Credit: photo from ICE's Flickr page (LOL)

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photo from ICE’s Flickr page (LOL)

Good morning, Portland! And welcome to another edition of Good Morning, News, a rough draft of history that includes cat tweets:

Okay, here are the headlines.

• Residents of Bend, Oregon turned out yesterday to stall an ICE bus containing undocumented immigrants who had committed the crime of… existing. A standoff that began in the afternoon lasted into the early morning hours, as Border Patrol agents arrived on the scene at 11 pm and pepper sprayed several protesters. The agents then led the detainees out of the buses. The two men who were detained have reportedly lived in the area for over a decade. Read more in this comprehensive OPB article.

Here’s some video from the scene yesterday:

• Meanwhile, here in Portland, protests returned to the Multnomah County Justice Center last night. After a brief hiatus from police making arrests on Monday evening, cops reportedly made multiple arrests last night—and also used tear gas after declaring a riot.

Here’s police launching tear gas in front of protesters—i.e., in the direction they are dispersing—which makes total sense:

• Portland City Council voted yesterday on a new policy that will make it easier to develop duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes in Portland—including affordable ones. It’s a policy that’s been years in the making, and that advocates say will greatly increase the city’s housing stock.

• After someone threw a pipe bomb at Portland protesters on Saturday, the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) claimed to be on the case. But new information gleaned from the Oregonian suggests that police aren’t exactly prioritizing the case—even after local reporters have done most of the hard investigating work for them.

• Drought watch:

• Lately I’ve been listening to Nice White Parents, an excellent New York Times podcast about the history and challenges of school integration, and the trouble that well-intentioned but arrogant white people can cause for communities of color. Episode four is out today.

• A Trump Administration rollback of a regulation that limits methane emissions is so regressive that even the oil and gas industry opposes it, saying the new policy hinders their efforts to transition from coal to natural gas.

• Speaking of Donald Trump’s stupidity: In an interview this morning, Trump made it crystal-clear why he opposes increased funding for the US Postal Service: “Now they need that money in order to make the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said. “But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.” It’s concerning when government does shady shit behind the scenes, but now I’m realizing it’s even more concerning when they do shady shit out in the open!

• Hey Portland, you know what to do 👇

• A new language artificial intelligence called GPT-3 is “uncannily clever,” reports Vox, and indicates that computers are inching closer to passing the Turing test.

• Headline of the Day: “Herman Cain Tweets From Beyond The Grave To Attack Biden And Harris.”

Blair Stenvick is a former news reporter and culture writer for the Portland Mercury.