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Good Morning, Portland! It’s already a little less hazy out there, and weather forecasts project that today’s easterly winds should thin much of the smoke the Pacific Northwest has been living under. But while the area’s air quality index is steadily creeping down, it could take until Saturday for it to totally clear. Hope you invested in air filters and artisanal ice. Let’s hit the news.
IN LOCAL NEWS:
•The Portland Fire has struggled during their last few games thanks to repeating turnovers and the absence of fan favorite Sarah Ashlee Barker due to an injury. Can they turn their fortunes around? The Mercury‘s Stephanie Kaloi has some new analysis and a recap of their last few games—as well as what to look forward to in the future!
• The tension and harmony between Blue Cranes’ tenor and alto sax is a foundational part of the Portland jazz quintet’s sound. So the declared departure of the group’s tenor saxophonist Joe Cunningham feels enormous to fans of the longstanding local group. For the Mercury, Robert Ham explains the consequence, history, and reveals a little about this weekend’s loving send-off show.
• Summer in Portland means delighting in some live music al fresco, including at Sellwood Park, where the nonprofit Sellwood Community House curates not one but two weekly concert series as part of its absolutely jam-packed summer programming. Cody Tracy profiles the weekly free show series and offers some picks.
• Via our sister publication, The Stranger, security staff at Neumos have formed a union:
• As a reminder, tomorrow’s daylight will be will be 2 minutes 37 seconds shorter. Summer is officially slipping away.
IN NATIONAL / INTERNATIONAL NEWS:
• Today in weird grudge trials—an alarmingly growing beat—the Senate Homeland Security Committee voted this morning to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress. It’s purportedly due to Fauci’s insistence on his Fifth Amendment rights last week, at a hearing where Republicans alleged that the former head of the nation’s pandemic response funded research in China to set off that same pandemic. In response to the vote, lawmakers from the Democratic Party protested that a contempt resolution must have a “statement of facts” certified by the president of the Senate, which would need to pass the full Senate with a 60-vote majority, which the New York Times calls “highly unlikely.”
• Because it’s Thursday, Iran says it’s close to finalizing an agreement on acceptable shipping routes between itself and the Sultanate of Omanan, which is located on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz. According to NYT, a spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry warned that “certain third parties” could potentially muck everything up. And that’s probably what’s going to happen.
• Today marks 81 years since the United States bombed the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing at least 70,000 people with the initial blast. Radiation sickness caused that number to double over the following weeks and months. It’s a bit of a mind twist to consider that people had no real ability to imagine the horrors of those bombings until over a year later when the New Yorker published a 30,000 word investigation by John Hersey—dedicating an entire issue to the piece. One of the people Hersey profiled actually wrote his own memoir account, which was recently published for the first time:
• Sending you into Thursday with respect for your weekend plans, whatever they may be.
