‘It needs to happen.’ Tribune columnist Rex Huppke says Chicago’s overdue to make proof of vaccination mandatory for entrance to public spaces.
■ Axios Chicago: Where’s Chicago’s proof-of-vax app? (Second item in today’s edition.)
■ The Guardian: As vaccine progress slows and the omicron variant looms, U.S. cases are surging.
■ A molecular physiologist writing for The Conversation says the question of whether omicron makes people more or less sick than other variants “will be answered much more quickly by the thousands of people infected … than by work in the lab.”
■ The Intercept says public health experts were appalled to hear the notion of free at-home COVID-19 tests for all Americans dismissed as ridiculous by White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
■ City Cast Chicago notes that the Midwest’s biggest pop-culture convention, C2E2, returns to McCormick Place this weekend—just days after omicron was linked to a similar gathering in New York.
■ The AP tackles the question “How will the world decide when the pandemic is over?”
‘The overall shrinkage has been dramatic.’ Journalist, photographer and author Lee Bey surveys Chicago’s fall from its perch as America’s onetime capital of black wealth.
■ More from Politico: The departure of Chicago’s Black population leaves “more abandoned buildings, shuttered schools and boarded-up storefronts.”
■ Black gun owners tell The TRiiBE why they chose to arm themselves.
■ Block Club Chicago: A Bucktown group shrouded in secrecy aims to hire private security to patrol the neighborhood.
Dirty money. A top guy in Chicago’s Streets and Sanitation Department has been indicted in connection with embezzlement at a failed Bridgeport bank.
■ The Reader’s Ben Joravsky has filed a Freedom of Information inquiry, asking the city to document what led former Chicago inspector general Joe Ferguson to conclude then-Mayor Emanuel didn’t engage in a cover-up of Laquan McDonald’s murder by police.
Tollway trouble. A Sun-Times editorial: “The scandal-prone Illinois State Toll Highway Authority keeps trying its best to prove it shouldn’t exist as an independent agency.”
■ A Trib editorial calls for big new ideas on Chicago’s traffic problems: “The pandemic and the lifestyle changes it has created have changed everything for travel and transit.”
‘So much for independent-minded Democratic politics.’ Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown flags a first for Cook County Democrats: A request that potential countywide candidates who want the party’s endorsement sign a written loyalty pledge.
■ Law blogger Jack Leyhane: The pledge poses ethical challenges for judicial candidates in particular.
No snow? WTTW News’ Patty Wetli ponders the rising prospect that Chicago will have made it 365 days without measurable snowfall.
■ Axios: Winters in Illinois’ biggest towns are getting warmer.
[Correcting the date in this item.] Do You Fear What I Fear? That’s one of the songs that was in the works for an Indivisible Chicago sing-in demonstration pushing voter rights legislation this Wednesday evening at Millennium Park.
■ Chicago cops have a plan aimed at avoiding a repeat of Saturday night’s Millennium Park mayhem, which left a 12-year-old girl shot in the back.
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