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Good morning, Portland! Have you copped a sweet limited-edition Mercury poster yet?
Here are the headlines.
• Campaign funding is turning out to be a hot topic in this year's local elections. The latest twist: A Sam Adams-supporting PAC is facing a complaint for not disclosing its top donors on a campaign mailer.
And here's another bit of campaign funding drama:
Wheeler has publicly applauded the Open & Accountable Elections program, despite using his less-monied opponents' reliance on it to undermine the program in campaign emails. https://t.co/mZ1roo2irw
— Alex Zielinski (@alex_zee) May 11, 2020
• Speaking of the campaign, we're now just one week away from Election Day! If you've yet to turn in your ballot, make sure you do so before it's too late.
• Anthony Fauci and other medical experts are testifying remotely before the Senate this morning, warning that reopening too early could result in "needless suffering." Check out their full remarks here.
• Meanwhile in Congress: Democrats are pushing for more aid for states struggling during COVID-19, but Republicans haven't quite warmed up to the idea yet.
• COVID-19 is having an outsized impact on communities of color—which means that could result in them being even more undercounted in the US Census than usual. That's important because federal funding for cultural-specific services is distributed according to Census results.
• Too bad it doesn't work :/
Gresham man accused of smuggling misbranded chloroquine from China for resale during coronavirus pandemic https://t.co/TAxxJW5rLS pic.twitter.com/lYJczUXpWH
— The Oregonian (@Oregonian) May 11, 2020
• An Oregon law prohibits jury trials from pausing completely during the COVID-19 pandemic. That's putting jurors, defendants, and everyone involved in the criminal court system at greater risk of contracting the virus.
• The Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center was the setting of a coronavirus recent outbreak, with 17 people testing positive for COVID-19, 14 of them being staffers. Get more quick COVID-19 headlines like this in our daily roundups.
• Quibi, that short-form content streaming app that you kept seeing commercials for but had trouble believing was actually a real thing, is not living up to its creator's expectations. Jeffrey Katzenberg told the New York Times that "I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus. Everything.”
• I couldn't possibly try to explain what this article is about, but it made me laugh harder than anything else I saw yesterday, so here:
an incredible time to be alive https://t.co/OdxhHREqfv
— Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg) May 11, 2020