OREGON LIFE: Sometimes you’re out on a smoke break and a renegade bull shows up to gore you. That bull pays for your suffering with its life.
Think the housing market is bad? Try snatching up some of Portland’s sweet, sweet warehouse space, which is being mauled by big dreamers readying themselves for recreational marijuana.
The school board for Portland Public Schools, mulling important new rules that will determine which students can go to which schools, will take another shot at voting on guidelines tonight, after the last attempt was interrupted by protesters with Don’t Shoot Portland.
Bad Blazers News: LaMarcus Aldridge messed up his hand in last night’s game. Good Blazers News: This also happened.
You might have heard yesterday was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and, given the last six months or so, it was a particularly fraught one, with protests erupting around the country. There was also the usual stuff: No mail, Twitter racists being calmly, lovingly backed down from their garbage (click through all the photos), and local leaders talking about how much further we need to go to achieve King’s vaunted dreams.
Some of that stuff doesn’t quite jibe with seven words you’re probably going to hear tonight: “The state of our Union is strong.” (That is, unless the presidential speech writer decided to go with a more-creative phrasing under the spell of all that scotch).
Still, squint a bit—like the Associated Press has done for this brief article—and things might be said to look “less bad.”
That certainly isn’t the outlook in West Texas, where a population reliant on Mother Oil is readying itself for the cold realities of an oil glut.
Another Texan making somber plans: outgoing Gov. Rick Perry, who straight-facedly says he has no idea if he’ll run for president again.
And maybe that’s true. Perry appears nowhere in this story about Republican presidential hopefuls who happily grovel and curtsy for the favor of the Koch brothers.
Nothing surprises, these days, but it’s worth noting that British intelligence agents have been snooping through the emails of some of the world’s top journalists.
This is shady: An Argentine prosecutor who’d just accused the country’s president of sheltering Iranian terrorists, and was getting ready to testify against her, shows up shot to death in his locked apartment. It looks like a textbook suicide, and no one really buys that it is.
Terrible Syrian President Bashar al-Assad can thank ISIS for this much: Suddenly people aren’t so set on seeing him punished for his likely war crimes. Bigger fish and all that.
ISIS’ latest ugliness, by the way, is threatening to execute two Japanese men unless it gets $200 million in mere hours.
Today’s sunset: 5 pm! That feels significant!
This guy is fast running out of time.