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Good Morning, Portland: Happy Halloween! So, of course, today will be cloudy with highs in the mid-50 degrees. Then it's time to build character, because after 5 pm we're getting nothing but pure rain. And like, think back. Yes. Most Halloweens are like this. Get you indoors, around a cauldron. It's time for news! 

IN LOCAL NEWS:
• Mayor Keith Wilson announced yesterday that the city will resume enforcing its contentious camping ban on November 1—which is also when SNAP benefits will probably expire for over 15,000 homeless Multnomah County residents. The Mercury's Jeremiah Hayden has more on this sudden shift to enforcement.

• Oh, what's this?! Some night news from  Jeremiah Hayden that Mayor Wilson put the city's Housing Bureau director on leave yesterday; a role she's been in since early 2024.⁠ A letter from the City Administrator announced Hisserich’s leave to councilors, late in the afternoon yesterday and names Michael Buonocore as the interim director while Hisserich is on leave. Buonocore was the executive director of Home Forward, Multnomah County’s housing authority, from 2014 to 2021. There's more! Read it!

• OH UH, WELL, FUCK. A mind-boggling story dropped from the Oregonian's Shane Dixon Kavanaugh today, pieced together from reports and interviews. It appears that earlier in the month Councilor Jamie Dunphy's chief of staff (now deputy chief of staff, due to restructuring) brought a woman who had been camping near the public library in Milwaukie into his home to try to connect her with services. Days later, he seemingly abandoned her at Milo McIver State Park at 2 am, 21 miles southeast of Portland! Dude, that's by Estacada! To make matters worse, when state police tried to remove the woman from the campground 36 hours later, they tased, handcuffed, and arrested her. Kavanaugh spoke with social service outreach workers in Milwaukie who had been trying to connect the woman with services, while she camped, before she seemingly disappeared into thin air. The whole story is your super sad scandal read of the morning.

• That feels like a scandal for the record books. But everything's all sideways with the President constantly threatening the city, so it might just disappear into political ether. Though, I could see it cropping up in Wm. Steven Humphrey's Pop Quiz PDX. Did you that this week's? It's about Haunted Portland!

• So yeah, it's Halloween WYD? I think that Nolan and Lindsay straight up grabbed their real life DM conversation to open this fun events round-up collab. Do This, Do That and Mercury Music Picks go full Frankenstein with event recommendations for Halloweekend! 

• Wait, a lot happened yesterday. Will we lose a City Hall not-scandal beneath the quagmire of suspicious leaves and unrelated restructurings? As you may remember, over the weekend, a fire broke out at the home of Portland City Councilor Candace Avalos—now believed to have started in a nearby shed. Portlanders did what Portlanders do and began pitching into a GoFundMe to help Avalos afford immediate expenses, raising more than $14,000 in just a day. Aaaaaand keeping any of that could be very complicated! Courtney Vaughn explains why!

• There was a time when a three-hour standoff IN THE WAVES of Siletz Bay "and briefly out into the churning Pacific Ocean" would have been a top GMN story. ALAS, then the fucking President started threatening our city and using his power to disappear people without due process. But the cover photo for today's news captures a sort of world-weary-yet-inspirational vibe I will carry in my heart. 

• Who's cruising for a pardon? It's Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, who just hired Marc Mukasey, a lawyer specializing in white-collar litigation who has, in the past, represented President Donald Trump and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, among other notable figures.

• Your Friday morning ticket drop is arriving shortly, and EverOut has drawn up a list of shows hitting the streets. Snap up seats for 2026—that's just what we're doing now. Will you chose Brandi Carlile's Human Tour (Moda in March) or Hayes Carll: We're Only Human Tour (Aladdin in Feb)? These creatives, where do they come up with this stuff? NOW FOR NATIONAL NEWS.

IN NATIONAL / INTERNATIONAL NEWS:
• It's very unlikely we'll see a last minute reprieve for the 42 million Americans who will find themselves without food assistance, starting tomorrow. Even if Congress came together and funded the government—which won't happen because Senate is adjourned until Monday—it takes time to move SNAP dollars through systems and onto cards. Even if a federal judge rules today that the Trump administration must continue to fund food stamps during the government shutdown, it still takes time to get money into those accounts.

• So much nuclear talk coming out of President Trump. First he wants to test nuclear weapons—cool cool cool—and now he's telling Senate Republicans to invoke the "nuclear option" to scrap the filibuster and end the government shutdown. Dawg, I just said the Senate is adjourned.

• Epstein files fanciers may be interested to hear that JPMorgan Chase reported tens of millions of dollars of potentially suspicious transactions to the US government, in the weeks following Jeffrey Epstein's death. The transactions involved Epstein and prominent Wall Street and business figures.

• As we see the destruction of Hurricane Melissa wrought across Jamaica, there's an interesting story of resilience underlining some of the reports. NYT reports: "In recent years, Jamaica has created a multilayered financial plan to respond to natural disasters. The strategy, which analysts say is uncommonly sophisticated, means the government has an arsenal of financial reserves and other tools ready to deploy, with each designed to handle a different level of disaster."

• If we don't laugh about it, we'll cry! Take a page out of Bo Johnson's playbook and embrace life's surreality.