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Good Morning Portland! It’s another cloudy day here in the PNW, perfect for sipping coffee and staring broodingly out the window of a kitschy cafe, contemplating the next chapter of your novel. Anyway, here’s the news!

Sinclair Broadcasting is getting a lot of shit for a media-bashing segment that news anchors across the country were required to read on air, and for some reason the president felt it necessary to weigh in. Locally, one brave KATU employee is anonymously sharing internal documents demanding that Sinclair reporters stay silent.

We’ve been tariffed, ya’ll. China has retaliated against American aluminum and steel tariffs with tariffs of its own. Analysts think the 128 goods on the list specifically target Trump’s base, but that hasn’t stopped the prez from threatening brand new tariffs, this time against China’s tech industry. Anyone else smell the beginnings of a trade war?

Teachers are striking in Kentucky and Oklahoma to protest cuts to benefits, wages and school funding.

The Trump administration is now
rating immigration judges based on quotas, requiring them to clear 700 cases each year to maintain a “satisfactory” rating. Jeff Sessions says it’ll clear the backlog of cases, while some on Twitter are calling it a “deportation machine.”

Apparently less pollution is a bad thing, according to the new EPA (Is it Environmental Protection Agency? Or Environmental Pollution Agency? I can’t seem to remember), which decided to lower the standards for auto emissions and is now suing California to try and force it to lower them too. Gov. Kate Brown and Mayor Ted Wheeler wrote a joint statement opposing that bullshit (alongside our coastal neighbors) in response.

The markets are dipping after months and months of aggressive and unprecedented growth, a shift that NYT described thusly: “The Trump Bump is becoming the Trump Slump.” Some says it’s related to the trade war rumblings mentioned earlier.

via GIPHY

Trump’s bombastic tweeting about immigration has swiftly turned into policy changes, including proposals that strip protections from children and allow families to be detained for longer time periods.

General Sisi won nearly 100% of the vote in Egypt’s elections, a landslide that the Egyptian government is calling “VERY DEMOCRATIC, WE PROMISE.”

For Autism Awareness Day yesterday, Qatar released information about a new technology that can diagnose autism in just a few minutes.

In local news, County Commissioner Loretta Smith wants to send homeless people to jail. They won’t be locked in, of course, just two hours away from downtown and any services.

Students at Ockley Green Middle School protested yesterday over the removal of one of their favorite teachers from the classroom. Chris Riser, the man in question, allegedly led a “dangerous” student protest in February that commemorated the death of Quanice Hayes, a 17-year-old black kid who was gunned down by police in 2017.

Now if you feel like dancing in the street on your way to work (or just want to watch a music video with an enormous dancing robot), here’s one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite electroswing bands.