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Just a friendly downtown food cart operator.
Just a friendly downtown food cart operator. Carlotta Washington

Good morning, Portland! It's going to be a delightful 75 degrees todayā€”the perfect temperature for waving at WAR SHIPS.

They're Not Cages, They're Cells: Remember when staff at a Texas immigrant detention center for kids called the police on Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley for wanting a look inside? He finally got that tour. Or to be clear, he got a tour, of a different child lock-up along the Texas-Mexico border. Here's what he told The Nation about his visit.

Hot Mess: The owner of a food cart at the SW 5th and Stark cart pod was arrested yesterday for allegedly spraying a customer with hot sauce, throwing a Gatorade bottle at her face, and calling her the n-word.

Hot Mess, Pt. 2: Turns out Oregon's wildlands are aheads of schedule for their flammability. According to state forestry officials, the Oregon's recent dry spell has left forests and fields extra-prepared to be set ablaze by a disastrous fire. Cool.

Put a Bird on That: In Other Words, Portland's longtime feminist bookstore and community center, is closing at the end of the month. In a statement, the shop's owners said that rising rents and plummeting community support (volunteers, board members) have forced them to shutter. But I'm okay with just blaming Portlandia .

In the Red: Former Oregon first lady Cynthia Hayes will file for bankruptcy this week. Hayes is swimming in massive legal fees accrued from fighting to keep 72,000 emailsā€”and faces a potential $110,000 fine for violating state ethics laws.


Great Idea, BEN: Ben Carson, who is inexplicably still employed as the Housing and Urban Development secretary, has introduced a policy that could raise rents for people receiving federal housing assistance by 20 percent in the county's 100 largest metro areas. Carson says it'll incentivize people to get jobs, again proving that he has absolutely no idea what he's talking about. The plan would probably nudge thousands of low-income Americans into homelessness.

Kim Possible: Donald Trump has commuted the sentence of Alice Marie Johnson, a woman serving life in prison for a nonviolent drug conviction, after Kim Kardashian told him to. Since this is the world we live in now, Trump's decision has given hope to civil rights lawyers who've requested presidential clemency for thousands of other nonviolent drug offenders. (Cut to Attorney General Jeff Sessions' elfin scowl).

Get Out: It's unclear if any Muslim Americans were invited to the White House Iftar dinner last night. None of the leading Muslim advocacy organizations, spiritual leaders, or members of Congress were invited to celebrate Ramadan with Donald Trumpā€”perhaps because none of them would have accepted the offer. Trump instead forced diplomats from Muslim-majority countries to come to the White House, where dinner was followed by a life-action reenactment of Get Out.

Goodbye, Civilization: A group of MIT students have created a psychopath robot named Norman (as in Bates) by drowning it in violently disturbing Reddit content.

Did it for the Wu: On Tuesday, police chased a rouge National Guard Lieutenant in a small tank-link military vehicle down a Virginia highway, eventually cutting him off in downtown Richmond.


More importantly, here's the last tweet Lieut. Joshua Yabut posted before hitting the road.