Monday-Wednesday? Come on down. After a run of downtown mayhem, including a 16-year-old shot and killed near Millennium Park’s Bean sculpture, Mayor Lightfoot is banning minors from the park after 6 p.m. Thursday through Sunday—unless they’re accompanied by a “responsible adult.”
■ The mayor was elaborating in a news conference at Chicago Public Square’s email deadline …
■ The ACLU objects: “The vague description … will result in unnecessary stops and arrests.”
■ A 17-year-old’s been charged in the murder.
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■ Potential mayoral candidate Paul Vallas slams Lightfoot for being out of town over the weekend, “in Texas fundraising & grandstanding pretending to be tough.”
■ Another hat in the mayoral ring: Veteran Chicago cop Frederick Collins.
He had a history. The 18-year-old white man accused of a racist massacre at a Buffalo supermarket issued threats that drew cops to his high school and sent him to a hospital last year but he was never charged with a crime.
■ The New York Times: The gunman targeted a neighborhood shaped by decades of segregation …
■ … and he allegedly spent months planning the attack.
■ The victims included a 72-year-old woman remembered as “a powerful voice” for civil rights.
■ Columnist Neil Steinberg is flummoxed: “Why would an 18-year-old kill?”
■ Popular Information traces the “great replacement theory” that seems to have motivated the suspect from a 1930s senator to the knucklehead lawmakers and media figures of today.
■ The gun used bore a racial epithet and the number 14—an apparent reference to a 14-word statement popular with white supremacists.
■ CNN’s Oliver Darcy: “White supremacists used to … secretly meet under the cover of night. Now they sit at home and convene on extremist message boards … interconnected like never before.”
■ The Associated Press: It’s just the latest in a series of targeted racial attacks in the U.S.
■ A gunman Sunday killed one and wounded five others at a Southern California church lunch reception.
■ Police praise congregants who took the guy down, disarming and hogtying him.
‘Many Americans don’t understand how high the stakes really are.’ Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan warns that democracy is at stake in the midterm elections—and that journalists need “new ways to convey … how badly things could turn out.”
■ Columnist Steve Sheffey: “What will it take for the American people to start treating the Republican Party—and by extension, those who support Republican candidates—as clear and present dangers to our lives and our democracy?”
Here we go again. Evanston and Kenosha County, Wisconsin, have returned to the pandemic’s high-risk phase.
■ Evanston Township High School is requiring masks again.
■ Contact tracing is back in Oak Park schools.
■ Your Local Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina: “We are clearly in an infection surge right now, although you wouldn’t really know it due to underreporting, lack of communication and pandemic fatigue.”
■ The U.S. pandemic death toll has now hit 1 million.
■ Bloomberg: Early research suggests that people who’ve been vaccinated and then catch the omicron COVID-19 strain may be primed to overcome a broad range of other variants.
■ ProPublica spotlights a COVID testing company that missed 96% of cases.
Miss last night’s total lunar eclipse? NASA has you covered.
■ Chicagoans got only a glimpse.
Breathe queasy. New research pinpoints Chicago’s worst air.
■ Days before three women were found dead in a Rogers Park senior living facility, residents complained to their city council representative about a lack of air conditioning.
■ On the other hand, Chicago escapes citation in a Post map of America’s significant wildfire risks.
■ HBO’s John Oliver—in last night’s show available free on YouTube—surveyed misbehavior by utility companies across the country.
Hey, Cubs fans! Cubs co-owner and Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts, whose family owns the Chicago Cubs, says if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, he’ll call a special session of his state’s legislature to outlaw abortion altogether.
■ CNN visits a downstate Illinois “oasis” for out-of-state women seeking abortions.
■ Across Chicago and the nation, Saturday rallies demanded a continued right to abortion.
■ A Sunday rally downtown condemned Israel for the murder of a Palestinian-American journalist.
McDonald’s’ do svidaniya. The first American fast-food chain to open in the Soviet Union is selling its Russian business.
■ The AP: If Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was meant to check NATO, “it appears to have backfired.”
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