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Good Morning, Portland! And good morning to all the atmospheric rivers! The National Weather Service released a flood potential outlook late yesterday, writing "a series of at least two, if not three, atmospheric rivers will bring periods of widespread heavy rain to northwest Oregon and southwest Washington this weekend into early next week." So get your booties on and salute the septuagenarian hero of your neighborhood who gets out there, in full body storm gear, and clears your street drains. Maybe it's time you take up the torch (which, in this case, is a long pole and / or inverted rake).

IN LOCAL NEWS:
• Remember the summer and those nasty near 100-degree days? On those days, I generally camp out in a movie theater for at least two showings, sometimes three. And that's how I came to watch the documentary All Light Everywhere, which isn't  exactly scintillating, but which did tell me that body camera manufacturer Axon purposely makes body cameras that see only about as well as a human being. It's more important that the camera reflect what the officer saw, to give a picture of what they were reacting to then to actually gather what happened. I bring this up because Portland Police may being donning Axon body cameras as soon as the summer or fall of 2024. News Editor Courtney Vaughn has more on that.

• Portland police are in trouble over a slideshow again, but it's not for including right-wing memes this time. Instead, a Tuesday presentation on preventing theft at large retail stores in Cascade Station and on Janzen Beach may have violated a state law against making mug shots public.

• "Help Determine the Fate of the Five" sounds like a Fast and the Furious movie title. But it's actually clever copy from the City of Portland, asking you to weigh in on the five statues that activists and protesters toppled or damaged at different points during the social justice protests of 2020. A warning: The survey confusingly appears to end at multiple points, and if you're taking it on a mobile device, it can be difficult to figure out how to progress to the next section—don't stop until you get to rate each statue! On one hand, I imagine that the responses from actual Portland-area residents will be somewhat skewed once the rage bait WTF Portland accounts get ahold of this thing. However,  on the other hand, what were the chances anyone would have listened to the results anyway?

• Speaking of Portland rage bait, the Oregonian reports that Kevin Dahlgren—who achieved internet fame for filming homeless people in the city—has been charged with further criminal counts, alleging that Dahlgren committed fraud during his time as a Gresham city employee.

•Trimet announced this morning that beginning on December 3 it will expand its 48 bus line (which runs between Beaverton and Hillsboro) to frequent service. In Portland, frequent service is every 15 minutes. Imagine how many people would be able to rely on the bus if frequent service was every 7-8 minutes. But I digress.

• There's a sinkhole in Cornelius:

• Pop culture classical live music nights are a frequent occurrence in my inbox these days. However fans of the peaceful farming game, Stardew Valley, will want to note two special shows in May 2024, at Aladdin Theater, called Stardew Valley Festival of Seasons where traveling musicians will play arrangements of the beloved score live. Tickets go on sale today at 10 am. Check out details for that and other shows dropping seats this morning via our weekly Friday morning ticket alert.

IN NATIONAL /INTERNATIONAL NEWS:
• Despite attempts to prolong the weeklong truce and exchange of hostages between Israel and Hamas, Israel resumed bombing Gaza minutes after the ceasefire ended this morning. The Associated Press reports that "militants in Gaza resumed firing rockets into Israel, and fighting broke out between Israel and Hezbollah militants operating along its northern border with Lebanon." The BBC has a breakdown of reasons the ceasefire ended. The New York Times dropped an exclusive story, saying that Israeli officials knew of Hamas' plans to attack Israel's settlements around the Gaza Strip, but had dismissed it as aspirational. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is worried that the Israel-Hamas war will overshadow Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

• Sandra Day O’Connor, a retired supreme court justice who was the first woman on the Supreme Court, has died. She was 93. O'Conner was considered a moderate conservative in her time, but she fought for abortion rights and refused a 1989 attempt to overthrow Roe v Wade (which the current batch of fuckups overturned in 2022). 

• Friday morning is a good time for a nice longread. This Wired piece from earlier in the month is framed around ideas of how we co-create a culture of surveillance by filming one another in public spaces without permission. But the tale of a city dealing with homelessness and public nuisance will resonate with Portlanders. No spoilers, but the first video in this story didn't capture the whole situation—and how you feel about what unfolds will say a lot about you.

• The juiciest opening paragraph you will read this week comes from space.com, and describes solar flares: "Aurora chasers around the world are eagerly awaiting the arrival of a super-hot plasma eruption — known as a coronal mass ejection (CME) — that will slam into Earth." Granted, we aren't in a northern lights area, but Space has compiled this neat list of live aurora cams.

• Let us now celebrate the capricious and unprepared universe with a seasonal remembrance of this epic Patti LaBelle performance. Be the "where are my backup singers?"—interspersed with epic soloing—that you want to see in the world: