■ ABC News shares what we know about each of them. (Illustration: Google’s ImageFX.)
■ Law professor Joyce Vance surveys the complications ahead in finding five more and six alternates.
■ Judge Juan Merchan lowered the boom on Trump during the selection process: “I will not have any jurors intimidated in this courtroom.”
■ Jimmy Kimmel: “One potential juror was an older woman who said she believed that no one was above the law. And Trump’s lawyers were like, ‘Get her out of here right now.’”
‘Trump is charged with falsifying documents to cover up his frantic efforts to prevent damaging disclosures in the waning days of the 2016 election.’ Journalism critic Dan Froomkin contends that every report on Trump’s trial requires a basic explanation like that.
■ Or, as Dulcé Sloan put it on The Daily Show: “It’s the porn-money-love-sex-music trial.”
■ Trump yesterday fell asleep in court again.
■ Trump niece Mary L. Trump—a psychologist: This trial puts him “in a unique context for which he is totally unprepared.”
■ True thing: The Trump trial goes dark Wednesdays because that’s the day Judge Merchan reserves for (other) mental health cases (March 17 link).
■ Outside the courtroom, Daily Show correspondent Jordan Klepper befuddled Trump supporters with logic.
■ An Onion quiz: “Could You Serve On Donald Trump’s Jury?”
‘Hell no.’ Former WGN-TV news director Jennifer Schulze rejects calls for a 2024 presidential debate between Trump and President Biden: “Trump breaks the rules. … There’s no benefit to the nation to create a massive additional platform for him to hijack.”
■ Popular Information: “Meet the people spending $800,000 or more to make Trump the next president.”
‘Police responding defensively … are getting more media and political scrutiny than gangbangers unloading their weapons on innocent little kids.’ A Tribune editorial slams “progressive forces … in power at City Hall.”
■ WTTW: Chicago’s police superintendent says his department tracks complaints against cops, but “there is no evidence CPD leaders knew that the five officers who stopped Dexter Reed … had racked up three dozen complaints” in the months before they killed him with 96 shots in 41 seconds.
■ A Chicago City Council member’s filed a formal complaint against the chief of the city’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability—for talking to reporters about the Reed case, “tainting … public opinion.”
■ At least one person—a juvenile—was in custody after what Naperville police describe as a targeted shooting that put schools on lockdown yesterday.
‘Hate littering.’ A proposed ordinance would outlaw acts like the recent placement in Chicago of antisemitic materials on cars and property.
■ The Anti-Defamation League reports record levels of antisemitic acts in Illinois and across the country.
■ Wired: Nine Google workers sitting in at corporate offices in New York and California to protest the company’s contract with Israel Defense Forces were removed by cops.
Chicago spared. Tornadoes raked through Kansas and Iowa yesterday—diverting at least one flight bound here.
■ Illinois Answers Project has a question: “Flooding is Illinois’ most threatening natural disaster. Are we prepared?”
■ Wired: Hackers linked to Russia’s military are claiming credit for sabotaging U.S. water utilities.
Civil wrong. Heated reports that, in a move the Union of Concerned Scientists condemns as “reprehensible,” Al Sharpton’s civil-rights-oriented National Action Network convention over the weekend embraced lying fossil fuel industry reps—who proceeded to fearmonger about renewable energy.
■ Cipher: How we know the energy transition is here.
NPR’s ‘final warning.’ National Public Radio has handed a five-day suspension without pay to senior editor Uri Berliner, who went public with his complaint that the network has “comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview” …
■ … telling him he’ll be fired if he again violates the network’s requirement that staffers get approval for work with other news organizations. (Update, 11:07 a.m.: They can’t fire him. He’s quitting.)
■ Berliner’s colleague, Steve Inskeep: “Berliner gave a perfect example of the kind of journalism he says he’s against.”
■ A coalition of more than 2,000 news publishers is asking the feds to investigate Google’s suppression of links to California-based news outlets.
‘Book ban crisis.’ A new account from PEN America, a nonprofit dedicated to writers’ freedom of speech, says the assault’s on the rise …
■ … but it sees hope: “Resistance is rising, and the very students whose right to read is being challenged and the authors whose works are being censored are fighting back in creative and powerful ways.”
But what happens to those empty bottles? Bankrupt dairy producer Oberweis has explained what went wrong …
■ … but it says it expects to continue operating as it seeks a buyer, hoping to preserve at least 1,000 of its 1,100 nonunion jobs.
■ The Atlantic: “The ubiquitous rise of add-on fees and personalized pricing has turned buying stuff into a game you can’t win.”
Passages.
■ After just three months on the job, the Dallas pastor who took over leadership of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition has quit without explanation.
■ ABC7 Chicago vice president of news Jennifer Graves is signing off after 32 years with the station.
■ R.I.P., former Cubs pitcher Ken Holtzman, “the thinking man’s baseball hero.”
Thanks. Robert Feder, Paul Clark, Mike Braden and Joe Hass made this edition better.
■ Also: Readers who help underwrite the rising cost of producing and distributing this service.