Trump trial rewind. Jurors in the ex-president’s New York criminal trial were set to rehear some key testimony today.
■ Live updates here.
■ Law prof Joyce Vance: “I warned you that this part would be excruciating.”
■ You can read the judge’s jury instructions here.
■ The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last: “Whatever the outcome, the system worked.”
■ USA Today columnist Rex Huppke: “The jury will make its decision. In the meantime … stop trying to predict the future and look at the claptrap Trump spits out … every freakin’ day.”
■ Dan Froomkin at Press Watch calls for the nation’s “elite media” to engage in “clear and overwhelming” messaging about Trump—including: “He is, personally, an abhorrent human being, especially to women.”
‘Sam Alito believes you … are stupid.’ Law Dork Chris Geidner says the justice “went even further on Wednesday than I thought he would go in refusing to recuse himself from the Trump or Jan. 6 cases currently pending at the U.S. Supreme Court.”
■ Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, says Alito’s response to concern about the flying of insurrectionist-istic flags over his homes makes clear the court’s new code of ethics lacks teeth.
■ The Washington Post’s Monica Hesse (not really) applauds Alito’s “recognition of a woman’s right to oversee her own flags on her own property without the influence or governance of a man.”
‘Bloated, swollen, unnecessary and boring.’ Columnist Eric Zorn says Democrats’ decision to renominate Joe Biden remotely reinforces “the dull vapidity of national political conventions”—including the one set for Chicago in August.
■ Fueling speculation about a potential presidential run, Gov. Pritzker was headed north today to address the Democratic state convention in Wisconsin.
■ NOTUS: “Anti-abortion activists want a seat at the political table. Neither party wants them there.”
‘If Yellow Banana fails to do better and fully live up to its pledge, the city should … consider splitting.’ A Sun-Times editorial peels into a company that took $13.5 million in taxpayer cash to reopen six Chicago grocery stores on the South and West Sides but has nothing to show 14 months later.
■ Barnes & Noble’s opened its first new Chicago store in years.
■ Bankrupt Oberweis Dairy has a new owner.
Circling the Square. A $27 million project to route Milwaukee Avenue around—instead of through—Logan Square Park is off and running …
■ … but it’ll take a couple of years.
■ Block Club Chicago: New private security patrols, backed by restaurateurs and developers, have launched in Fulton Market.
‘Over-reporting of crime leads to an inaccurate public perception about crime rates.’ And so a Chicago City Council member says her office won’t be sharing crime alerts on social media …
■ … although residents can opt in to get them.
■ Crime news website CWBChicago senses an opportunity.
■ A shooting on the Southwest Side early this morning left two men dead.
■ A suburban police department’s launched a nationwide hunt for a man sought in connection with the shooting of a young mother and her two kids May 18.
■ A tipster’s helped identify a CTA robbery suspect.
$25. That’s the ballpark per-person settlement the University of Chicago’s agreed to in a lawsuit filed by students who say the university shortchanged them and their educations through the pandemic.
■ The U. of C. Medical Center says the private information of 10,300 people may have been exposed in an email breach.
Got cicadas? Block Club talks to an entomologist about what to do with all those carcasses.
■ None by you? Enjoy 22 seconds of cicada sounds recorded yesterday.
You might never have to ask your partner ‘Do I smell bad?’ A University of Michigan professor updates efforts to give computers an AI-assisted olfactory sense.
■ The Atlantic and Vox Media have agreed to let OpenAI use their work to train artificial intelligences …
■ … a deal that Atlantic senior editor Damon Beres compares to “making a deal with—well, can I say it? The red guy with a pointy tail and two horns?”
■ Spotify faces a class action lawsuit over its decision to discontinue—and stop supporting—its Car Thing auto audio device, leaving consumers with a $50 piece of electronic trash.
Beyoncé, affirmed. Popular Information: A federal judge has struck down New Hampshire laws restricting lessons on race and gender—changes that fueled a parent’s complaint about a high school social studies teacher who used a Beyoncé video to teach a lesson about the art and culture of the Harlem Renaissance.
■ Read the judge’s decision: The laws “raise the specter of arbitrary and discretionary enforcement.”
■ A reactionary organization is suing Evanston over its first-in-the-nation reparations plan for Black residents with historical ties to the community, complaining the program is “nothing more than a ploy to redistribute tax dollars to individuals based on race.”
‘PolitiFact is wrong.’ John Ruberry dropped a note in the Chicago Public Square mailbag about yesterday’s edition link to a PolitiFact report that violent crime is near a 50-year low: “FBI crime stats have been incomplete for a while. … At best, [PolitiFact’s Louis] Jacobson should have rated this fact-check as ‘incomplete.’ [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis got busted last year using similar FBI stats” (October link).
■ Related, from Nieman Lab: “Widespread embrace of the term ‘fact-based journalism’ within the journalism community is a capitulation to those who are undermining the very notion of journalism.”
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■ Mike Braden made this edition better.