O’Hare is great, everybody uses it–but it just can’t seem to grow without a certain amount of deception. Justice McLaren of the Second District of the Appellate Court of Illinois wrote in an April decision upholding part of a seven-year-old lawsuit filed by Du Page County and some suburbs against the city of Chicago: “Documents support the plaintiffs’ allegation that the City devised a four-part master plan that included new runways but announced only part of that plan, calling it the ‘World Gateway Project,’ without disclosing its intention to reconfigure and construct new runways. It is well established that municipalities cannot evade statutory requirements by segmenting an overall project into smaller pieces.” Therefore he ruled that a trial court will have to decide whether additional runways have to be approved by the state Department of Transportation (www.state.il.us/court/Opinions).
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Judge for yourself. Sam Smith writes in the on-line “Undernews” (April 25): “One test of the state of an empire is whether a handful of angry young men with box cutters can wreck your major economic and military edifices and throw the country into total panic. One test of the state of your culture is whether you can think of much over the past few years to which you reacted by thinking ‘that’s the best (whatever) that I’ve seen-heard-read in a long time.’ Another test is when you find yourself saying of some public figure, ‘I’m sure glad such people are around at a time like this.’”
