Sure, now. Shit-peddling conspiracy theorist Alex Jones finally conceded—under oath and facing a massive damage verdict in a defamation lawsuit filed against him by the parents of a 6-year-old killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School—that what happened in Connecticut that day in 2012 was “100% real.”
■ That came during a session in which the parents’ lawyer revealed that Jones’ lawyer accidentally sent him years’ worth of texts and email from Jones’ phone.
■ See the “Perry Mason moment” when Jones learned about that leak …
■ … which included evidence that Jones’ bloviation was generating more than $800,000 a day at times in 2018.
■ Rolling Stone’s scoop: Because Jones has been so cozy with Jan. 6 riot instigators, the House committee on the insurrection intends to request that trove of data.
‘A warning to Republicans.’ Gov. Pritzker sees Kansas voters’ defeat of a measure that would have repealed abortion protections as “a sign to the Republicans seeking to undermine bodily autonomy: Americans will not stand for this extremist agenda.”
■ At least three Illinois Republicans have joined the roster of those criticizing Republican gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey for comparing abortion to the Holocaust …
■ … but columnist Eric Zorn says Bailey’s statement doesn’t qualify as “antisemitic.”
■ Popular Information’s Judd Legum: “The lesson of Kansas is that reproductive rights can motivate voters, even in red states, to turn out.”
■ Tuesday’s primaries handed big losses to Republican incumbents considered not conservative enough.
■ Political strategist and Axe Files host David Axelrod interviewed by the Tribune’s Christopher Borrelli: “It may not be the big year for Republicans all the signs suggest.”
■ Here’s Axelrod on the Chicago Public Square podcast five years ago.
‘Not guilty.’ That’s the plea entered yesterday by the man accused of killing seven people and wounding dozens more in an assault on Highland Park’s 4th of July parade.
■ Sun-Times reporter Lynn Sweet, who was there that day and in the courtroom yesterday: The hearing lasted seven minutes more than the massacre itself.
■ An 18-year-old Lollapalooza security guard and mother of three was jailed, accused of creating a fake terrorist threat to the festival so she could leave work early.
And now, the dad’s gone. Thomas Dobosz of Rolling Meadows has died, three days after a crash with a car traveling in the wrong direction on I-90 also killed his wife and four children—three of them his.
■ A car crash in Indiana yesterday killed a Republican Indiana congresswoman and three others, including two of her staff members.
■ A 13-year-old girl was in critical condition after a lightning strike at Chicago’s Garfield Park Conservatory.
‘I will write my last column for the Daily Herald this Sunday.’ Chicago-area news veteran Burt Constable is taking a buyout.
‘A sad day.’ The celebrated leader of an all-Black Chicago charter school is out after an investigation of allegations he engaged in inappropriate sexual conduct with a student.
■ Almost 12,000 pages of sealed records obtained by the Associated Press detail how a “help line” established by the Mormon church to address problems of sexual abuse has been misused to divert accusations away from law enforcement and instead to church attorneys, who can bury them.
‘Why no one cared that Al Qaeda honcho Zawahiri got droned.’ The Intercept’s Murtaza Hussain sees “a sign that global jihadism is not much of a priority anymore for the U.S. public—and also for Islamists themselves.”
■ Or, as your Square columnist answered a reader asking why that story appeared in Tuesday’s edition beneath mention of the death of JoJo the Brookfield Zoo silverback gorilla: “It was an Ozymandias thing.”