Tornado touchdown. A swarm of twisters blitzed the Chicago area last night, and at least one touched down near O’Hare.
■ Passengers at the city’s two airports were forced off planes and into shelter.
■ Here’s video.
Rain, rain, every day / Nor any end to drought. Despite the almost daily downpours the Chicago area’s experienced this month, the region’s dry spell continues—because, in these big dumps, a climatologist tells the Sun-Times, “the first maybe inch or 2 soaks in, helps the soil, and the rest just runs off.”
■ The Washington Post: “Floods, fires and deadly heat are the alarm bells of a planet on the brink.”
■ Economist Umair Haque: “Climate change … raises risk—fast.”
■ Remember how recipe website Epicurious announced it’d stop publishing recipes including beef—because of its impact on the Earth? Um, er, ah … not so much.
■ In a roundup of how cities are fighting climate change, Dame hails Chicago’s Green Alleys project.
■ A Sun-Times editorial: Trees! More trees!
■ New York gossip site Page Six says a Robert F. Kennedy presidential campaign dinner “descended into a foul bout of … polemic farting” as “two boisterous old men” argued about the climate.
‘If Fitzgerald has to go, so does most of his staff.’ Columnist Eric Zorn says Northwestern’s cleanup after a hazing scandal in its football program isn’t done yet.
■ Rick Morrissey at the Sun-Times: “You can scream all you want that Pat Fitzgerald didn’t do anything wrong. The problem is that he didn’t do the one right thing that was necessary.”
■ The Post goes inside the student newspaper investigation that got Fitzgerald fired.
A Chicago income tax? The Better Government Association’s Illinois Answers Project considers the risks and rewards of “one of the city’s only progressive options” for funding Mayor Johnson’s ambitious programs.
■ A congressional investigation concludes that some of the nation’s largest tax-prep companies may have for years broken federal law by sharing customers’ sensitive financial data with companies including Google and Facebook parent Meta.
‘A transformation in … contraceptive care.’ Medical groups and women’s health advocates are cheering the FDA’s approval of the first over-the-counter birth control pill.
■ It could become available online and on retail shelves—as freely accessible as aspirin and eyedrops—as soon as next year.
Sorry about that Fox News thing. In a joint statement published to the Web, three veteran television executives “express their deep disappointment for helping to give birth to Fox Broadcasting Company and Fox Television that came to include Fox News Channel—the channel that prominently includes news that … ‘no reasonable person would believe.’”
■ They say they “genuinely believed that the creation of a fourth competitive force in broadcast television was in the public interest.”
■ Popular Information and Public Notice teamed up for this one: “Fox News won’t let new facts get in the way of a good conspiracy.”
■ An Arizona guy falsely accused of leading an FBI plot to trigger the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol is suing Fox and its defenestrated bloviator Tucker Carlson for defamation.
■ The plaintiff says he used to be a regular Fox viewer.
‘More punishment than anyone deserves.’ In a hearing that Esquire’s Charlie Pierce says “took place on another plane of reality entirely,” FBI Director Chris Wray lost it with Republicans’ contention that—in the Post’s words—“as a Republican appointed by President Donald Trump, he was nevertheless out to get Republicans.”
■ Contrasting news organizations’ headlines on the story, critic Dan Froomkin describes The New York Times’ as “lazy, weak-ass, tells-you-nothing, normalizes-the-insanity.”
■ ProPublica: Almost 100,000 voter registration challenges in Georgia came from just six right-wing activists.
Bear up, Chicago. Plenty of Chicago-area entertainment veterans to root for among this year’s Emmy nominations, including Bob Odenkirk for Better Call Saul, Rachel Brosnahan for Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Quinta Brunson for Abbott Elementary …
■ … and FX’s Chicago-set series The Bear, about a chef taking over a family sandwich shop, has landed 13 nods.
■ Conceding a sector to Starbucks and Dunkin’, McDonald’s is abandoning its bakery lineup.
■ Harris Meyer made this edition better.