It bears repeating: The standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is over, though federal courts around the country are only seeing their dockets grow. Besides the four remaining occupying militants, federal authorities yesterday charged a number of other people around the country who'd been involved in the occupation. In total, 23 people face charges.

And then there's patriarch Cliven Bundy, who's here in Portland facing a bunch of charges—finally—for the armed-to-the-teeth 2014 standoff in Nevada that clearly made Oregon occupiers think their antics might be tolerated. Bundy had his first appearance in court yesterday.

Also: Hallelujah! The Harney County Migratory Bird Festival looks like a go!

In air quality news, we attempted to estimate what it might have cost Southeast Portland's Bullseye Glass to slap pollution control units on the flues that have—apparently—been spewing cadmium and arsenic into the air. Spread over the lifetime of those devices, consultants say it'd have been between $17,000 and $33,000 a year.

Cadmium has gotten
a lot of the press since Portland turned its eye toward emissions from glass factories last week. But what about all these arsenic hotspots around town?


The current legislative session
is brief by design, but it's contemplating huge issues. After hours and hours of argument yesterday, the Senate passed a bill that would carve the state into three pieces, each with their own minimum wage. Here in Portland, the wage would increase to $14.75. The compromise—for which legislators cast aside a proposal by Gov. Kate Brown—hasn't pleased some groups that have been angling to get a minimum wage measure on the November ballot.

And a plan to largely end Oregon's use of coal-fired electricity in coming decades has passed out of a house committee. The central argument it faces: detractors say it'll cost huge sums of money, but aren't offering much proof. Supporters say it won't cost electric customers much, and are touting a study.

The O has an interesting and in-depth piece about how poor deal making and a hush-hush attitude by city bureaucrats left Portland taxpayers holding the bag for a South Waterfront park that developers were supposed to largely fund.

Multnomah County Sheriff Dan Staton
—accused of being creepy and crass—has settled with one of his employees, eliminating the specter of a lawsuit against Your Elected Sheriff. The out-of-court settlement isn't stopping state officials from investigating Staton for a variety of alleged improprieties. Bad time to be the sheriff.

Let's dispel once and for all with this fiction that Albert Einstein didn't know what he was doing. He knew exactly what he was doing. Or so say the physicists crowing about the existence of "gravitational waves," which, frankly, threaten to crack my fragile mind.

Sun's gone.

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And so is she.