‘A terrible loss.’ That’s Gov. Pritzker describing the killing of off-duty Chicago Police Officer Luis Huesca early Sunday in an apparent carjacking.
■ Mayor Johnson calls it “an act of unconscionable gun violence.”
■ Huesca’s death followed by about a year the killing of one of his police academy classmates (March 2023 link).
■ Columnist Laura Washington asks, “Where is the outrage for the victims of Chicago’s latest mass shooting?”
■ Block Club Chicago: The University of Chicago promised $15 million to prevent violence on the South Side, but it’s put up less than $3 million.
CTA ‘pressure points.’ Streetsblog Chicago tracks growing pressure for Chicago Transit Authority President Dorval Carter to get outta the way …
■ … including Pritzker’s call for “new” and “additional” leadership.
■ Mayor Johnson’s not ready to hop on that train.
A homelessness homer? Emerging plans would combine Chicago’s programs for migrants with its longstanding homeless shelter system.
■ The Texas Tribune: Migrant apprehensions are down at the Texas border.
Opening day. Updating coverage: Prosecutors today were set to—for the first time in history—offer a jury a criminal case against a former U.S. president.
■ CNN has live analysis of the case against Donald Trump here.
■ Politico: Watch to see how prosecutors balance accusations of sex and corruption.
■ Former Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger: “With his big mouth silenced and his quiet presence assured by the judge, Trump has been shrinking in size.”
■ USA Today’s Rex Huppke: “He’s on trial, he’s unhinged and he’s coming unglued.”
■ Columnist Dan Pfeiffer: How to talk about Trump’s trial with your MAGA-curious uncle.
■ LateNighter critic Bill Carter: Trump last week helped prove that Jimmy Kimmel has “the best left hook in late night.”
Happy Earth Day. Historian Heather Cox Richardson looks back to the occasion’s origins in the ’60s.
■ Environmental Law & Policy Center chief Howard Learner calls it a good time to consider five steps to protect the Great Lakes.
■ Commenting in the Tribune, students from the University of Illinois and Stanford and Brown universities demand their schools divest from the fossil fuel industry. (That’s a gift link, courtesy of those whose support keeps Chicago Public Square coming.)
Campus ‘crisis.’ Columbia University in New York canceled all in-person classes today—hours before the start of Passover …
■ … as tensions rise over the arrest of more than 100 pro-Palestinian demonstrators on the campus last week.
■ Popular Information: The arrests “conflated peaceful pro-Palestinian protests with prejudice and hatred toward Jewish people.”
Illinois’ aid split. The Sun-Times’ Lynn Sweet explains how and why Illinois members of the U.S. House divided—across party lines—in votes to send the Senate foreign aid packages for Israel and Ukraine.
■ Notus: House Republicans sidelined their isolationist wing.
■ Columnist Brian Beutler: Republican Speaker Mike Johnson merits no “strange new respect” for coming around on the aid package—“at least not until he explains why he sacrificed thousands of lives, swaths of territory and perhaps the future of Ukraine for nothing.”
‘We’d call this a clown show, except …’ A Sun-Times editorial says “the curtain can’t fall soon enough” on the scandal-scarred leadership at one of Cook County’s poorest suburbs, Dolton.
■ WGN-TV: Dolton Mayor and Thornton Township Supervisor Tiffany Henyard’s trips ran up $102,987 in charges on government credit cards.
R.I.P., another mall. Stratford Square in Bloomingdale shut down for good yesterday.
■ Its new owner is the village, which aims to transform it into a complex of housing, green space, restaurants, entertainment venues … and, hey, maybe some stores.
■ Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich hails the unionization of Volkswagen’s Tennessee plant: A “stunning rebirth of the American labor movement.”
■ That would be here—and, as of this morning’s Square email deadline, the latest dates showing up there are for the month of May.
■ Pritzker rejects fears the convention will bring a repeat of 1968’s violence …
■ … telling CNN he expects something much more like the 1996 Chicago convention.
■ Columnist Edwin Eisendrath says meeting last week with Democrats who gathered here to plan the convention proved “a great antidote to the fingernail-biting anguish.”
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