
Chicago City Council upholds 30 mph speed limit
Why it matters: Studies show that pedestrians are half as likely to die when hit by a car driving 25 mph rather than 30 mph.
Context: Cities including New York, Los Angeles and Seattle have already adopted a 25 mph limit.
Chicago suburbs, including Evanston, Wheaton and Aurora, have also done so.
What they're saying: Ordinance sponsor Ald. Daniel La Spata noted, "we have never in the past decade had fewer than 100 traffic fatalities in any given year."
He highlighted the case of 3-year-old Elizabeth Grace Shamrock who was crushed under a semi in 2022.
The other side:"Lowering the speed limit would have unintended consequences that may not have been looked at today," West Side Ald. Jason Ervin said.
"For some communities, it may be fine, but the folks that I represent aren't looking for lower speed limits so they can have more interactions with the police department."
Other council moves: Alders delayed a vote on Mayor Brandon Johnson's proposed $830 million bond issue to pay for infrastructure including streets, bridges and lead line replacements.
Some council members complained that the repayment structure, which delays principal payments for at least 19 years and costs taxpayers almost $2 billion, needs to be rethought.
Ald. Anthony Beale introduced a measure to stop letting city council members participate in meetings remotely, charging that some are abusing the rule now that the pandemic is over.
Ald. Jeanette Taylor, who was participating remotely, pushed back, saying she was at home preparing to "have a procedure" and has been "hospitalized with COVID three times."
Ald. Anthony Napolitano introduced a proposal to restore the Columbus statue in Arrigo Park, citing the city's failure to take down a puppet display at the Cultural Center that some alders have called antisemitic.

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New York Post
17 minutes ago
- New York Post
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The Hill
4 hours ago
- The Hill
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As scientists at leading research institutions, we have personally witnessed the effects of the administration's policies — including colleagues relocating overseas and students leaving research altogether. Undergraduate science internship programs have been canceled, and graduate programs in many research universities paused. As a result, scientists are increasingly seeking jobs abroad. The administration claims its goals are to increase efficiency and raise the standards of scientific research. In fact, thousands of programs and projects have been cut solely on the basis of ideologically motivated keyword searches, without any concern for their performance, design or conduct. That's not efficient. A Trump executive order issued in May underscores the purely political nature of these attacks. Titled ' Restoring Gold Standard Science,' the order puts hand-picked presidential appointees into every agency to review and 'correct' any evidence or conclusions with which they disagree. That's not scientific. Further, many of the administration's policies effectively punish researchers simply for asking discomfiting questions and punish institutions for teaching about unpopular ideas. Viewed together, these outline a political strategy toward science that is both systematic and dangerous: a full-scale war on the scientific community, the network of individual researchers across many institutions whose collaboration is essential for scientific progress. Despite the media stereotype of a lone genius in a lab coat, science is really a communal activity. As Isaac Newton, one of the most important scientists of all time, wrote: 'If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.' Every research project builds on foundational theory, tested methods and vetted findings created and refined through previous research. And every scientist depends on the distributed efforts of an extensive community to vet and review manuscripts for publication and proposals for new research, maintain common journals, databases and tools needed to share and build upon knowledge and educate and train the next generation of talent who help operate their labs. Institutions of higher education are the traditional hosts for the scientific community in the U.S, providing an independent forum for developing and refining ideas, an environment for training students and infrastructure for labs and shared resources. For more than 80 years, U.S. society has partnered with these institutions to foster a healthy scientific community. Federal funding enabled universities to build and maintain the infrastructure necessary for scientific research and support the most promising students. The scientific community collaborated to evaluate proposals for research across fields, ensuring resources were directed to the highest-quality projects, independent of political and institutional bias. No system is perfect, but the external scientific community has successfully partnered with the government to provide independent guidance and vetting — balancing competing interests and perspectives to evaluate proposals, advise the agencies that set funding priorities, accredit the programs that train researchers, review research findings and publish research results. Scientists within the government participate in the larger scientific community, reinforcing community standards as they move between jobs, and preserve the autonomy to ask scientific questions and share their findings. The administration's policies represent a three-fold attack on the scientific community. First, the administration aims to directly seize control over the key community functions that support scientific independence: Administrative actions have politicized the review processes for funding at National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, suppressed scientific data and withdrawn support for students. Second, the administration aims to subdue universities that provide an independent home for the community by weaponizing institutional accreditation and student visas, threatening individual institutions and their leadership when they are slow to align with the administration's ideology. Third, the administration is isolating scientists and scientific functions within the government. It does so by sidelining scientific expertise, firing entire independent expert advisory panels, canceling government access to scientific journals, preventing government scientists from publishing in them and, now, subjecting scientific analysis to systematic political modification and censorship. The government's war against science is a disaster for both. Without intellectual and political independence, the scientific community can't function effectively to discover new knowledge and solve hard problems. It's magical thinking for politicians to expect to receive truthful answers about the world when they poll to find the most popular answer, pay to get the answers they want or ignore data they dislike. And it's anti-democratic when political leaders dictate whether questions, data, and conclusions are appropriately scientific. Society needs science to tackle complex problems and to teach others how to do so. Science doesn't function without a healthy scientific community. As citizens, we should debate what problems are essential. As voters, we should decide which problems deserve public research funding. As free people, we should not tolerate political attacks on science and the scientific community. Micah Altman is a social and information scientist at MIT's Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship, MIT Libraries. Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park.


