Mixed signals. Mayor Lightfoot’s all excited about NASCAR’s deal to race around Chicago’s streets beginning next year …
■ … but her announcement came a day before the City Council was to vote on a plan to crack down on illegal street racing.
■ Streetsblog Chicago co-editor John Greenfield on Twitter: “Headlines: Climate change is causing weather-related crises around the globe, and car crash fatalities have spiked across the U.S., including Chicago. Lori Lightfoot: Hey, let’s have a downtown NASCAR race!”
■ Not to mention USC Annenberg Media’s March report on NASCAR’s historically racist fanbase …
‘20 suicides in four years … is a blatant alarm.’ A City Council member would give Chicago police officers power to decline overtime assignments.
■ Cops complain they’ve reached a “breaking point” that demands actual time off.
■ A senior attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois writes to the Sun-Times: “No one should conclude that a decline in arrests in Chicago has caused an increase in shootings.”
‘The city was engaging in discrimination.’ The federal government accuses Chicago of violating Black and Latino citizens’ civil rights by relocating polluting industry into their neighborhoods from mainly white areas.
■ If the city doesn’t mend its ways, it could lose hundreds of millions in federal aid.
■ Lightfoot’s office calls the complaint “absurd.”
■ A plan to encourage more transit-oriented development on Chicago’s West and South Sides—and to increase affordable housing along train and bus lines—was headed to the full City Council today.
■ CityCast Chicago previews today’s council meeting.
‘I was shocked he gave up this easy.’ The suburban cop who arrested the alleged Highland Park shooter recalls how it went down.
■ Highland Park’s mayor was scheduled to testify today at a U.S. Senate hearing on “Protecting Our Communities from Mass Shootings” …
■ … a session that was to begin at 9 a.m., streaming live on the web here.
■ Hundreds turned out in Naperville last night for a hearing on an assault-weapon sales ban there.
‘47 Republicans joined all Democrats.’ Today’s reason to be cheerful: In a rebuke (kind of) to the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning abortion rights, a bipartisan majority of the U.S. House has voted overwhelmingly to codify the legality of same-sex and interracial marriage …
■ … a notion that now heads to the Senate—which still includes Ted Cruz.
■ Chicago Rep. Jan Schakowsky was among 19 lawmakers arrested yesterday in an abortion-rights demonstration outside the Supreme Court.
■ The Washington Post: Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s neighbors favor abortion rights but are getting tired of protests outside his home.
■ The Indianapolis doctor who performed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim is moving to sue the state’s attorney general for defamation.
■ A Cleveland woman who sought an abortion after her state made it illegal at six weeks tells BuzzFeed News what it’s like to be “one paycheck away from being forced to have a child.”
Pritzker has it. Illinois’ governor has caught the COVID …
■ … after last week’s presidential campaign-ish trips to the White House, Maine and Florida.
■ For What It’s Worth law blogger Jack Leyhane: “The virus is apparently not as tired of us as we are of it.”
■ Your Local Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina: The newly approved Novavax shot isn’t “the silver bullet we need … to close out our fight against SARS-CoV-2.”
‘They calculated it would be better to face the fallout for deleting the texts than the fallout from whatever was in those texts.’ History prof Heather Cox Richardson is skeptical of the Secret Service’s claim it accidentally erased its agents’ Jan. 6 messages.
■ Trevor Noah on The Daily Show: “If any of us ‘lost a text,’ the Secret Service … would find the shit out of it.”
■ In fairness, the service has coughed up one exchange.
■ University of Chicago research into those charged in the insurrection concludes that more than half owned businesses or held white-collar jobs … and came from counties Joe Biden won.
■ CNN: A top spokeswoman for Nevada’s Republican Senate nominee marched that day with the reactionary Oath Keepers—including one later charged with sedition.
New Sun-Times boss: ‘Everything’s on the table.’ The Chicago Public Square / Rivet360 podcast Chicago Media Talks returns—to introduce you to the paper’s new top editor, Jennifer Kho.
■ From last week: How she decided to publish a photo of victims of the Highland Park shooting.
■ Politico’s Jack Shafer: “A new poll shows confidence in the press is still sinking. Don’t believe it.”
Apple may owe you $395. A class action settlement stands to send cash to people in Illinois and six other states whose 2015-19 MacBook computers were saddled with crappy keyboards.
■ Google’s ChromeOS Flex offers new life and surprising speed boosts for old computers that would otherwise wind up in the trash …
■ … and you can download it free here.
Roaring back. The Art Institute’s lions have returned to their Michigan Avenue posts.
■ Columnist Neil Steinberg notes the decay of a massive South Side sculpture that turns 100 this fall.
Shirtsighted. Why, yes, that’s a Chicago Public Square T-shirt sported by reader Nancy Watkins in Washington State’s North Cascades National Park.
■ Your support (and T-shirt purchases) help keep Square coming.
■ Pam Spiegel made this edition better.