‘Be there. Will be wild.’ Donald Trump’s Dec. 19, 2020, tweet may prove central to today’s Jan. 6 committee hearings—as lawmakers make the case that Trump issued a “siren call” to join the insurrection.
■ Just Security has a chart tracking Trump’s knowledge and intent in efforts to overturn the election.
■ Critic Aaron Barnhart says TV captioning—which, during the last Jan. 6 hearing, turned the name “Pat Cipollone” into “Patsy Baloney”—might be “the greatest thing in electronics today.”
■ You can watch live—and read along with—today’s hearing here beginning at noon.
‘Here we go again.’ The Atlantic’s Ed Yong, a Pulitzer winner for his COVID-19 coverage, counsels people to take BA.5 seriously: “Those who have managed to avoid the virus for close to three years will find it a little harder to continue that streak, and some who recently caught COVID are getting it again.”
■ Had it? Don’t count on more than a month’s immunity.
■ Illinois ranks No. 3 in the nation for monkeypox case counts.
■ Chicago’s targeting its monkeypox vaccine supply at those exposed to someone with monkeypox and men who’ve had intimate contact with other men in a social or sexual venue, have multiple or anonymous partners or are sex workers.
Downtown’s plight. Even as Chicago shootings and homicides drop overall, they’re up in the heart of the city.
■ Cops arrested an 11-year-old boy in an attempted South Side carjacking.
■ Democrats in Kendall County, southwest of Chicago, are up in arms over Republican plans to raffle off a rifle similar to the one used to attack Highland Park’s 4th of July parade.
■ Police have been hunting a gunman responsible for a wave of shootings at 7-Eleven stores in California yesterday—on 7/11, Free Slurpee Day.
■ 77 minutes of uninterrupted security camera video at the Uvalde, Texas, school ravaged by a gunman reveals, in USA Today’s words, “what experts have called one of the worst police failures in American history.”
Abortion assertions. The Biden administration says hospitals everywhere in the U.S. must provide abortion services if a woman’s life is at risk.
■ Judges across the country now are (re-)shaping abortion law, including …
■ … a federal judge who’s blocked an Arizona law that gave the unborn all legal rights …
■ … and a Minnesota county judge who’s declared most of the state’s abortion restrictions unconstitutional.
■ ProPublica: The IRS has declared the anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ rights Family Research Council a church—shielding it from financial scrutiny.
Ouch. First Lady Jill Biden’s apologizing—under fire from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, among others—for comparing Texas Hispanics to “breakfast tacos.”
■ The editor of the Sarasota, Florida, Herald-Tribune has apologized for publishing a column defending the racist Proud Boys gang …
■ … but failed to acknowledge that the columnist’s husband is a Proud Boy.
Free bikes. Chicago’s giving 5,000 of ’em to needy Chicagoans over the next four years.
■ Tens of thousands of leaked docs show Uber “flouted laws, duped police, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments.”
Running on empty? Illinois is among the states where gas prices have dropped the most.
■ Dartmouth College research: U.S. air pollution has inflicted nearly $2 trillion in damage on other nations.
■ Pollen got you down? Blame light pollution.
■ Esquire’s Charlie Pierce: “The Republican solution to a world on fire is to avoid the word fire.”
‘The oldest documented light in the history of the universe.’ NASA has rolled out the first images from its $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope.
■ NASA administrator—and ex-astronaut and U.S. senator—Bill Nelson: Webb will “fundamentally alter our understanding of the universe.”
■ NASA was to release more images, one by one, at a news conference today—simultaneously publishing them on its, um, Webbsite.
■ The video presentation was unfolding live here at Chicago Public Square’s email deadline.
■ Meet your new desktop background or screen saver.
$1. That’s all it takes—just $1, once—to see your name enshrined in the Legion of Chicago Public Squarians.
■ You can do it in less than a minute here.
■ Chris Koenig made this edition better.