Was this murder? Or a horrible accident? An Olympia man was found bleeding with a head wound on West Burnside, near the Burnside Bridge, after paying some friends in town a visit. He also was found, the cops say, without his pants and wallet. He died later, and now his family is wondering why the Portland Police Bureau won’t treat it like a potential homicide.
And let’s keep it lurid. Yesterday’s stabbing a few blocks north of city hall killed a 43-year-old chef, about to start at a Pearl District restaurant, who’d been staying at a relative’s condo in the KOIN tower. He’d apparently gone out to a concert Wednesday night.
You remember the street fee, right? The one that’s likely going to be reborn as a street tax? There’d been hope, as we reported in Hall Monitor this week, that a formal proposal might emerge as soon as today. That’s been pushed off, along with plans to first air that proposal on November 12. A vote now looms the day before Thanksgiving.
Starbucks is a benevolent less deity. The coffee chain has selected Portland as a test market for a new pre-payment option using smart phones. You order on your phone, you pay on your phone, and then you walk over and pick up your waiting order.
That’s as good a transition to Ebola as any. The United States now has a “czar” who’s in charge of leading the country’s response to the virus’ first tentatively exploring tendrils, and who can take the fall in case that response is incompetent and ineffective.
The pandemonium and panic are unceasing. A Texas health care worker who might have handled an Ebola sample has been preemptively isolated after it was realized she was cavorting—still symptom-free!—on a cruise ship.
The apologies and mea culpas also are unceasing. Looking over the despair and destruction that’s been rained down upon West Africa because of an unserious international response to the outbreak’s early growth, the World Health Organization now says it’s very sorry for not having done a better job at its job.
Who’s pulling the police strings in Hong Kong? No one should be surprised that the answer is Beijing. China is in a bit of a pickle here. Do they crack down with mainland-style vengeance, scaring off the financial markets that make Hong Kong such a money-maker for the Communist Party? Or do they back off and embolden everyone else under the party’s tightly pressing thumb to think they might rise up, too?
Stop-and-frisk policing, which lives in a slightly more benign form in Portland, leaves behind lingering anxiety and trauma in the young men, often African American, whom it targets.
The son of Joe Biden apparently hews closer to America’s preferred renegade portrayal of Joe Biden than the actual Joe Biden. Hunter Biden has left the Navy Reserve because he had some cocaine.
Death stalked a South Korean pop concert the other day, after a large ventilation grate beneath the crowd gave way, sending 16 people plunging some 60 feet to their dooms. The band kept going for a little while, until someone finally realized what had happened.
In Paris, a Napoleonic war memorial is sharing space with a 24-foot buttplug. For art! It’s green!
I FEEL LIKE YOU MIGHT HAVE SEEN THIS BEFORE. SO WHAT. YOU SHOULD SEE IT AGAIN. IT’S HAPPY.
A council vote on a controversial measure the day before Thanksgiving? The one work day of the year when you can guarantee that many Portlanders will be out of town, and people who are still here aren’t going to be paying attention to the news that evening or the following day? That’s a hell of a coincidence…
Even if you love every idea City Council has, at some point, you have to accept that meetings in which invited guests who agree with whatever the proposal get to eat up the bulk of the time at the dais and votes purposefully set up on days to draw the least amount of attention is no way to govern in a democracy.