So much news today, y’all.
Let’s lead off, though, with the first thing I saw in my inbox this morning: An email from Erik Henriksen, alerting me to a new Jaden Smith app. Released just today, and promising “music you wont hear ANYWHERE else,” it’s a safe bet Erik is one of the 93 people and counting who’ve given the “Jaden Experience” a 4+ star rating. I will not be downloading.
On to important things, then. How badly have you yearned to learn the secrets of Portland’s “Where’s Waldo Bandit,” who made a splash back in 2010 with nothing more than a pithy note (threatening a bank teller’s life) and a striped sweater? He looks like a nebbish! But he’s robbing banks! The Oregonian has a lengthy profile. But who will tell of the “Nerdy Bandit’s” exploits?
How you liking TriMet these days? Its board is pleased as punch, and will probably kick up General Manager Neil McFarlane’s compensation to around $290,000 this week.
A contingent of Grant High School students taped some sort of sex act in some part of the school. What those acts were—and whether they took place in a basement, or locker room, or restroom—is not clear. Cops are looking into it.
You should help catch whoever set a homeless man’s tent on fire in Forest Grove on Saturday (which was frigid).
The biggest buzz today? It’s climate change. Like this Oregonian piece about how a new natural gas terminal in Coos Bay would be the state’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, if approved.
Or the frantic efforts of a Louisiana Democrat to pull together the votes to pass a Keystone XL pipeline bill in the US Senate. That bill is almost certain to die on the president’s desk (climate change is his key issue, these days), but his advisers tell the New York Times he’d consider using the pipeline “as a bargaining chip” down the line.
Or the fact that all this striving and fighting could be for naught, if India doesn’t get on board and try to curb its coal use, which it has no intention of doing.
Missouri’s battening down the hatches for warfare, declaring a state of emergency yesterday in advance of a grand jury’s decision on whether to charge Ferguson officer Darren Wilson in the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown. Is this, some asked, an admission that Wilson has no chance of being charged? Fair question.
A pair of Palestinians killed four Israeli rabbis at a Jerusalem synagogue this morning, terrorizing their victims with knives and axes. It is not, as you can imagine, helping an environment still tense from recent conflict. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to “respond with a heavy hand to the brutal murder of Jews who came to pray and were eliminated by despicable murderers.” He’s already ordered the attackers’ homes destroyed (they were killed by police).
Deaths by terrorism ballooned last year, rising 60 percent according to a new study. Pretty much all of that was in the Middle East. Nigeria, too.
The Oregonian‘s editorial board says rideshare service Uber should come to Portland. An Uber executive, meanwhile, says Uber should hire teams to dig up dirt on people like the Oregonian‘s editorial board.
What do you get for the man who already has a swastika tattooed on his forehead? Charles Manson’s found another wife.
Why haven’t we been talking about this? Who dropped the ball? Was it me?