NBC News
8 hours ago
- NBC News
Why a 'mini Trump' is breaking through in Japan
TOKYO — As President Donald Trump's tariffs add to a sense of uncertainty in Japan, more voters here are embracing an idea inspired by their longtime ally the United States: 'Japanese first.' The nationalist slogan helped the right-wing populist party Sanseito make big gains in Japan's parliamentary elections on Sunday, as it capitalized on economic malaise and concerns about immigration and overtourism. Party leader Sohei Kamiya, who since 2022 had held Sanseito's only seat in the upper house of Japan's parliament, will now be joined by 14 others in the 248-seat chamber. It's a far cry from the party's origin as a fringe anti-vaccination group on YouTube during the Covid-19 pandemic. Though Japan has long had a complex relationship with foreigners and its cultural identity, experts say Sanseito's rise is another indication of the global shift to the right embodied and partly fueled by Trump, with populist figures gaining ground in Europe, Britain, Latin America and elsewhere. Kamiya 'fancies himself a mini-Trump' and 'is one of those who Trump has put wind in his sails,' said Jeff Kingston, a professor of Asian studies and history at Temple University's Japan campus. Speaking at a rally on Saturday at Tokyo's Shiba Park, Kamiya said his calls for greater restrictions on foreign workers and investment were driven not by xenophobia but by 'the workings of globalization.' He criticized mainstream parties' support for boosting immigration in an effort to address the labor shortage facing Japan's aging and shrinking population. 'Japan is still the fourth-largest economy in the world. We have 120 million people. Why do we have to rely on foreign capital?' Kamiya told an enthusiastic crowd. The election results were disastrous for Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, who is facing calls to resign now that his conservative Liberal Democratic Party — which has ruled almost uninterrupted since the end of World War II — has lost its majority in both houses of parliament. The Japanese leader had also been under pressure to reach a trade deal with the Trump administration, which said Tuesday that the two sides had agreed to a 15% U.S. tariff on Japanese goods. On Wednesday, Ishiba denied reports that he planned to step down by the end of August. The message from his party's string of election losses is that 'people are unhappy,' Kingston said. 'A lot of people feel that the status quo is biased against their interests and it advantages the elderly over the young, and the young feel sort of resentful that they're having to carry the heavy burden of the growing aging population on their back,' he said. Kamiya, 47, an energetic speaker with social media savvy, is also a strong contrast to leaders such as Ishiba and the Constitutional Democrats' Yoshihiko Noda, both 68, who 'look like yesterday's men' and the faces of the establishment, Kingston said. With voters concerned about stagnating wages, surging prices and bleak employment prospects, 'the change-makers got a lot of protest votes from people who feel disenfranchised,' he said. Sanseito's platform resonated with voters such as Yuta Kato. 'The number of [foreign immigrants] who don't obey rules is increasing. People don't voice it, but I think they feel that,' the 38-year-old hairdresser told Reuters in Tokyo. 'Also, the burden on citizens including taxes is getting bigger and bigger, so life is getting more difficult.' The biggest reason Sanseito did well in the election, he said, 'is that they are speaking on behalf of us.' Kamiya's party was not the only upstart to benefit from voter discontent, with the center-right Democratic Party for the People increasing its number of seats in the upper house from five to 16. Sanseito, whose name means 'Participate in Politics,' originated in 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic, attracting conservatives with YouTube videos promoting conspiracy theories about vaccines and pushing back against mask mandates. Its YouTube channel now has almost 480,000 subscribers. The party has also warned about a 'silent invasion' of foreigners in Japan, where the number of foreign residents rose more than 10% last year to a record of almost 3.8 million, according to the Immigration Services Agency. It remains far lower as a proportion of the population than in the U.S. or Europe, however. Critics say such rhetoric has fueled hate speech and growing hostility toward foreigners in Japan, citing a survey last month by Japanese broadcaster NHK and others in which almost two-thirds of respondents agreed that foreigners received 'preferential treatment.' At the Sanseito rally on Saturday, protesters held up signs that said 'No Hate' and 'Racists Go Home.' Kamiya denies that his party is hostile to foreigners in Japan. 'We have no intention of discriminating against foreigners, nor do we have any intention of inciting division,' he said Monday. 'We're just aiming to firmly rebuild the lives of Japanese people who are currently in trouble.' Despite its electoral advances, Sanseito doesn't have enough members in the upper house to make much impact on its own and has only three seats in the more powerful lower house. The challenge, Kingston said, is whether Kamiya can 'take this anger, the malaise, and bring his show nationwide.'