This bedeviling “summer in October” we’ve been enjoying (or at least I’ve been enjoying it; the rest of you keep keening for grayness and misery) ought to wash away by this weekend. A Pacific typhoon has helped give birth to a “pineapple express” storm that’s imminently headed for Oregon’s shores. Remember the pit bull that […]
Denis C. Theriault
Denis C. Theriault is the Portland Mercury's News Editor. He writes stories about City Hall and the Portland Police Bureau, focusing on issues like homelessness, police oversight, insider politics, and civil liberties. Before arriving in Portland, Denis wrote and edited for the San Jose Mercury News, covering the California Legislature and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, as well as the city of San Jose—a real-live million-person town.
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Good Morning, News: Good Morning, Marriage Equality!
Same-sex marriage… soon to be legal for all Americans? In a measured but significant announcement, the United States Supreme Court this morning said it wouldn’t hear appeals from five states who’d didn’t like that lower courts had told them to let same-sex couples marry. Which means marriage in those states—Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin—is […]
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Good Morning, News: Hong Kong Can’t Choose Its Leader… But You… Why You Can Choose a Lion Cub’s Name!
The news out of Hong Kong has taken a turn. Protesters massing by the thousands, seeking truly open elections despite China’s refusal, have suddenly been set upon by roving packs of anti-democratic, pro-government thugs—who’ve been beating people, ripping down tents, and stealing banners. The attacks may derail tentative plans for protest leaders to sit down […]
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Good Morning, News: No One’s a Winner in the Texas Ebola Sweepstakes!
Of course Texas is the reason America’s freaking out (or maybe reasonably and sanely concerned) about its first Ebola case. Officials now say “about 100” people had contact with Thomas Duncan after his return from Liberia, including students at a handful of Dallas-area schools—but that the number of people who might require a quarantine will […]
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The Police Chief Is Willing to Back Off Exonerating a Cop Who Pepper-Sprayed Campers. But He Says No to Discipline.
Police Chief Mike Reese, asked by a citizen panel this August to punish a cop who pepper-sprayed homeless campers beneath the Morrison Bridge last fall, has decided to try for a compromise measure, police officials have announced. In a letter last month to the Citizen Review Committee, which advises the city on police policy issues […]
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Novick Wants an Extra $4.5 Million (at Least) for Street Fixes
No one figured Portland’s expected budget surplus this fall—a mere $8.9 million—would go very far once the city’s myriad bureaus and offices submitted their blitz of funding requests ahead of this fall’s annual city budget adjustment. But city hall’s already-meager expectations might need to shrink just a little bit more. At least half of the […]
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Worth a Thousand Homes
Maps Offer a Sobering Look at Four Decades of Gentrification
Four decades of gentrification in North and Northeast Portland
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Hall Monitor
The Lesson of Public Grief
The death of Amanda Fritz’s husband reminds us: Everyone weeps when they’re heartbroken.
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30 Years for Man FBI Enticed Into Pioneer Courthouse Square Bomb Plot
Some eighteen months after his conviction in an FBI-led plot to blow up Pioneer Courthouse Square in 2010, Mohamed Mohamud stood before the federal judge who was about to sentence him and offered up an apology. “The things I said and did were terrible,” Mohamud told US District Court Judge Garr King’s courtroom, the Oregonian […]
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The Effort to Recall Hales and Novick Has Come to a Quiet (Expected) End
Need some more proof, besides the calendar and the rain, that summertime and its heady dreams have finally left us? The man who announced twin campaigns to recall Mayor Charlie Hales and Commissioner Steve Novick back in July has announced, a week early, that those efforts have been suspended owing to a failure to collect […]
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Gentrification: Promises Kept, Promises Broken
TRUST IS DIFFICULT to regain once it’s been lost—whether that sundering came in one fell, foul swoop or merely over several decades, a series of half-promises never more than half-kept. Consider North and Northeast Portland and the plight of the city’s African American community. First, city leaders gutted traditional neighborhoods around North Williams and in […]
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Good Morning, News!
Hi. That didn’t work out so well. Ferguson’s police chief was fresh from a weeks-late apology over the August shooting death of Michael Brown when he got the bright idea that he’d put on his civvies and join protesters later that night for a stroll through the town. Instead, he ended up marching with riot […]