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Good Morning, Portland: We're looking at some classic Portland weather for the weekend: Clouds and rain. Temperature highs in the low 60s and mid-40 degrees at night. Sounds like a great time to enter a log lady contest.

IN LOCAL NEWS:
• Portland's skyline arguably hit the market yesterday as both the PacWest skyscraper and Big Pink (aka US Bancorp Tower) are up for sale.

• So, back in 2015, Portland City Council adopted a Vision Zero resolution, promising to end traffic fatalities and serious injuries on city streets by 2025. WEELP it's 2025, and we're nowhere near that. In fact, traffic crash deaths hit a 30-year high in 2023. To commemorate the 10-year anniversary of Portland's Vision Zero commitment, Councilor Tiffany Koyama Lane is bringing a resolution to double down on the city's pledge to end traffic fatalities. Taylor Griggs has the deets.

• Arts organizations across the state have been reeling from sudden and confusing cuts to National Endowment for the Arts grants that they had been promised. Yesterday the Oregon Humanities Council filed a suit against DOGE, seeking a ruling to block the cuts.

• Mike Schmidt, Multnomah County's former district attorney, is starting a podcast and taking on the name his lobbyist detractors People for Portland emblazoned across the city: The Schmidt Show. After losing the 2024 May primary election to Nathan Vasquez, Schmidt completed his term and moved on to a position as general counsel for the Urban League of Portland. He told the Oregonian he has no plans to monetize the podcast and will focus on positive local news stories [insert Journalist thousand yard eye roll]. In traditional podcast form, Schmidt will host interviews in his parents’ guest bedroom.

• Speaking of a good podcast, if you're interested in how to change the mind of conspiracy theorists you may enjoy NPR Embedded's Alternate Realities, which follows a journalist's yearlong $10,000 bet with his father on whether several theories come true and the ways conspiracy theory beliefs are tearing their family apart. 

• We're. sending you into the weekend with two movie recommendations, the Paul Rudd / Tim Robinson buddy dram-com Friendship, and Pavements: A documentary about the '90s indie band Pavement that contains a faux biopic, a real Pavent musical, live show recordings, and more. Critic Dom Sinacola writes "Pavements is less an attempt to grasp why Pavement is loved than how."

• Well, bless your sweet cocktail; it's almost the end of Highball Week. Did you sip on a snack drink? You have until Sunday to enjoy $10 inventive cocktails from 41 of the city's most inventive bartenders!

IN NATIONAL / INTERNATIONAL NEWS:
• Today in why are we still pretending(?), President Trump is wrapping up his tour of the Middle East, having not really discussed the region's most pressing issue Israel's brutal war in Gaza and instead mostly slathered praise on the area's dictators in the hopes of receiving presents.

• On Thursday, the Trump administration fired hundreds of predominantly journalist contractors at a federally funded news network Voice of America. This happened despite orders from federal judges in April instructing the administration to halt its efforts to shutter and dismantle VoA and two other federally funded outlets: Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. I hate to be simple here, but if all this stuff is unlawful, why do people keep doing it?

• Today in THIS CAN'T BE REAL: 

Kristi Noem has been working with the producer of “Duck Dynasty” to pitch a reality TV show—titled “The American”—where immigrants will compete in a string of challenges across the country “for the honor of fast-tracking their way to U.S. citizenship,” according to a new report.

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— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast.bsky.social) May 15, 2025 at 4:28 PM

• And now a message for the demoralized [it me].