Cash coming. Child tax credit money for parents of kids through age 17 begins flowing today to more than 35 million U.S. families …
■ … but, The Wall Street Journal warns, those payments could also trigger unexpected tax bills next year.
■ It’s a program once on Republican President Richard Nixon’s to-do list.
‘Good people feel the need to arm themselves when traveling to Chicago.’ A lawyer for an Iowa man arrested here after a downtown hotel housekeeper found a loaded rifle with a laser scope, five ammo clips and a loaded handgun in his room says the guy was here just to propose to his girlfriend and not to launch a mass attack on the city.
■ The Sun-Times: Chicago’s recorded the most mass shootings in the nation over the last five years …
■ A 73-year-old grandfather, Star Trek fan and Vietnam war veteran is dead after being punched during an attempted South Side carjacking.
■ A School of the Art Institute student has been sentenced to pay more than $58,000 to replace a police vehicle he set on fire during the May 2020 riots downtown.
■ A Utah-based gun company is promising to stop making and selling a Glock handgun disguised to look like a Lego toy.
‘The window … is closing..’ Research by a director at one of the world’s largest accounting firms suggests society is—as a 1972 Massachusetts Institute of Technology report predicted—on track for a global collapse by 2040 …
■ … raising what Motherboard calls “urgent questions about … overexploitation of planetary resources.”
■ The Conversation: High-tide flood risk is accelerating, putting coastal economies at risk.
■ Massive flooding in Germany left more than 30 dead and dozens missing.
‘I. Don’t. Care.’ A highly regarded Republican messaging strategist has been advising President Biden’s pandemic task force—and he says he’s not worried about blowback from conservatives.
■ Daily Beast contributor David Rothkopf condemns ex-President George W. Bush—“who is responsible for the biggest foreign policy catastrophe in U.S. history”—for now giving President Biden advice on foreign policy.
■ A new book on Donald Trump’s last year as president says the nation’s top generals feared he’d attempt a coup.
■ The Guardian: Despite Texas’ left-bound demographics, Texas Republicans are leaning further to the right. (Cartoon: Keith J. Taylor.)
Amazon ascendant. In one of its biggest Chicago deals, Amazon’s buying a steel-fabricating plant on the Southwest Side for another delivery station.
■ A phone app that helps people buy restaurant food—cheap—that otherwise would go to waste has launched in Chicago.
■ The Tribune ranks Chicago’s 25 best restaurant hamburgers.
■ Block Club Chicago serves up “Chicago’s Ultimate Ice Cream Guide.”
‘Abolish the Olympics.’ New Republic columnist Natalie Shure calls them “a financial boondoggle that … this year … might also spread a deadly COVID variant among a largely unvaccinated population.”
■ Ex-Chicago Bull Scottie Pippen is renting out his vacant Highland Park home during the Olympics for $92 a night.
■ Sun-Times critic Richard Roeper gives Space Jam: A New Legacy a measly 1 1/2 stars: “I’ve never seen anything like it… and I wish I could unsee what I have seen.”
■ Speaking of the ’90s: A one-hour documentary debuting tonight spotlights Chicago’s role then as the capital of “trash TV.”
‘It really doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere.’ Frustrated by a lack of ethics reform in the Illinois General Assembly, the legislators’ official watchdog is quitting.
■ An ex-Chicago Public Schools elementary principal has been indicted on charges of using as much as $200,000 in public money to feather her own nest.
■ Law blogger Jack Leyhane on bribes allegedly taken by a Cook County Board of Review worker for reducing a residential property tax assessment: “The real scandal is that we have assessments at all.”
Chicago Public Square loses a reader. A Chicagoan writes in reference to yesterday’s edition, which featured an essay by N’DIGO publisher Hermene Hartman: “What in the world are you doing linking that empty rant about city crime? What is the news value there? … Boosting a pile of MAGAt-level raving is beneath you, or should be anyway. … Please remove me from the email list immediately.”
■ Another reader: “As I read it, I thought, ‘Hermene Hartman isn’t a journalist. She took $50,000 to shill for Bruce Rauner. And I don’t believe what I’m reading here is true.’” (Here’s the 2014 report to which that writer alludes.)
Here are some readers who haven’t canceled …
… and who in fact have provided financial support to keep Square coming free for everyone else: Linda Paul, Myrel Cooke, Kristina Zaremba, Jayson Hansen, Jeanette Mancusi, Ed Nickow, Christopher Comes, Cate Plys, M. Braun, Susan Kumler, Maria Garvy, Jeanne Mcinerney, Keith Huizinga, Mark Miller, Carmie Callobre, Hank DeZutter, Jan Czarnik, Arthur Golab, Harla Hutchinson, Jan Menaker Brock, Gil Arias, Robert Izral, Alex Riepl Broz, Janean Bowersmith, Patrick Olsen, Bill & Laurie Bunkers, Barry Koehler, William Tracy, Michael Johnson, Kent Anderson, Joe McArdle, Ed McDevitt, Daniel Horvath, John Iltis, Michele Kurlander, Martha Intrieri, Mike Janowski, Heather O’Reilly, James Barton, Susan Stevens, Ron Schwartz, Maria Mooshil, Ann Spittle, David Layden, Alec Bloyd-Peshkin, Ron Castan, Christa Velbel, Scott Tindale, Ellen Mrazek, Eric Zorn, Maureen Kennedy, Roy Plotnick and Mark Wukas. Chip in as little as $1 to join them in this roll call.
■ And thanks to Mike Braden for making this edition better.