Not so fast. A day after sports-jersey-clad parents and students protested a decision in the face of a COVID-19 spike to cancel club, athletic and other extracurricular activities for the rest of this semester, Oak Park and River Forest High School has reversed course—for now.
■ Flashback to March 2020: Oak Park was first in Illinois to issue a “shelter in place” order.
■ A Tribune editorial: “This crisis is far from over.”
■ New York City is requiring that private employers require vaccinations for their employees.
■ Omicron’s getting all the buzz, but the director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health says the delta variant remains the overwhelming cause of deaths.
‘Jan. 6 was practice.’ The Atlantic’s Barton Gellman warns that Donald Trump’s Republican Party is much better positioned to subvert the next election.
■ Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg: “As bad as the Trump administration—whoops, the first Trump administration—was, the terrible possibility is, things could still get a lot worse.”
■ The Associated Press: “The path to power for Republicans in Congress is now rooted in the capacity to generate outrage.”
‘These parents cannot claim they saw no signs. If anything, they encouraged the signs.’ Deadspin founder Will Leitch says the Oakland County, Michigan, school shootings have finally produced “villainous parents.”
‘The CNN anchor who should have been serving the public was secretly putting family loyalty first.’ A professor of media ethics and law dissects Chris Cuomo’s fall from grace.
■ CNN’s Brian Stelter calls Cuomo’s dismissal Saturday “a case of death by a thousand cuts.”
■ Politico’s Jack Shafer: “Cable news reaches a tiny fraction of the country, so why does the rest of the media care so much about the stupid things it says?”
You, pwned? If you’ve ever used Gravatar—the WordPress-owned service that lets you “create, upload, and manage your globally recognized avatar from a single place”—odds are good yours are among the almost 114 million email addresses, names and usernames hacked in a data breach.
■ Enter your email address at the free service haveibeenpwned.com to find out if you’re a victim of that or other breaches.
■ While you’re there, you can sign up to be notified automatically of future trouble.
Brrrr. Today and tonight bring Chicago’s coldest air of the season …
■ … but then things warm up—a little.
■ Illinois Public Interest Research Group director Abe Scarr says you can blame skyrocketing heating bills on “a misguided 2013 law” that the legislature has failed to revise “despite calls to action from Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Attorney General Kwame Raoul, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, the Chicago City Council, and more than 35 consumer, environmental and community organizations.”
■ The U.S. produces an order of magnitude more plastic waste per person than China does.
■ The U.S. produces an order of magnitude more plastic waste per person than China does.
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