was like.”
■ University of Southern California research: “Though few U.S. residents have survived the pandemic unscathed, hardship isn’t equally distributed across groups.”
Meat feat. The world’s largest meat processing company—Brazil JBS SA, the second-largest producer in the U.S.—says it’s getting back online after a ransomware assault similar to the one that last month crippled a U.S. oil pipeline.
■ CNBC: A Russia-linked cybercriminal group is responsible.
Stream dreams. Critic Aaron Barnhart spotlights seven boutique TV services that are changing the game.
■ The new Google Chromecast gadget comes with a Netflix credit—for new and existing Netflix subscribers—that (link corrected) cuts the thing’s effective price to $6.
■ This week’s Sounds of Chicago podcast from the Chicago Music Guide doubles as a CIMA fundraiser.
Thanks to Mike Braden for making this edition better.