The Mercury provides news and fun every single day—but your help is essential. If you believe Portland benefits from smart, local journalism and arts coverage, please consider making a small monthly contribution, because without you, there is no us. Thanks for your support!
Hul-loh Portland. We’re looking at a sunny weekend, with highs of just over 65 degrees. This will lead to people saying “suns out, buns out” like they just thought of it for the first time. You only SOBO once… so YOSOBOO, and so forth. YOSOBOOASF. Here’s the news!
IN LOCAL NEWS:
• Every time you see a number in a headline about Portland’s homicide and shooting rates, it’s worth asking: Did this number include the times when police shot someone? Because Portland Police Bureau doesn’t include people who were shot by police in their running homicide tally, so when a news source cites that data, those people are probably left out. Mercury News Editor Courtney Vaughn reports that even as the city invests in initiatives to curb gun violence, “a handful of the city’s own police officers have perpetuated gun violence on multiple occasions.”
• On Thursday, Gov. Tina Kotek signed Senate Bill 1596 into law, which makes Oregon the fourth state in the nation to guarantee consumers the “right to repair” their electronic equipment for a fair cost and on reasonable terms. Oregon Capital Chronicle reports that “only one major manufacturer opposed the bill – Apple.”
• OPB’s Ryan Haas reports that Christopher Knipe, who was sentenced last year for killing Portland activist Sean Kealiher, was “also a match for a rape kit collected in 2003.” Haas wrote on Twitter: “I discovered the DNA match buried in hundreds of pages related to the homicide of Sean Kealiher,”
In 2019, Portland police learned that convicted killer Christopher Knipe’s DNA was a match for a rape kit collected in 2003.
Despite that, police and prosecutors did not follow up with the victim.
New from me:
— Ryan Haas (@ryanjhaas) March 28, 2024
• There’s a new record in the works from Portland-based outlaw country act Jenny Don’t and the Spurs, a cumbia-forward show this weekend you cannot miss, and a rundown of which artists we’re immediately excited about on Pickathon’s 2024 show lineup. Check on it, Hear in Portland.
• I hypothesize that Editor in Chief Wm. Steven Humphrey built this week’s entire Pop Quiz PDX around the strength of the image below:
• No matter what club you carry for, our calendar team has something for you in their legendary Friday morning round-up of show that are about to go on sale. What’s about to drop you may ask? Mike Birbiglia at Newmark! Dinosaur Improv at Rev Hall! Lyle Lovett and his Large Band at McMenamins Grand Lodge 👀 🤠 ❗
IN NATIONAL / INTERNATIONAL NEWS:
• Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter has arrived, replete with a Buffalo Springfield-esque opening track, “American Requiem,” a cover of the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” and a version of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” with rewritten lyrics—because Beyoncé would never beg. While promoters would have had us all believe the current reigning queen of music would take a wholly country approach with her new album, what dropped at midnight was instead a broad album of what music industry reporter Ben Sisario calls, “a broad essay on contemporary pop music, and on the nature of genre itself.”
• Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Thursday. Back in November, a jury declared the FTX cryptocurrency exchange founder guilty of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering, which could have earned him 100 years. If he serves the whole sentence that means he’ll be paroled at 57, but like… he’s still rich right? He was ordered to forfeit 11 billion, but he’s still sort of rich right? Anyway.
• So, as it turns out, the guy who directed Men—I loved Men—directed the soon-to-be-released A24 film Civil War. Though reporter for the Stranger Vivian McCall begins her essay with the current discourse surrounding the aggrandizing and fatalistic dystopian film, what she actually gets into with this piece is a break down of just how concerned we should be over the results of a recent YouGov poll that asked more than 35,000 Americans if they supported secession. Not Succession. Secession, like from the dang union of 50 United States.
• Breaking: Electric trucks go wrrr wrrrr.
Breaking News: The Biden administration announced a regulation designed to boost sales of electric trucks. The latest in a string of ambitious climate regulations, it aims to clean up the heaviest polluters on the road. https://t.co/ffS5BRRYBB
— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 29, 2024
• There’s been a good amount of solar eclipse chatter around me, and I was thinking: Are you for real? I thought that 2017 eclipse was supposed to be special. And didn’t we just have another one in 2023? It turns out that the total eclipse is happening nowhere near us. In Portland, we can expect 22 percent totality on April 8, starting around 9:30 am and continuing til 12:20. Even though it’s not a total eclipse, NASA still doesn’t recommend looking at it.
• It’s almost Easter, and the Associated Press reports Norwegians are crossing into Sweden to buy up Swedish eggs. It’s not because Swedish eggs are better; Norway just ran out. ..because in response to concerns about overproduction of eggs, the government gave farmers incentives to produce less eggs… and then a bunch of birds got bird flu.
• Now, to battle!
Suzette Smith
Source link
