Life in prison. That’s a possibility for U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent Luis Uribe—convicted of using his gun, badge and position as a law enforcement officer to rob and sexually assault four women in Schaumburg and Naperville.
■ The prosecutor in the case told jurors to ignore the fact that the victims were sex workers.
■ Uribe still works for the agency (New York Times gift link).
■ Block Club: “ICE says it can’t find its own records of tear-gassing and arresting Broadview protesters.”
■ 15 Illinoisans have taken the first legal steps toward extracting monetary damages from Homeland Security for its “Midway Blitz.”
U.S. war crimes? A United Nations team has found “reasonable grounds” to conclude that strikes on an elementary school and a sports facility in Iran constituted “indiscriminate attacks that killed or injured civilians.”
‘The day the world started moving on without America.’ Columnist and former Republican U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger on Canada’s acceptance into the European Union: “A country bound to us by a century of blood and trade and friendship … decided the United States was no longer a reliable partner, and started building other alliances.”
■ Columnist and former Democratic Illinois U.S. Rep. Marie Newman says Rep. Mike Johnson’s decision to hang up this session of the House fits a long pattern of “speakers ducking for cover.”
‘Genuinely alarming.’ Reporter Aaron Parnas: Sen. Mitch McConnell, “a sitting U.S. senator who has real legislative power over the rest of this Congress … has been repeatedly photographed with a blank, vacant expression and his mouth hanging open, has refused to answer any direct questions from reporters about his health since returning, and needed real-time coaching from colleagues just to cast a routine committee vote correctly.”
■ Columnist Ken Klippenstein: “If you want to know how he’s getting away with this … one big reason is that major media have been doing him a solid.”
■ The Onion: “McConnell Returns To Capitol Hill In Jar Of Formaldehyde.”
‘Judges are the bulwark that is defending our democracy.’ That’s columnist and law professor Joyce Vance on a federal judge’s order that the Kennedy Center’s Donald Trump-loyal leadership give 30 days notice before implementing the president’s spiteful threat to demolish it.
■ Lisa Needham at Public Notice on the president’s totalitarian aesthetics: “The Hitler comparisons are sometimes overdone. But not here.”
‘Confusion among parents, caregivers, clinicians and the public.’ That’s what Your Local Epidemiologist sees if Trump’s Health and Human Services Department succeeds in fast-tracking a plan to narrow access to vaccines.
New hope for shuttered hospitals. The failed owner of Weiss Memorial and West Suburban medical centers has agreed to sell them …
■ … raising hopes they could reopen before the end of the year.
■ Axios: Waits for emergency room care in Chicago run longer than the national average.
‘What did the president say to the Irishman?’ Past Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions winner Fritz Holznagel says that’s not the start of a bad joke—it’s the start of this week’s news quiz from The Conversation, on which your Chicago Public Square columnist got a perfect score.
■ Then try your hand at CityCast’s weekly news quiz, where your columnist got 4/5 right …
■ … and Justin Kaufmann’s Chicago punk rock quiz for Axios (6/10 correct here).
‘I know … Macklemore also once went onstage wearing a false Jewish hooked nose and beard.’ But Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg writes, “I kinda like him.”
■ Blogger and music critic Bob Lefsetz on the rapper’s dumping from Ed Sheeran’s tour after making pro-Palestinian comments: “Makes a great headline. Billionaires silence poor artist. But once you get into the details … it’s much more complicated.”
■ 404 Media: An online contest to find other acts to open for Sheeran was flooded with “Free Palestine” videos and fart memes.
‘Largest theft of labor in human history.’ 404 Media: OpenAI and Microsoft admit that large language models are “predatory pieces of technology that have been built on what a Microsoft executive called ‘an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.’”
■ The Lever’s David Sirota says paralysis on artificial intelligence tech—in both major political parties—“is helping AI oligarchs avoid accountability and endanger the world.”
■ Also from 404: “I hijacked a real artist’s Spotify with AI music. It was disturbingly easy.”
■ Jonah Meyerson (no relation) at McSweeney’s channels AI chatbot Claude: “Technically, there is a non-zero chance that anything might kill off humanity in the next decade.”
‘She lived for her job. For 40 years. And now it’s gone.’ Pulitzer-winning columnist Dave Barry shares news of his sportswriter wife’s dismissal, “informed—on a brief video call, by two corporate guys she did not know, who did not know her—that, effective in two weeks, her position would no longer exist. … That’s how it is in newspapers these days.”
■ Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch (gift link): “I’m terrified that the climate in which everyone laughs at AI videos of a journalist getting slapped is the prelude to somebody getting killed in the real world.”
