‘I’ll still wear a mask’ / Blood money / Wordle, bastardized

‘I’ll still wear a mask.’ Author and Deadspin founder* Will Leitch lists the places he’ll keep his face covered “even if/when the pandemic is over.”
A bipartisan legislative panel has slapped down Gov. Pritzker’s plan to restore the state’s emergency mask mandate for schools.
A Reuters survey finds school boards nationwide enduring death threats over masks and other policies.
Don’t count on a quick end to Chicago’s vax and mask mandates—regardless of what happens at the state level.

‘Lets get ready to steal b----.’ A Chicago man has pleaded guilty to inciting a cycle of looting and rioting in August 2020.

Whoops. BuzzFeed News reporter Jason Leopold tweets: “ICE turned over docs to me in response to my #FOIA about protests in Portland, forgot to redact them & then wrote back to me & demanded I destroy the docs & ‘refrain from using or disclosing the contents.’ Here they are.”
The last immigrants in Illinois detention awaiting deportation from the U.S. have been transferred out of state.

Only in Chicago. Axios Chicago notes that no other (correction:) major U.S. city gives the mayor power to fill vacancies on the municipal legislature …
 … as Mayor Lightfoot’s preparing to do in the case of convicted Ald. Patrick Daley Thompson …
 … amid growing pressure for her to pick an Asian American.

Blood money. Gunmaker Remington’s agreed to pay $73 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the families of nine of the victims among the 20 first-graders and six educators killed with one of its rifles at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.
Time: Despite research that such programs don’t reduce smoking by kids and may in fact encourage it, tobacco giant Altria keeps quietly funding substance-use-prevention training for teenage students.

Facebook’s bind. In what looks to be another blow to Facebook and other social media companies that have been monetizing your digital activity, Google says it’s following Apple’s lead and phasing out cross-app tracking on Android phones.
The Washington Post says an all-hands Facebook meeting didn’t go well yesterday: “A new set of corporate values … was ridiculed by employees” …
 … who now apparently will be called “Metamates” instead of Facebookers.

Unrelated developments.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers magazine Spectrum reports that hundreds of patients around the world dependent on bionic eye implants to address blindness have been plunged into darkness because the company responsible has stopped supporting the technology.

‘Good for journalism.’ The Poynter Report’s Tom Jones celebrates the “one-two punch” Sarah Palin suffered in her fight against The New York Times.

ViacomCBS, we hardly knew ye. The new corporate name: Paramount.
Caught up in a multifaceted scandal, CNN’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer is quitting.

Wordle, bastardized. Days after The New York Times acquired the beloved online word game with a pledge that “no changes will be made to its gameplay” (Jan. 31 link), the Times has, well, changed its gameplay …
Columnist Eric Zorn: “It goes too far to disallow such words as guesses, which are often strategic attempts to locate the placement of letters in the actual solution.”
Depending on your age, you may have known him best as National Lampoon editor-in-chief, 60 Minutes contributor or Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! panelist: P.J. O’Rourke is dead at 74.

So … a typical February Wednesday in Chicago. Temps in the 50s today …
 … followed by maybe 7 inches of sleet and snow.

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