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And now, the news:
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CrowdStuck. Updating coverage: Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike blames a faulty software update to computers running Microsoft Windows for a worldwide plague of “blue screens of death”— crippling banks and retailers, knocking media companies off-air and grounding flights.
■ CNN reports “misery at airports worldwide” …
■ … and Chicago’s no exception.
■ Continued printing plant problems have again fouled Chicago-area newspaper delivery.
■ Costco’s now selling an “apocalypse bucket” with food good for 25 years, providing “readiness in the face of uncertainty.”
Trump be Trump. The former president and convicted felon last night began the longest televised presidential nomination acceptance speech ever with what Chicago native and veteran D.C. journalist Jonathan Alter calls a “vivid and gripping” description of Saturday’s shooting—before descending into “his petty, divisive and no longer entertaining rally speech.”
■ NOTUS: “Trump promised a new tone. He delivered the same old Trump”—and not “a grand vision for a united America.”
■ The AP: As quickly as he called for an end of the “demonization of political enemies,” he demonized Democrats plenty.
■ Pod Save America cohost Dan Pfeiffer: “Trump couldn’t discuss his policy agenda because that would stick a thumb in the eye of most voters. There was no message.”
■ Stephen Colbert opened his show thusly: “We are live! But after watching that speech, I’m dead inside.”
■ Was not “the owner of Power Slap, a slap-fighting promotion” the perfect guy to introduce Republicans’ choice for the next president of the United States of America?
■ Variety: Why is Trump so fixated on Hannibal Lecter?
■ In the presence of convicted Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, historian Heather Cox Richardson sees evidence of a political machine “thoroughly corrupted into an authoritarian party aligned with foreign dictators.”
■ Although Trump’s rarely seen wife Melania was there, his son Barron was M.I.A.
■ CNN’s Oliver Darcy credits Trump for the “formidable” task of capturing the nomination while “swimming upstream” against Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, New York Post and The Wall Street Journal.
■ The Bulwark: Trump emerges from the convention the party’s only three-time nominee since Richard Nixon—with “few guardrails” and little dissent within his own party.
False, False, False, Pants on Fire … PolitiFact checks Trump’s speech and finds hooey galore …
■ … but he gets a “Mostly True” on his assertion that ears “bleed more than any other part of the body.”
■ CNN counted more than 20 falsehoods.
■ Bloomberg: Facebook and Instagram parent Meta has “a Trump dilemma of its own making.”
Whoops. Wired says Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, left his Venmo account public—exposing his “close ties to the very elites he rails against.”
■ The Onion: “Usha Vance Gently Corrects RNC Usher Attempting To Deport Her.”
■ Law prof Joyce Vance dives into Republicans’ Project 2025 to ponder what happens to education if Trump wins.
‘Widespread acceptance that Biden remaining in the 2024 race is wholly untenable.’ CNN says many of the president’s senior advisers have concluded he must drop out.
■ Discourse Blog columnist Katherine Krueger is bewildered by progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ decision to back Biden’s campaign to the hilt.
■ Poynter’s Tom Jones has his hands full trying to figure out what’s going on in Bidenworld.
Company’s coming. Ahead of next month’s Democratic convention in Chicago, Texas’ governor promises to send more migrants this way.
■ David Sirota at The Lever sees Democrats in a death march: “This is a party whose leaders have been most comfortable asking Supreme Court extremists to be nicer, rather than engaging in a direct confrontation with the justices who are repealing the 20th century.”
■ Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg: “Democrats are supposed to be twisting in agony right now. … But honestly, I don’t feel it. Given how either man won’t be around much longer, I’m already looking past them.”
Bye, Bob. Comedy icon Bob Newhart, who grew up on Chicago’s West Side and led one of the most successful careers in TV history, is dead at 94.
■ He was born in Oak Park.
■ Sun-Times critic Richard Roeper: “When he exited a room, he left everyone smiling.”
■ In 2016, he told WGN Radio: “Being a Cubs fan prepared you for life. … You knew you were ahead, but you knew you were going to blow it.”
■ The intro to his eponymic TV series set in Chicago made no geographic sense.
■ His legacy endures in the alternative history of the space program, For All Mankind.
■ Also gone: Bob Booker, writer-producer of a groundbreaking 1962 presidential satire album …
■ … and TV business journalist turned Trump fanboy Lou Dobbs.
16 years in prison. That’s the sentence in Moscow for a Wall Street Journal reporter convicted on espionage charges.
■ The Washington Post says the trial’s “unusual swiftness” suggests “potential developments in negotiations for a prisoner exchange.”
Village violation. The Illinois attorney general’s office says Orland Park’s mayor broke the state’s Open Meetings Act when he cleared the room during a heated board meeting to discuss the Israel-Hamas war …
■ … but he gets off with just a wrist slap and a warning not to do it again.
You’ll have to be perfect … to beat your Chicago Public Square columnist’s score on the latest news quiz concocted by past Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions winner Fritz Holznagel.
■ CityCast has a Chicago-centric news quiz for you.
■ If you’re into history more than news, check out Axios Chicago’s quiz about stuff that happened here in 1984.
Moon caves! An international team of researchers using NASA data has unearthed—or is it unmooned?—evidence of subsurface lunar caverns that could someday shelter humans …
■ … which makes this weekend—55 years since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to land on the moon—a fine time to revisit an unedited, never-broadcast-in-full interview in which Douglas Ward, one of NASA’s “Voices of Apollo,” recalls harrowing moments when “the computers were overloaded.”
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■ Mike Braden made this edition better.
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