‘This is awful.’ Climate experts are blasting ABC News for a (since-corrected) headline that said climate change wasn’t to blame for the Maui wildfires …
■ … which have left maybe a thousand people still unaccounted for—in addition to more than 100 confirmed deaths.
■ This video may show how the conflagration began.
■ The Associated Press: Fires and other disasters are on the increase in Hawaii.
■ A wildfire has burned thousands of acres on a Spanish island—maybe that nation’s worst fire in a year of severe drought.
■ For the first time in 84 years, a tropical storm could make landfall in California this weekend.
■ Columnist Mike Fourcher: Carbon capture’s going to become “a major part of our economic lives. One way or another we’re going to have to start paying for it—and the cost will be in the trillions of dollars a year.”
Rain, rain. Another blast of stormy weather today brought traffic to a halt at O’Hare.
■ Is your home wet? Don’t use any of these dehumidifiers, which have caused at least 23 fires.
Transit transformation. An organization charged by the Illinois General Assembly with overhauling Chicago-area transportation is considering combining the CTA, Metra and Pace—and raising fares.
■ Partly driving change, WBEZ reports: The 9-to-5 commuter is going extinct.
‘Democracy won.’ The publisher of a small-town Kansas newspaper, the Marion County Record—former University of Illinois journalism professor Eric Meyer—says the paper’s been “vindicated” now that the local prosecutor’s withdrawn a search warrant and agreed to return all the equipment that Marion, Kansas, cops seized from the paper and its staffers Friday.
■ Meyer’s 98-year-old mother, whose death has been attributed to stress from the raids on the paper’s offices and at the home she shared with her son, is remembered for her “vigilance with words, a powerful sense of propriety and equally unflinching opinions.” (Photo: Marion County Record.)
■ The Kansas Bureau of Investigation was still scrutinizing the raids.
■ Columnist Parker Molloy condemns AP and Kansas City Star coverage of the story that gave readers “the impression that … the legal protections afforded by the First Amendment are only valid so long as people like the work you do.”
Unprotected speech. A Texas woman’s been arrested, accused of threatening to kill the federal judge overseeing the criminal case in Washington against Donald Trump.
■ Names, photos and home addresses of members of the Fulton County, Georgia, grand jury that voted to indict Trump have reportedly been circulated online.
‘The major purpose of most book publishers has switched from publishing books to making money.’ Columnist Robert Reich says the potential sale of Simon & Schuster to a private equity firm “vastly increases the influence of financial interests over book publishing.”
■ Author and civil liberties champ Cory Doctorow hails “at long last, a meaningful step to protect Americans’ privacy.”
Thanks. Eric Zorn’s kind enough to share Chicago Public Square highlights with his readers each Thursday.
■ You should sign up for Zorn’s newsletter free here.
■ Journalism critic Margaret Sullivan slams the news media: “Is it so hard to hyperlink to primary documents such as court decisions?”
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