If you believe Portland benefits from smart, local journalism and arts coverage, please consider making a small monthly contribution to the Mercury, because without you, there is no us. Thanks for your support!
Good Morning, Portland! I’ve got good news and bad news, and I’m nowhere near out of news! Today in good news, Willamette Valley weather is being sweet and sensible right now. It’s like she just found out we’re switching schools, so she’s trying to pretend we’ve been friends this whole time. Forecast says to expect partly sunny with a high of 78 degrees, and you can expect more of the same this weekend. Bad news? The world’s most flamboyant man, Tim Curry, has died. Do the stars look jealous to you? Because there’s a new girl in town. TikTok is flooded with people making meme videos about Curry and Dolly Parton meeting in heaven, and there’s absolutely no harm in that. Let’s hit the news!
IN LOCAL NEWS:
• Maybe I have a skewed perception from writing the morning news once a week, but is Portland Public Schools (PPS) always in trouble? The Oregonian‘s Julia Silverman and Mark Friesen reported Wednesday that PPS could end up closing between 10 and 20 elementary and middle schools. District leaders say that the possible closures are not only a response to budget issues, but the one-two punch of smaller enrollment numbers and increased operating costs.
• On Tuesday, an alliance of Portland faith leaders and a coalition of groups representing people with mental illness and disabilities denounced a lack of action by city leadership, specifically regarding two recommendations from Portland’s Independent Police Review. The groups also called upon the city to release all documents on Portland Police Bureau’s response to the 2020 protests. Courtney Vaughn has more on why the statements matter and whose names were named.
• Very little is yet known about a man found dead on Portland’s Eastbank Esplanade Wednesday night. A press release from PPB says that witnesses near SE Madison flagged down an officer at 8:56 pm to report the sounds of gunshots. Police found a man dead on the esplanade’s path and closed the area to allow PPB’s homicide unit to respond.
• On November 12, 2025, an Oregon man called the office of a US Senator, identified himself, and threatened to “put a bullet” in the politician’s head. On Wednesday, he was sentenced to 60 days of home detention and three years of federal supervision. The US Attorney’s office declined to say which senator received the threat, only that it wasn’t an Oregon senator. The man’s federal public defender described him as isolated and “doomscrolling” on Facebook through incendiary political posts before he made the call.
• Today in yes, turn all factories into Juantonio’s chips factories, my body is ready, it was looking like a 49,000-square-foot warehouse in Hood River County was primed to become a new Amazon facility. BUT THEN the Port of Hood River opted to sell its land to a local company instead. Columbia Gorge News reports that Juantonio’s tortilla chips makers, Dominguez Family Enterprises Inc. plans to build a 35,000-square-foot manufacturing and warehouse facility to expand its operations.
IN NATIONAL/ INTERNATIONAL NEWS:
• New York Times reports that record-high surges in immigration arrests over the summer predominantly included people who did not have criminal records. Of the 92,000 people ICE says it arrested in June and July, just four percent had violent criminal convictions. This is not a surprise, and nobody should be acting surprised about this. I also find the claim that those arrested were “people who had not previously been the focus of President Trump’s mass deportation campaign” dubious. Everyday people stuck in US immigration limbo are vulnerable and the vulnerable have always been the targets of this deportation campaign. If you’re angry that your Russian bride was detained at the airport, you haven’t been paying attention.
• A world barely entering the bargaining stage of it’s Dolly Parton grief received word Wednesday that the most flamboyant man to ever live, actor Tim Curry, had died on Tuesday night at his home in Los Angeles. Timothy James Curry was born April 19, 1946, in Grappenhall, Cheshire, which is a very fancy-sounding place to be born. He grew up to be Dr. Frank-N-Furter, a sweet cross-dressing pansexual mad scientist. Or rather, that was the actor’s breakout role—one he launched and reprised many times with gusto. To me, Curry will always be Grand Wizard Egbert Hellibore from The Worst Witch (1986). To my friend Kurt, Curry cannot help but be the horned Darkness from Legend (1985). What did all these roles have in common? Capes! Eventually, Curry branched out into roles without capes. Readers will remember his character-defining performance as Pennywise in the 1990 TV miniseries adapted from Stephen King’s It. Everything Bill Skarsgård does now can only exist in relation to the style of horror that Curry created for that role. It’s sinister; it’s sexy; it’s super scary, and if you revisit, you’ll realize Curry did it all dressed up like a regular party clown—no cheekbone defining makeup or prosthetic teeth. If I keep talking about Tim Curry we’ll never get onto the rest of the news, so I’d better stop. But I’ll just leave you with this:
• We still don’t know why the US government issued a travel alert for Americans planning to visit Mexicali in northern Mexico on Monday. The government also temporarily suspended consular activities in the border city—the capital of Baja California state—citing a “potential threat.” On Tuesday, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said “there was an alert about the possibility of a criminal group” and added that the report was based on information from US agencies.
• Today in fast robots, the newly earned record for robot running speed was broken… again by at 2nd World Robot Games in Beijing, China. On August 25, a robot broke the 100-meter record held by Usain Bolt, 9.58 seconds, with a time of 9.39 seconds. On Wednesday, another robot improved on that time, running a 100-meter sprint in just 8.86 seconds.
• When I said I was done highlighting iconic Tim Curry moments, I lied. Here are 135 more:
