‘A terrible loss’ / Campus ‘crisis’ / Want Colbert tix?

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‘A terrible loss.’ That’s Gov. Pritzker describing the killing of off-duty Chicago Police Officer Luis Huesca early Sunday in an apparent carjacking.
■ Mayor Johnson calls it “an act of unconscionable gun violence.”
■ Huesca’s death followed by about a year the killing of one of his police academy classmates (March 2023 link).
■ Columnist Laura Washington asks, “Where is the outrage for the victims of Chicago’s latest mass shooting?”
■ Block Club Chicago: The University of Chicago promised $15 million to prevent violence on the South Side, but it’s put up less than $3 million.

CTA ‘pressure points.’ Streetsblog Chicago tracks growing pressure for Chicago Transit Authority President Dorval Carter to get outta the way …
■ … including Pritzker’s call for “new” and “additional” leadership.
■ Mayor Johnson’s not ready to hop on that train.


Opening day. Updating coverage: Prosecutors today were set to—for the first time in history—offer a jury a criminal case against a former U.S. president.
■ CNN has live analysis of the case against Donald Trump here.
■ Politico: Watch to see how prosecutors balance accusations of sex and corruption.
■ Former Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger: “With his big mouth silenced and his quiet presence assured by the judge, Trump has been shrinking in size.”
■ USA Today’s Rex Huppke: “He’s on trial, he’s unhinged and he’s coming unglued.”
■ LateNighter critic Bill Carter: Trump last week helped prove that Jimmy Kimmel has “the best left hook in late night.”

Happy Earth Day. Historian Heather Cox Richardson looks back to the occasion’s origins in the ’60s.
■ Environmental Law & Policy Center chief Howard Learner calls it a good time to consider five steps to protect the Great Lakes.
■ Commenting in the Tribune, students from the University of Illinois and Stanford and Brown universities demand their schools divest from the fossil fuel industry. (That’s a gift link, courtesy of those whose support keeps Chicago Public Square coming.)

Campus ‘crisis.’ Columbia University in New York canceled all in-person classes today—hours before the start of Passover …

Illinois’ aid split. The Sun-Times’ Lynn Sweet explains how and why Illinois members of the U.S. House divided—across party lines—in votes to send the Senate foreign aid packages for Israel and Ukraine.
■ Notus: House Republicans sidelined their isolationist wing.
■ Columnist Brian Beutler: Republican Speaker Mike Johnson merits no “strange new respect” for coming around on the aid package—“at least not until he explains why he sacrificed thousands of lives, swaths of territory and perhaps the future of Ukraine for nothing.”

‘We’d call this a clown show, except …’ A Sun-Times editorial says “the curtain can’t fall soon enough” on the scandal-scarred leadership at one of Cook County’s poorest suburbs, Dolton.
■ WGN-TV: Dolton Mayor and Thornton Township Supervisor Tiffany Henyard’s trips ran up $102,987 in charges on government credit cards.

R.I.P., another mall. Stratford Square in Bloomingdale shut down for good yesterday.
■ Its new owner is the village, which aims to transform it into a complex of housing, green space, restaurants, entertainment venues … and, hey, maybe some stores.
■ Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich hails the unionization of Volkswagen’s Tennessee plant: A “stunning rebirth of the American labor movement.”

Want Colbert tix? As The Late Show with Stephen Colbert heads to Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre during the Democratic National Convention in August, a spokeswoman says she expects seats to become available on the show’s usual ticketing site.
■ That would be here—and, as of this morning’s Square email deadline, the latest dates showing up there are for the month of May.
■ Pritzker rejects fears the convention will bring a repeat of 1968’s violence …
■ … telling CNN he expects something much more like the 1996 Chicago convention.
■ Columnist Edwin Eisendrath says meeting last week with Democrats who gathered here to plan the convention proved “a great antidote to the fingernail-biting anguish.”

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Thanks. Mike Braden made this edition better.

