This means war / Unhappy anniversary / Square loses a reader

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This means war. Retaliating against President Trump’s White House ban on reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico—who are suing—ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News are canceling their pooled TV coverage of the president, under which they’ve rotated responsibility for generating footage carried by news organizations worldwide.
■ Poynter’s Tom Jones sees Trump’s move as “the kind of brazen and dangerous act that attempts to push America closer to countries that have state-run media.”
■ Former U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger—a rare Republican who voted to impeach Trump: “While it may seem like a petty move by a petty man, this is a textbook move by authoritarians to choke out critical media.”
■ Radio news veteran Rob Archer says Trump’s act isn’t completely without presidential precedent.

So it’s not just about his ego? Trump says the big arch he wants to build between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery would also host ammunition supplies, drones and snipers.
■ Gary Legum at Wonkette sees it as “Toddler President’s … Super-Cool GI Joe Play Fort.”
■ Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg: Trump’s “putting-your-name-on-everything hustle is a play right out of the ancient tyrant playbook.”

Unhappy anniversary. Block Club: A year after the first violent clash at the Broadview immigration detention center, immigration agents again pepper-sprayed protesters.
■ See it here—profanities included.

‘Quantum is not AI.’ A Tribune editorial (free link): The Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park Gov. Pritzker’s championing for the former U.S. Steel South Works “will not be a collection of power-sucking, water-drinking data centers.”
■ Pritzker told ABC’s Jonathan Karl over the weekend that AI “essentially learns from itself and doesn’t need human beings anymore, and I think that’s what we all need to be concerned with.”
■ In a gesture some might see as poetic, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District is offering to sell AI data centers recycled sewer water.
■ Fear of sewer overflow amid weekend rain prompted cancellation of yesterday’s Chicago River Swim.

‘The government would like to revisit the whole don’t experiment on vulnerable people thing.’ Comedian and columnist John Fugelsang flags the Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-led Health and Human Services Department’s consideration of changes to rules regulating medical research on humans.
■ Back on HBO after several weeks, John Oliver took a swipe at his Trump-allied corporate business daddy: “Having access to wealthy parents just cannot be the system to get badly-needed healthcare—even if it is apparently the system that lets you be in charge of HBO.”
■ The Onion on a report that one in three U.S. residents with health insurance nevertheless struggle with long-term medical debt: “If there was a better way to provide healthcare surely another country would have figured it out.”

Apple’s ‘alarming text.’ HuffPost says that if your iPhone flags “mercenary spyware,” it’s not spam: “It’s a real warning Apple users are getting that they should act upon quickly.”
■ Here’s the company’s detailed guide for what to do.

‘Back to the drawing board.’ Sun-Times architecture columnist Lee Bey says the plan for “an ungainly and unattractive” new entrance to the Museum of Science and Industry “threatens to foul up one of the city’s great urban vistas.”
■ The owners of the United Center have released details of plans for a new 6,000-seat music venue in the ’hood.

Chicago Public Square loses a reader. An unsubscribe note following Friday’s edition objected to “Zionist mischaracterization of witch’s nose worn by Macklemore and illegal collusion by Robert Kraft to silence and demonize a courageous performer.”
■ We don’t expect every reader to agree with every opinion linked from Square, but we encouraged that (former) subscriber to read in full the pieces linked from that issue, as well as these links from Wednesday’s edition.
■ Opening a concert Saturday, Ed Sheeran commented on the dropping of Macklemore from his tour, calling the situation in Gaza “catastrophic and unjustifiable.”
■ Pulitzer-winning Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch (gift link): “Eagles’ silence on their role in the Macklemore mess has become deafening.”
■ Chris Koenig and Mike Braden made this edition better.

Life in prison / ‘Genuinely alarming’ / News quiz

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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.”

‘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.
■ You have just two days to file a formal comment: Here’s how and where to do it.

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.”

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