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Good Morning, Portland! The area’s 10-day weather forecast is looking pleasant as hell, with comely highs of mid-to-low 80s. Time to start some thankless garden project. Let’s hit the news!
IN LOCAL NEWS:
• The campaign for a ballot initiative seeking to redirect clean energy funds to the Portland Police Bureau collected over 63,000 signatures, putting the proposal one step closer to the November ballot. But as city and county elections offices work to verify those signatures, a new complaint emerged Tuesday, alleging multiple legal missteps in the signature gathering process. It’s the latest in a flood of more than 75 complaints submitted to state elections officials against the Enhanced Community Safety Initiative. Read the Mercury‘s latest update!
• Portland City Council holds no plans to save Lloyd Center Mall. Well, they didn’t really have the power to do so at all. Last month, councilors heard public testimony from the “Save Lloyd Center” and “Save Lloyd Ice” coalitions, who filed two separate appeals to the Portland Design Commission’s Lloyd Center Central City Master Plan. We’ll have a story on that forthcoming, but the long and the short of it is that—while the councilors were sympathetic to the pro-Lloyd Center campaigns—they denied the appeals, saying they didn’t have the power to substantially intervene in this situation.
• The Mercury‘s 2026 Food Issue, “Get Out & Eat,” is on stands now! Inside you’ll find a smorgasbord of important culinary content, such as a “Portland’s Top 20 Food Carts” by the issue’s editor Katherine Chew Hamilton and a Soft Serve Roundup by Taylor Griggs. Get in there, and snack on some stories!
• Sending you into national news with a quick little reminder about Tilikum Bridge updates, which begin today and could cause disruptions through Sunday July 12. “But how does this effect ME,” you cry to the sky. The 17, 19, and FX2 will be on detour routes in the vicinity of the bridge. MAX service crossing the bridge will be shuttle buses. Street car is disrupted! (But it’s unclear how!)
IN NATIONAL /INTERNATIONAL NEWS:
• Today on Which Ceasefire Was That Anyway? The US attacked scores of Iranian military sites and port facilities on Wednesday. The Pentagon described this as a response to strikes against three commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz. (Iran has been saying that, during the ceasefire, it has the right to manage traffic through the strait.) This is actually the… second (?) retaliation for those ships; The New York Times reports that they included a Saudi oil tanker and a Qatari vessel.
• These attacks are also happening at the close of days of public ceremonies for the funeral of Iran’s former leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Hundreds of thousands of mourners made their way to Mashhad, Iran’s spiritual capital and second largest city where Getty photographer John Moore found some posing with banners that read “Kill Trump” on a main thoroughfare.
• Between this round’s first and second retaliatory attacks, President Trump ventured his view that the three-week ceasefire is “over.” In response, OIL PRICES ARE BACK UP, BAYBEEE.
• Let’s take recent Charlie XCX single break. Whew. I mean, wink.
• On Wednesday night, via social media, the current Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, Graham Platner, announced he was suspending his election campaign. He also vocally denied the accusation of rape from a woman he dated in 2021, which Politico reported on Monday. Platner was a favorite to defeat Republican Senate incumbent Susan Collins, but had faced a series of revelations about his character over the course of his campaign. The state’s Democratic party will hold a convention to choose a new nominee by July 27.
• In 2019, advice columnist E. Jean Carroll publicly accused President Donald Trump of attacking her in 1996 and sexually assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. Trump denied the allegations, but in 2023, a civil trial jury found that the president had abused and defamed Carroll. At the end of June, the US Supreme Court allowed that jury’s verdict to stand, which set in motion the release of over $5 million awarded her in damages. Trump’s lawyers have asked a court to block the dispersal while they appeal yet again. The Trump team is also currently appealing $83 million granted to Carroll for defamation by a separate jury in 2024.
• Now get out there and cope with some bullshit. I believe in you.
