Have you bowed to the frigid sun yet? It’s dry. It’s still dangerously cold. Especially for the most vulnerable among us. And that means more warming centers and shelters are open, along with a promise that no one in need during this early cold snap will be turned away.
The entrepreneurs behind Hempstalk have already been refused a permit for next year‘s hoped-for marijuana festival at Waterfront Park—amid reports from undercover cops and others that pot-selling and pot-smoking ran rampant despite promises that wouldn’t be the case. Hempstalk’s promoters are now asking city council for relief for the second year in a row.
Some of the most damning emails detailing the intensely close role Governor Kitzhaber’s campaign staff played in the Cover Oregon debacle, reported by Willamette Week this (willamette) week, were leaked and not turned over as part of public records requests, the Oregonian has reported, suggesting some staffers have an ax to grind.
A 15-year-old caught chucking bricks at cyclists last year in Northeast Portland—hitting one cyclist in the face—was sentenced to four years in a youth prison after pleading guilty to assault.
Midterm-slain Congressional Democrats have added Senator Elizabeth Warren, the firebrand progressive from Massachusetts, to a leadership team that’s otherwise the same as it’s been for many long years.
Looming presidential action on immigration has newly empowered Congressional Republicans in a bit of a state. Arch-conservatives are salivating over the prospect of a government shutdown—upsetting their “centrist”-minded colleagues, who haven’t forgotten that seeming reasonability was among the biggest reasons the party strengthened its hand this month.
Something else bound to annoy the GOP? Fresh off the United States’ climate-change accord with China, President Obama is now pledging $2.5 billion to help poor countries around the world do their part for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Nearly two-dozen Walmart workers in California staged a sit-in protest over their working conditions (and the company’s unheeded edicts about providing fresh meat and produce) before blocking a road to hammer home their point. They were all arrested.
The American spying apparatus may soon include small airplanes outfitted with “dirtboxes” that pretend to be cell towers and suck up huge amounts of phone data from an unsuspecting populace.
The Rosetta comet probe will die, its batteries expended, if it can’t manage to prod itself into a more sunlit part of the comet’s surface and let its solar sails drink deeply from all the brightness.
Another Ebola patient, a surgeon from Maryland working in Sierra Leone, is being flown in for treatment at Nebraska’s super Ebola hospital. (And, yes, the surgeon’s paying for the evacuation all by himself.)
The Islamic State has put its leader on tape for a 17-minute speech, days after reports said he was injured in an allied attack. It’s his first since the bombing began. His band of insurgents, soldiers and bureaucrats, sprawling over swaths of Syria and Iraq, are now planning to mint their own coins.
North Korea is sending an envoy to Russia, clearly hoping some common interests might make for the beginning of a beautiful new friendship.
Have you cried yet this morning? No? Here you go!
A man caught riding the New York subway naked was too drunk to realize he’d been photographed by the New York Post, which promptly put his picture on its front page. “I like to be naked. It turns me on. I wish I could do it all the time. I would if I could if I wouldn’t get in trouble.”
NOTHING ABOUT THIS IS UNCHASTE AND HARMFUL.