COVID rising. Over the last three weeks, the number of new U.S. COVID-19 cases per day has doubled …
■ … driven largely by the delta variant’s tear through areas with low vaccination rates.
Almost 16% of Chicago Public Square subscribers—
■ Chicago’s reviving its pandemic travel advisory, restoring two states to the list.
■ Bloomberg: Workplace vaccine mandates seem to work.
■ The For What It’s Worth law blog notes, “Get the kids vaccinated against COVID-19 almost anywhere you want” in Chicago—including scandalized Loretto Hospital.
■ The federal government reports drug overdose deaths skyrocketed to a record in the pandemic.
■ The Economist: In-person voting did indeed accelerate COVID-19’s spread.
‘I told the kids, I won’t get all 12 of you, but I promise to shoot eight of you.’ N’DIGO publisher Hermene Hartman quotes a friend in law enforcement who says he gave up riding his bike along the lakefront after he was attacked by a dozen children.
■ The Sun-Times reports that, for the first time in Chicago, some 911 calls for mental health emergencies will be answered not by cops, but by mental health professionals and paramedics.
‘Have you no shame?’ President Biden labeled Republican lawmakers “un-American” for pushing voter suppression and election subversion efforts.
■ CNN’s Brian Stelter condemns the Fox News anchors and producers “who went out of their way to ignore Biden as he delivered one of the most important speeches of his presidency.”
■ A Democratic state lawmaker from Texas wants more than words from Biden: “What we need to see is action, and we needed to see it yesterday.”
Now hear (and see and chew on) this. What the AP calls “an enormous” budget agreement among U.S. Senate Democrats includes expansion of Medicare benefits to cover hearing, vision and dental services.
■ Gov. Pritzker was headed to the White House today—one of three governors meeting with the president to discuss infrastructure spending.
We’re No. 15. CNBC ranks Illinois not-so-bad on its list of top states for business.
■ Chicago-based United Airlines is buying 100 small electric airplanes.
■ The European Union has rolled out what Bloomberg calls “the most ambitious multilateral climate strategy ever attempted.”
6 inches in 3 hours. Massive rains overnight Monday into Tuesday damaged bridges and endangered motorists about 65 miles southwest of Chicago.
■ NASA says a “wobble” in the moon’s orbit could trigger record floods on Earth.
■ Conservationists are sounding an alarm about giant goldfish.
‘Creepy men who obtained location data on women they were romantically interested in.’ That’s the New York Post’s take on a new book that reports Facebook fired 52 employees caught spying on users.
■ One of the book’s authors tells NPR of the Jan. 6 insurrection: “Facebook knew the potential for explosive violence was very real.”
■ Five members of one Texas family have been arrested in connection with the riot.
■ CNN’s Chris Cillizza on a rash of new books about the last administration: “Trump’s final days in office were even worse than we thought.”
■ One of those books quotes Trump as suggesting that whoever talked to reporters about his retreat to the White House bunker “should be executed!”
Chicago Emmy nods. This year’s nominees include the Chicago Media Project for HBO’s Allen v. Farrow …
■ … and filmmaker Steve James and his son Jackson for the Chicago-set documentary City So Real.
■ In 2018, James was one of the first guests in the Chicago Public Square podcast series.
■ The TV series Chicago Fire, Chicago PD and Chicago Med all got snubbed.
‘This morning … I remembered: You don’t have to write anything.’ But recently bought-out Tribune columnist Mary Schmich nevertheless did anyway.
■ Across the country, journalists are unionizing at record numbers.
■ A one-time digital news darling, The Atlantic, faces tough times in the post-Trump era.
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