Make it 5. The National Weather Service now counts that many tornadoes touching down in the Chicago area Monday.
■ The rains that day did a number on the city’s century-old Ruth Page Center for the Arts dance venue.
■ Block Club: Sewer geysers and exploding manholes may be Chicago’s new normal.
■ Headed to Lollapalooza? After good weather today, dress for rain.
Milwaukee wants our teachers. As Chicago’s school board prepared to vote today on big budget cuts, the city’s neighbor to the north is recruiting those laid off here.
■ Chalkbeat Chicago: The new budget would beef up special education staff.
‘Leave the man alone.’ Your Local Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina comes to the defense of COVID-19 response leader Anthony Fauci: “He absolutely made mistakes. … But … at some point … we need to start turning anger into something that actually fixes what’s broken.”
■ Law prof Joyce Vance: Fauci took the Fifth 111 times to avoid falling into Republicans’ perjury trap.
■ Jeff Tiedrich at Everyone is entitled to my own opinion: “Republicans don’t have a single idea right now for how to improve the lives of We the People, so they’ve decided instead to … keep the cultists distracted by reviving their six-year-old grievances against the hero who did his best to keep President Horsepaste McBleachguzzle from botching the COVID crisis.”
■ Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik: “The case against Fauci … rests on several false claims.”
‘More dangerous than you think.’ Columnist Thom Hartmann sounds an alarm about President Trump’s order for signs in front of Smithsonian buildings, warning of “inaccurate information” therein.
‘A far-right organization that routinely distorts reality to suit its ideological goals.’ That’s how Popular Information describes the Newsmax TV channel—whose content Facebook’s corporate parent has agreed to use “to support AI queries across Meta’s apps and devices.”
■ Elon Musk’s AI company is suing Minnesota over its groundbreaking ban on “nudification” tech.
‘Chicago became my home.’ Glen Hansard, the folksinger maybe known best for the Academy Award-winning “Falling Slowly,” is dead at 56 …
■ … after a motorcycle accident in his native Ireland.
■ WXRT morning host Marty Lennartz’s tribute: “A great talent … always embraced here as a Chicagoan.”
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A Square public service announcement in honor of an old friend