Another week, another strike. Governors State University faculty planned to join counterparts at Chicago State and Eastern Illinois on walkout tomorrow.
■ WBEZ explains: “State spending on higher education was cut nearly in half over 20 years after adjusting for inflation, setting the stage for today’s labor strife.”
■ Northeastern Illinois University enrollment is in freefall.
■ It’s not just Illinois: For the first time in its 257-year history, Rutgers University faces a faculty strike.
Movie theater shots. A ride-share driver’s been arrested, accused of gunfire in a Chicago movie theater over a fare dispute.
■ Weekend shootings across Chicago took at least three lives.
■ At least a dozen postal workers have been robbed at gunpoint in Chicago over the last month.
■ Police have issued a warning about people who’ve posted fake items on Facebook Marketplace and then robbed victims at gunpoint.
‘If there were to be a rupture under a river, what would that look like?’ An environmental defender is among those sounding an alarm about plans to build a carbon dioxide pipeline through Illinois—without public notification or input.
■ The Washington Post: “Scientists have documented an abnormal and dramatic surge in sea levels … raising new questions about whether New Orleans, Miami, Houston and other coastal communities might be even more at risk from rising seas than once predicted.”
■ Chicago’s temperatures could reach 80 this week.
■ Wired: America’s tornadoes are evolving—fast.
‘Great news for guns!’ USA Today columnist Rex Huppke channels “the spokesgun for the Tennessee chapter of Guns United Against Gun Control” in hailing the Republican-led Tennessee legislature’s decision to kick two Black Democratic lawmakers out of office for their role in a gun protest.
■ Tennessee lawmakers could vote today to reinstate one of the two.
■ Indivisible Chicago planned a rally this afternoon on their behalf.
■ Popular Information: The Tennessee House speaker who led the charge to expel them for technical violations of procedural rules seems not to live in his district.
■ Today, it’s Kentucky: Louisville police reported “multiple casualties” in a shooting at a downtown bank building.
‘The Republican presidential campaign TV ads will write themselves.’ Columnist Laura Washington fears a Democratic National Convention in Chicago won’t end well for Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson or the party.
■ Politico: Chicago’s business leaders are warming to Johnson.
‘Republican death drive.’ That’s how John Stoehr at the Editorial Board sees the party’s hard-line stand against abortion: “You can’t spend decades equating it to murder, then go soft on murder.”
■ U.S. Health Secretary Xavier Becerra condemns a federal judge’s ruling threatening the availability of the abortion drug mifepristone as “not America” …
■ … a ruling that Public Notice asserts has fueled “the federal judiciary's grave legitimacy crisis.”
■ Conflicting federal court findings have sown confusion over the drug’s legality.
‘A blow to the Supreme Court, and America.’ A Sun-Times editorial condemns Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ “lax ethics.”
■ Poynter’s Tom Jones takes on The Wall Street Journal’s contorted criticism of the adjectives in ProPublica’s reporting on Thomas’ conflicts of interest: “Never mind that the adjectives are actually, you know, true.”
■ The Onion again: “Thomas Given Disciplinary Trip To Gary.”
‘A federal watchdog called for ending the practice nearly 50 years ago.’ But ProPublica reports that “the Army increasingly allows soldiers charged with violent crimes to leave the military rather than face trial” …
■ … and it has plenty of sad stories to back up its reporting.
A Chicago Public Square bummer. Twitter’s crippling of its application programming interface for third-party vendors means that two of this news briefing’s “secret weapons” (September link)—TweetShelf and Newslit—have been knocked out of service.
■ Twitter’s actions have been shaped in part by a feud with the Substack email newsletter service.
■ The Bulwark’s Cathy Young: “This dumpster fire … is a gloriously stupid finale to the ‘Elon Musk, Free Speech Warrior’ show.”
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