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Good morning, Portland! And happy last day of September. The weather will be quite lovely today, partly cloudy with temperatures in the low 70s. Unfortunately, we’re expected to see an October warm-up this weekend and next week. Hopefully fall will return soon.
IN LOCAL NEWS:
• Oops! A District 4 City Council candidate forum planned for next week is in flux after the neighborhood association set to host the event realized it may not legally be able to do so. The Pearl District Neighborhood Association was scheduled to co-host the candidate forum with the NW Examiner newspaper. But the neighborhood association was forced to abandon the forum due to legal requirements for neighborhood associations and nonprofits. Only four candidates were initially invited to participate—three incumbents and Eli Arnold, a challenger who has worked as a Portland police officer in the Pearl District. The decision to only include those four candidates appeared arbitrary, and as it turns out, it’s not allowed. Local, state, and federal laws outline strict guidelines for how neighborhood groups can host such political events, and some laws bar them from activity that could have the effect of favoring a candidate or group of candidates. It’s unclear if the NW Examiner will continue to host the event without the neighborhood association. Find out more in Jeremiah Hayden’s latest story for the Mercury.
• Last Thursday afternoon, several law enforcement agencies (including the Portland Police Bureau and the US Marshals) “encountered” a 39-year-old Black man named Eddie Campbell at a hotel in Southeast Portland. Campbell was a suspect in a Gresham homicide earlier that day. (KATU posted an old mugshot of Campbell.) A few hours later, Campbell and one of PPB’s K9 dogs, Kylo, were both dead. At first, all PPB said was that “shots were fired.” PPB said an officer shot Campbell, but didn’t say what happened preceding the shooting, and the bureau didn’t say who shot Kylo. However, PPB’s early communications implied it was Campbell who shot Kylo, while not stating it outright. Now PPB has said it was actually an officer from one of the responding law enforcement agencies, likely PPB or the US Marshals, who shot Kylo. The dog was injured on the scene and later euthanized at the veterinary hospital.
We still don’t know very much about the shooting. While PPB has shown photos of Campbell’s gun (presumably the one he allegedly used to murder someone in Gresham), it’s not clear if he was actually armed when he was shot by cops. We also don’t know which cops (as in, which law enforcement agency they’re employed with) shot Campbell and Kylo. PPB is expected to release body camera footage of the incident sometime in the next week or so, per bureau policy.
• Did you know there are three corn mazes on Sauvie Island? Well, even if you did, you probably haven’t visited all three of them. And even if you have, in fact, done that, you DEFINITELY haven’t witnessed the three mazes—two cute and one scary—from writer Joe Streckert’s perspective. Luckily, you now have that opportunity. Check out Streckert’s latest for the Mercury, in which he reviews the three corn mazes from several angles.
• Apparently, a bunch of Oregonians are looking at President Trump’s catastrophic rule and saying, “Yup, sounds like what I want my governor to be like, too.”
• “There’s a new cart I’ll be adding to my regular rotation: Indian Flavor Express,” writes our food editor, Katherine Chew Hamilton, in this first edition of her new restaurant review column, The Chew Chronicles. The cart offers dishes rarely, if ever, seen at other Indian restaurants in town. Kalimiri, a tangy, light yogurt-based curry with black pepper showered in fried onions, gets a lift from fresh mint and cilantro; pair it with the cart’s eight-hour slow cooked lamb. The tariwala is flavored with mustard seeds, tamarind, and curry leaves—creamy, but not heavy thanks to coconut milk. In the bagara baingan, tiny Indian eggplants, served whole, swim in a thick, nutty gravy made of cashews, lotus seeds, and coconut. Check out Katherine Chew Hamilton’s first review for her new column here, and then it sounds like you’ve got some lunch plans.
IN NATIONAL/WORLD NEWS:
• The US Supreme Court weighed in yesterday to allow—at least for now—the Trump administration to resume its incredibly dehumanizing and awful third-country deportation scheme. Under the deportation plan, tens of thousands of immigrants have been forced out of the US to countries they are not residents of and often have never even been to. The Supreme Court’s decision, filed in a brief without much explanation, temporarily overruled a lower-court order blocking the deportations. While we don’t know much about the justices’ rationale here, we do know the three liberal justices dissented. The Supreme Court is expected to take up a full oral argument on the case in December. Meanwhile, vulnerable people—many of whom made the United States their home—are being subject to this inhumane treatment. To quote the advocacy group Third Party Deportation Watch, the policy is “one of the Trump administration’s most coercive tools to spread fear and deny protection to people who have been granted—or are seeking—safety in the United States. The agreements treat immigrants and refugees as bargaining chips, reflecting the Trump administration’s transactional and corrupt approach to foreign policy.”
• Given how corrupt the Supreme Court is, here’s some surprising news: Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, one of the worst of the bunch, has recused himself from a major climate litigation case headed to the nation’s highest court next week. The case, Suncor v Boulder, may determine if local governments can sue big oil companies for climate damages. (Read the Mercury‘s semi-recent update about Multnomah County’s big oil lawsuit for more context.) Alito, who owns thousands of dollars in oil stock and is therefore financially implicated in the greenhouse gas industry, is obviously compromised. For months, he said he wouldn’t recuse himself from the case, but now he has reversed course. Maybe the 76-year-old right-wing extremist just wants to get out of work. Regardless, the decision will hopefully result in a fairer trial for those seeking damages from the companies that caused the climate crisis.
• Lol. As some people (not necessarily me), would say…”sucks to suck.”
• As we know, Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are not good faith actors in any sense, and particularly when it comes to their communications about some of the most marginalized people among us. A recent HHS report, titled “Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?” clearly meets the definition of right-wing propaganda. It was not peer reviewed, and the study authors haven’t produced its underlying data, or details about who funded it. The report propagates the right-wing myth that trans people are dangerous and radical. There is no evidence supporting those claims. NPR has a good article fact-checking the report and providing context for the Trump administration’s latest attacks on trans people.
• YUP. Student reporters have been instrumental in reporting on the story of the alleged 2024 gang rape at Cornell University, leading to local law enforcement reopening the case this week.
Student newspapers are keeping journalistic integrity alive
[image or embed]— 祖思薪 Eugenia Zuroski (@zugenia.bsky.social) September 30, 2026 at 8:46 AM
• Remember—tomorrow’s the first of the month. (Say “rabbit rabbit rabbit,” if you’re superstitious.) Here’s a “Nancy” cartoon for the road.
