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Good morning, Portland! I, for one, am giddy to ride my bike to work this week, since the rainy gloom is being replaced with chilly sunshine! Expect sunshine and average temperatures in the 40s (brr) this week. On a related note: If you’re wanting to feel a bit better about the cold, dark days ahead of us this winter, cheer yourself up with this story about a Norwegian isle where residents don’t see daylight for nearly three months each year (and they genuinely love it?!) 

- If you recall, Mayor Ted Wheeler buddied up with City Commissioner Dan Ryan earlier this month to pass a plan through City Council to ban unsheltered homelessness and create mass homeless encampments. This week, Wheeler’s proposing a $27 million funding package to jumpstart the program to his fellow commissioners. Here are the deets.

- The mayor safeguarded thousands of his work text messages from public scrutiny for years by wrongly using iMessage instead of sending regular text messages. Because of his and others staffers’ inability to follow city text message policy, city tech staff have irreversibly blocked the app on all city phones.

- Good news for Oregon forests: The US Bureau of Land Management has agreed to reverse a rule installed under the Trump regime that allowed the agency to log massive swaths of forest after a wildfire. This is especially good news for the environmental groups who sued the government over this rule last year.

- Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has successfully flipped Washington’s 3rd Congressional District (which includes Vancouver), which has been Republican-led since 2011. Gluesenkamp Perez, a political newbie who owns a Portland auto shop, beat out MAGA darling (and white nationalist-aligned) dude Joe Kent. Huzzah! 

- In less inspiring seat-flipping news, the AP has called Oregon’s 5th Congressional District race, deeming Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer the victor. Chavez-DeRemer beat Democrat Jamie McLeod-Skinner, who won her party’s nomination after beating incumbent moderate Dem Kurt Schrader in the May primary. It’ll be the first time this district has been GOP-led since 1997. This win also makes Chavez-DeRemer the first Latina congresswoman from Oregon (Democrat Andrea Salinas may be the second if her close race for the brand-new 6th District is called soon!).

- After the national panic about a “red wave” crushing Democrats in last week's midterm elections, Democrats remain in the majority of the US Senate (woo!). However, the balance of power in the US House of Representatives remains unresolved (boo!). 

- Behold, the silver lining of Elon Musk’s bull-in-a-china-shop Twitter takeover: On Friday, someone who bought a blue check “verified” account to impersonate the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, and promptly tweeted: “We are excited to announce insulin is free now." The company’s stock immediately dropped 2.2 percent. 

- Dave Chappelle hosted SNL this weekend and, surprising absolutely no one, said some offensive bullshit. His cool endorsement of Kayne West’s antisemitism on national television was promptly condemned by the Anti-Defamation League. 

- Oh look, Mike Pence is finally admitting to the fact that Trump endangered him and fellow lawmakers on January 6:

 

- Ukrainians are celebrating the departure of Russian troops from the Ukraine city of Kherson, which was occupied by Putin’s army for eight months. It will take the shuttered city, which is currently without water and electricity, a while to recover. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday said 400 Russian war crimes have already been documented in Kherson 

- Today, President Joe Biden will sit down for a chat with Chinese President Xi Jinping in a rare face-to-face meeting between the countries’ leaders. Here’s what we can expect from the hang sesh, per NPR.Â