‘This is my house, you asshole.’ The Marion County Record—a Kansas paper published by a former University of Illinois journalism professor—has shared security camera video that caught his 98-year-old mother’s confrontation with cops raiding their home …
■ … an encounter that a coroner’s report says contributed to her death 24 hours later.
■ The paper’s not taking it easy on the town’s relatively new top cop: “Marion was warned before hiring chief.”
■ The Handbasket: The Record “isn’t pulling any punches.”
We’re No. 1. WTTW: Chicago leads the nation in carjackings—running triple the occurrence of a decade ago …
■ … and Chicago cops’ clearance rate for solving motor vehicle thefts last year was a measly 4%.
‘They want to basically topple our operation.’ Mayor Johnson’s deputy chief of staff says Republican governors will try to embarrass Chicago and other Democratic cities by sending even more migrants this way.
■ A Chicago Public School reportedly turned away migrant kids with families living at a nearby police station …
■ … but the district disputes that account.
COVID creep-out. Your Local Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina says the next two weeks will be telling for a new variant—BA.2.86, which is “turning heads even among the calm, cool and collected scientists.”
■ Nature: Its emergence “is reminiscent of the early days of the Omicron variant in late 2021.”
■ Ars Technica: “BA.2.86 shows just how risky slacking off on COVID monitoring is.”
‘We will see equally bizarre and destructive … events unfold as the globe continues to warm.’ A climate researcher is among those attributing California’s plight through Tropical Storm Hilary to a mix of natural and human-caused factors.
■ The Lever directs your attention to corporations (hi, Costco, Coke, Pepsi and Walmart!) fighting a landmark bill that would expose their contributions to climate change.
■ The Chicago heat advisory’s been canceled for today, but beware Wednesday.
■ Columnist and law professor Joyce Vance: “We live in a time where the political fight should be about which party has the best plan for dealing with climate change … but much of the country is still stuck on … Trump.”
Surrender Donothy. Ex-President Trump says he’ll turn himself in at Georgia’s Fulton County jail Thursday.
■ The Associated Press: His attacks on prosecutors build on his history of racist language and stereotypes.
■ Time sees a nightmare for Trump’s defense team: Everything he says can be used against him.
■ Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow offers an explanation for Trump’s behavior, beginning with these two panels:
‘It’s a mistake to think … Trump turned the Republican Party into the dangerous anti-democratic movement it is today.’ Launching a new column, ex-Sun-Times and Tribune editor Mark Jacob runs down 12 ways the Republican Party became this radicalized.
■ CNN’s Oliver Darcy: The surprise success of a series of reactionary country songs demonstrates that “the right-wing media universe is maturing—and finding great success— beyond typical news commentary.”
Warlord wannabe. The Guardian exposes the founder and sponsor of “a far-right network of secretive, men-only, invitation-only fraternal lodges”—a former industrialist who’s frequently speculated about his future as autarch after the U.S. collapses.
■ A Plainfield woman’s been arrested, accused of emailing threats to shoot Trump and his son Barron.
‘The world’s richest man … worried the technology he had created … was being used for war.’ HuffPost synopsizes Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker profile of Elon Musk. (If you hit a paywall, open that link in an incognito browser window.)
■ Also: Musk “has said that his hero is Douglas Adams, the writer who skewered both the hyper-rich and the progress-at-any-cost ethos that Musk has come to embody” … and whom your Chicago Public Square columnist interviewed twice before his death.