Another slave-owner statue in Portland comes tumbling down.
Another slave-owner statue in Portland comes tumbling down. Tuck Woodstock

Here's your daily roundup of all the latest local and national news. (Like our coverage? Please consider donating to the Mercury to keep it comin'!)

• HAPPY JUNETEENTH! If you would like to participate in this weekend's many protests and rallies to stop police brutality (both in person AND online) check out this great roundup of events! (And check in tonight and tomorrow at portlandmercury.com for our live, on-the-ground coverage of Friday and Saturday's protests!) Or if you feel more in a donating mood, may we suggest the Black Resilience Fund? Learn more about it here!

• Now it's time for your daily update on last night's protests: As we enter into our third (!!) week of nightly rallies and marches, there were three separate groups at work yesterday—a large rally at Jefferson High, a smaller (but still feisty!) gathering of around 200 around the Justice Center's Sacred Fence™ that dispersed around midnight... after throwing hot dogs at the cops? And, in the defining moment of the evening, a group that marched to 57th and Sandy toppled a statue of George Washington, our slave-owning first American president. No arrests were made last night.

• Today Multnomah County has entered into Phase 1 of reopening with a warning from the state that you better WEAR YA DAMN MASK (primarily in indoor public spaces). One of the many reasons we should all be WEARING OUR DAMN MASKS is that the OHA is reporting the ninth straight day in a row in which the state has over 100 new coronavirus cases. In fact we had 206 new cases since yesterday. Soooooooo... WEAR YA DAMN MASK.

• Due to the coronavirus, the 2020 Pendleton Roundup has been canceled. (Somehow I think we will survive.)

• In Washington state, both King and Pierce counties have declared racism a public health crisis.

IN NATIONAL NEWS:

• Trump—once again proving himself a human turd—has issued a thinly veiled Twitter threat to any protesters intent on ruining his rally/COVID super spreader party in Tulsa this Saturday. Meanwhile the city of Tusla enacted a 10 pm curfew for the area around the rally, but then quickly rescinded the order after Trump complained that it would aversely affect his sad, pathetic supporters. EYE ROLL!

• While the headline reads "Louisville Police Department Fires An Officer Involved in Breonna Taylor's Death," the news is that "termination proceedings" have only begun in regards to Brett Hankison... who is only one of three officers involved in Taylor's murder. So to clarify: Nobody's actually been fired yet, and only one-third of the people responsible for her death are being treated as such. BTW: None of these three officers have been arrested or charged for that murder, either.

• Who knew the best treatment for "blue flu" was cash money? The Atlanta Police Foundation gave every officer in the Atlanta Police Department an extra $500 yesterday "in an effort to stem attrition and boost morale." Yes, that includes (and might be considered a reward for) the petulant group of officers who called in sick as a response to one of their own being correctly charged with murder in the shooting death of Rayshard Brooks.

• A day after Trump's re-election campaign got ads pulled from Facebook for using Nazi imagery, Twitter took another shot at the White House's credibility (or its shoddy facsimile of it) by flagging another of his insipid tweets for containing "manipulated media," or as he prefers to think of it, "fake news."

• Mary Elizabeth Taylor, a lifelong Republican and assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs in the State Department, tendered her resignation last night due to our idiot president being a racist human turd. She didn't use those exact words in the letter (read it here), but... yeah. That's what he is, and that's why she resigned.

• Been awhile since we had a notable whistleblowing in the news, and this one's pretty big: The TSA is being accused of withholding N95 masks from its own staff, and through "gross mismanagement" allowing TSA employees to be "significant carriers" of COVID-19 in the earliest days of the pandemic. The Office of Special Counsel has since ordered Homeland Security to open an investigation.

• Reminder: Both Homeland Security and the TSA were founded by the Bush administration in the early 2000s, have been largely ineffective at protecting anyone from anything, and have served primarily to stigmatize and oppress minorities at home and abroad whenever possible.

• Sorry, repeat that back again: People probably caught COVID-19 from... what? Minks? The goddamn MINKS did this to us?

• And finally....