‘A brazen attack on press freedom.’ Popular Information dissects a small Kansas town’s police raid on a newspaper and its publisher’s home …
■ … an invasion that left the paper’s 98-year-old co-owner fatally unable to eat or sleep.
■ Her son and co-owner, former University of Illinois journalism* professor Eric Meyer, compares the invasion to “Gestapo tactics from World War II” …
■ … and he says the city’s whole five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies took “everything we have” …
■ … including, he tells The Handbasket, computers containing the identities of people who’d provided tips the police chief quit his previous job to avoid punishment for sexual misconduct.
■ He tells The New York Times (gift link, courtesy of Chicago Public Square supporters): “If we don’t fight back and we don’t win in fighting back, it’s going to silence everybody.”
■ ABC News has footage of the raid …
■ … which dozens of news organizations are condemning …
■ … and which a libertarian lawyer says “chills the important function of journalism.”
■ Historian Heather Cox Richardson traces the history of such intimidation back to Illinois in 1836.
‘We’re just concerned about a chilling effect.’ The American Civil Liberties Union is sounding an alarm about a new law signed by Gov. Pritzker, defining civil liability for people who share personally identifiable information about someone for the purpose of harming that person.
■ Among dozens of bills OK’d by the governor Friday: One that allows multiple-occupancy public restrooms to be labeled gender-neutral.
Chicago’s next top cop. Mayor Johnson’s picked the city’s counterterrorism chief to be the new police superintendent …
■ … and he’s dumped the public health commissioner who led the city through the pandemic, Dr. Allison Arwady …
■ … a move that Politico’s Shia Kapos calls “an ugly ending” that “smells of retribution”…
■ … and that a Tribune editorial condemns as “unconscionable.”
‘Land of broken promises.’ Block Club Chicago: Emails reveal how ex-Mayor Lightfoot cut a backroom deal to hand public housing property over to a billionaire’s sports team.
■ Chicago’s chief bridge engineer tells Block Club the 107-year-old Lake Street Bridge over the Chicago River will get an overhaul next year.
After the fires. Hawaii’s governor says the death toll in the Maui wildfires may double the toll of 96 reported so far.
■ Heated: “Nature didn’t turn the historic Hawaiian community into a tinderbox. People did.”
■ Under a flood watch today, the Chicago area faced the prospect of “torrential rainfall” …
■ … and maybe tornadoes.
Never again? Hah. Remember 2018, when the Parkland, Florida, shooting massacre prompted a run of “Never Again” protest marches demanding tougher gun control? The first half of this year brought more mass shooting deaths than all of that year.
■ In Chicago over the weekend, shootings left at least four dead.
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■ Mike Braden made this edition better.
* Your Square columnist’s alma mater.