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Thorns players protested on social media and on the field last night.
Thorns players protested on social media and on the field last night. Portland Thorns FC

Good morning, Portland! And a special "good morning" to the Portland Thorns players, who took to Twitter last night to make their demands known following the revelation that former coach Paul Riley had sexually coerced players—and the Thorns front office had done little to fix it. Forty minutes after Thorns players posted the following message, Thorns General Manager Gavin Wilkinson was placed on administrative leave.

The Thorns lost their match against the Houston Dash last night, but I'd say this win is bigger than a game score.

Okay, here are the rest of the headlines!

• A group of 25 Oregon firefighters and healthcare workers are trying to get out of getting vaccinated, despite a state mandate—but they faced a big setback yesterday. The Oregon Court of Appeals declined stop the mandate requiring them to get the shots by October 18, meaning they'll likely have to choose between rolling up their sleeves and losing their jobs.

• An excellent new report from Street Roots suggests that Portland homeless sweeps in 2021 may have failed to meet CDC guidelines around COVID-19 safety. In fact, sweeps seemed to increase around the time Portland was "reopening" back in May.

• Oregon's commercial salmon business is struggling, as climate change takes its toll on the state's salmon population. The problem has gotten so bad that Gov. Kate Brown is now requesting federal disaster aid from the U.S. Department of Commerce. As OPB reported, "the economic return from commercial salmon fishing along most of the coast since 2018 has been less than one-third of what it was in prior years. This continuing trend, [Brown] said in the letter, is having severe effects on already distressed rural communities and businesses that depend on salmon."

• Pfizer is now officially asking the FDA and CDC to approve emergency use of its COVID vaccine for kids ages 5-11. An independent panel will review the request later this month.

• Meanwhile, anti-vaxxers have found a new innovation: Online job boards specifically for people who refuse to get the COVID shot. The boards are full of medical workers who lost their jobs after refusing to get vaccinated.

• Today, in "American exceptionalism":

• Some good news: A federal judge yesterday issued an order blocking Texas's six-week abortion ban, calling the ban an "offensive deprivation of such an important right." Texas plans to appeal that decision, but it's at least a temporary victory for abortion rights in Texas.

• A new Senate Judiciary Committee report about Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results tells us what we pretty much already knew: Trump was pressuring everyone in his orbit to help him retain power. Members of Trump's Department of Justice (DOJ) threatened to resign en masse if he put an enabling ally in charge of the DOJ, referring to the threat as a "murder-suicide pact."

• Residents of another city in Michigan are being forced to abstain from using tap water, as the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services is warning that the water may be contaminated with lead. For now, residents of Benton Harbor are using bottled water instead.

• And finally: Here's an 80s news screen to help you get into the spooky October vibe.