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Good morning, Portland! Okay, here’s your daily allotment of good news: Portland has to-go Boba cocktails now.
And here are the headlines.
• Post-winter-storm update: The number of Portland General Electric (PGE) customers without power had been whittled down to 24,000 by Monday afternoon—but for those still without power, there could be a long road ahead. “At this point, the repairs only bring back about 10 customers at a time,” PGE President Maria Pope said in a press conference, per OPB. “It’s really slow-going given the amount of damage.”
• A good reflection of Oregon’s dropping COVID-19 numbers:
Providence Portland has no COVID-19 patients in critical care for first time in a year https://t.co/WV05X6fbcr
— KGW News (@KGWNews) February 23, 2021
• Oregon Senator Dallas Heard—a Republican anti-masker who has voiced support for protestors who stormed the Oregon Capitol last year—has been elected chair of the state GOP. Heard’s new position reflects the extremity of the Oregon Republican Party, which also released a statement in support of the January 6 US Capitol riot last month.
• Three former US Capitol security officials—all of whom resigned in the wake of January 6—are testifying before Congress today about the clusterfuck response to a Trumpian coup attempt. The hearings are part of a larger Congressional investigation into the events of the day, which left five people dead.
• The Supreme Court will consider two voting rights cases next week—both of which have the power to essentially gut the remainder of the US Voting Rights Act, depending on how the Court votes. And considering that there’s a strong conservative majority on the Court, things aren’t looking good. At stake is the right to absentee voting, among other things.
• No more kids in cages… now it’s children in migrant facilities. 🙃🙃🙃
First migrant facility for children opens under Biden https://t.co/ADgQxIlMYU
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) February 23, 2021
• A new independent report has confirmed what many already knew: Police in Colorado had no reason to illegally stop-and-frisk Elijah McClain, place him in a chokehold, or kill him with a ketamine injection. The story of McClain’s brutal 2019 killing drew attention during nationwide racial justice protests last year.
• Worth your time:
Online sex work has grown during the pandemic — but its ease is greatly overstated and its riches are hardly evenly distributed. For this piece, my first feature for GQ, I spoke to sex workers about life, hopes, work, and money in a really rotten year https://t.co/w1nnxSOyCu
— Jenna Sauers (@jennasauers) February 23, 2021
• We’ll end with some good news: A woman who survived pediatric cancer and now works at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is set to become the youngest American in space, as part of an all-civilian space mission that will take off sometime in the next year. Welcome to the future!
