Transit trepidation. A gunman’s rampage on a Brooklyn subway train has Chicago commuters on edge.
■ In YouTube videos, the man police were hunting had said he wanted to watch people die …
■ … and accused social service workers of making him “more dangerous … than anything, anyone could ever fucking imagine.”
■ Chicago-area transit agencies reported no threats here, but they’re on alert.
■ South Loop Neighbors tonight plan a public meeting on CTA crime.
■ The team overseeing Chicago Police Department reforms says Supt. David Brown’s goal of 1.5 million “positive community interactions” between cops and civilians “seriously risks increasing negative interactions.”
He gone. The CEO and president of Chicago’s Loretto Hospital is out in the aftermath of revelations that the hospital administered COVID-19 vaccinations to the ineligible—including people at his suburban church.
■ Acknowledging Philadelphia’s mask requirement revival, Cook County’s top doc is encouraging people here to begin to think about wearing masks indoors again.
■ Illinois is abandoning one of its most iconic COVID yardsticks: Seven-day average case positivity rates.
■ Your Local Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina: “The reliability of case numbers is crumbling,” so “use trends” to gauge whether “to dial up your COVID-19 layers, like wearing a mask.”
■ COVID casualties and drug overdoses contributed to making 2021’s U.S. death toll the largest ever.
‘His legacy will be extinction.’ Environmentalists are stunned by Gov. Pritzker’s campaign ad that cheers expansion of Rockford’s airport—a project that threatens to destroy a patch of ancient prairie.
■ Climate activists are calling foul on President Biden’s plan to cut gasoline prices by allowing the sale of higher-ethanol fuel.
Hair, hair. A bill to ban workplace discrimination based on hairstyles is, um, headed to Pritzker’s desk.
■ It expands on earlier legislation that applied to students.*
Baby formula shortages. Shortages have prompted major retailers—including CVS and Walgreens—to limit purchases …
■ … partly because of labor shortages and product recalls.
■ Chicago area food prices are running 10% higher now than a year ago.
‘This could have easily been alleviated by having the right storm shelters in place—which Amazon sells.’ A Chicago lawyer suing Amazon over the deadly collapse of its Edwardsville warehouse says a structural engineer’s report shows a “grave violation of safety.”
■ Amazon calls that allegation “premature.”
■ The Sun-Times’ Neil Steinberg looks back 30 years this week to “the quirkiest and least lethal Chicago disaster.”
■ Rough weather—maybe a tornado—loomed today for the Chicago area.
‘An unprecedented trove.’ ProPublica’s cache of leaked Internal Revenue Service data “demonstrates how the American tax system, which theoretically makes the highest earners pay the highest income tax rates, fails to do so for the people at the very top.”
■ Popular Information details how reactionary billionaire Charles Koch’s network attacks critics—through “entities … funded by the Koch network.”
■ The Conversation: Retail workers identify requirements to push credit card applications as the worst part of their jobs.
Thanks, Obama. Motorists along South DuSable Lake Shore Drive, Hayes Drive and Stony Island Avenue can expect traffic snarls as work begins on roadway improvements driven by construction of the Obama Presidential Center.
■ The Hollywood Reporter reviews Netflix’s new Barack Obama-narrated series, Our Great National Parks: “The chances of … watching five hours of this fairly innocuous documentary are close to zero.”
‘Extraordinary winners.’ The Tribune reveals a dozen champs in its Readers’ Choice Food Awards.
■ Here’s how they were announced live on the web.
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* A subject long dear to your columnist’s heart—and head.