Ix-nay on obs-jay / Off track / Happy Record Store Day

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Ix-nay on obs-jay. The judge in Donald Trump’s trial on charges of falsifying documents to cover up his frantic efforts to prevent damaging disclosures in the waning days of the 2016 election has ordered media not to report where potential jurors have been employed.
■ The judge dismissed two jurors concerned that information about them had become public.
■ Trump niece Mary L. Trump finds “some segments of the corporate media, primarily Fox, … helping Donald interfere with his trial through jury intimidation.”
■ Live updates: The trial had its 12 primary jurors and was in the hunt for alternates today.
■ In a break from tradition, the prosecution’s not advising Trump’s team who’ll be called to the stand first: “Trump has been tweeting about the witnesses. We’re not telling them who the witnesses are.”
■ Law professor Joyce Vance says one of the big questions is whether Trump will testify in the case: “The man whose lawyers were afraid to let him sit down for an informal Q&A with special counsel Bob Mueller has no business on the witness stand … But … Trump has proven … uniquely incapable of listening to the advice of his lawyers.”
■ Wonkette’s Evan Hurst sums up Trump’s post-court appearance before reporters yesterday: “Old Man Says He’s Cold, Has Some Newspaper Clippings To Show You.”
■ The Daily Beast says the trial is wreaking havoc on Trump’s campaign …
■ … but The Conversation finds him using the proceedings to his advantage.

‘Eight years into the Trump takeover of the Republican Party, there are still a few surprises left.’ Susan B. Glasser at The New Yorker: Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson’s “sudden willingness to bring foreign-aid bills to the House floor risks his speakership—and Trump’s wrath.”
■ Columnist Robert Reich hopes Trump keeps up his “stolen election” rhetoric—which Reich says “will backfire if enough potential Trump voters decide there’s no point in voting because the game is already rigged against them.”

Ceasefire resolutions ‘do foster anti-Semitism.’ Reader* Amy Parker disagrees with columnist Eric Zorn’s criticism of Jewish lawmakers who refused to discuss the matter with Mayor Johnson.
■ Jennifer Rubin at The Washington Post: “Israel cannot endure as a pariah on the world stage. Its long-term interests require it to … minimize further civilian casualties.”
■ A Google worker—and organizer with the group No Tech for Apartheid—who was fired after protesting the company’s contract with Israel’s military: “It feels like a very fascist environment.”
■ Israel reportedly launched a drone attack on Iran early today.
■ CNN alumnus Jessica Yellin: “It’s a veiled threat: Escalate and we can do real damage.”
■ NewsGuard: Iranian state media has been faking reports about its Saturday attack on Israel.

Pride cometh. Reversing an earlier call, organizers of Chicago’s June 30 Pride Parade say schools previously denied a role in a scaled-down event are back in—but as just one entry.
■ An extended moratorium on the closing of Chicago Public Schools—charter schools included—has passed the state House.

Off track. A Sun-Times investigation of a program designed to help ex-offenders win full-time jobs with the CTA finds those apprentices “strung along for years … in low-paying roles with no benefits.”
■ The Reload: The U.S. hasn’t had a mass shooting—four or more people killed in a single public incident unrelated to other criminal activity—since October.

Welcome to the 21st century, Illinoisans. Good news if you’ve ever scrambled to find someone to notarize a document: Illinois is now the 48th(!) state to let that happen remotely.
■ You can search for an e-notary here.

Happy Record Store Day. It’s tomorrow.
■ Honoring today’s 100th anniversary of the National Barn Dance’s debut on Chicago’s WLS-AM, Neil Steinberg writes: “The more I look at my time in Chicago, the more country pops out.”
■ The occasion gets celebrated Saturday at the Hideout.

‘To say the results were garbage would be a deep understatement.’ Literary Activism columnist Kelly Jenson: “Google is destroying your access to news.”
■ Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer: Free speech is disappearing on America’s college campuses.


This is the kind of spontaneous publicity that really makes somebody! Things are going to start happening now! Your Chicago Public Square columnist got 6/8 on this week’s news quiz. Can you do better?
■ Q. 1: “Expected tax revenues from which product have fallen short of projections?”
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* And former WXRT colleague to your columnist.

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