by Taylor Griggs 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, th ere is no us. Thanks for your support!  Good morning, Portland! I hope your Wednesday mornings (plural because I recognize your individuality) are going swimmingly. Speaking of swimming, you might get a little wet today if you spend time outside. Temperatures are set to be in the low 50s with intermittent drizzle.  ALSO! If you haven't yet purchased your tickets for the 2025 Geniuses of Comedy show—at Revolution Hall tomorrow night!—I highly recommend doing that at this here link. It's going to be a very fun show that will certainly live on in infamy for the rest of time, so you won't want to miss it.  With that, here's the news. IN LOCAL NEWS:  • The League of Oregon Cities is trying to get the state legislature to pass laws that further restrict homeless encampments across Oregon, or strengthen existing camping bans. The organization is publicizing a recent survey of 800 Oregon voters that indicated broad dissatisfaction with local and statewide efforts to tackle homelessness. The results also show almost 60 percent of people who responded to the survey said they support a ban on public camping even without the promise of available shelter. It's troubling that an ostensibly ideologically neutral city advocacy organization would present such results as evidence in their quest to lobby for their legislative agenda, and it should tell you something about the bills they want to pass. For the record, a survey of 800 voters doesn't necessarily indicate statewide sentiment about any given topic. But even if it was politically popular to kick homeless people out of camps without any available recourse, that doesn't mean the state should do it.  Regardless, it looks unlikely that the bills the League of Oregon Cities is advocating for—which include a bill that would make it much more difficult to sue a city over camping rules, and give cities more authority to ban camping in various places—will get very far in the current legislative session. According to this OPB article, legislators are noncommittal about the bill's prospects, and many local leaders—including Mayor Keith Wilson—don't support changing state law. We'll see if anything else transpires on this front, but I found it notable that a group like the League of Oregon Cities is supporting such a punitive bill that would give people less power to fight back against potentially illegal camping bans. It's also worth pointing out, as the Oregon Law Center's Sybil Hebb did in the OPB article, that it's pretty common knowledge that Oregonians are "frustrated with their elected leaders" about homelessness. We shouldn't reframe that common knowledge to support draconian policies that people don't want.  • In other Oregon Legislature news, gun control advocates testified in support of a state bill that modifies Measure 114, a voter-approved gun control law that has spent almost two years tied up in court. The bill, House Bill 3075-1, would make a few changes to Measure 114 (increasing gun permit fees, for instance) and launch major components of the law. Opponents of the measure, meanwhile, also made their voices heard in a Monday hearing for the bill. One major group opposing the gun control policy is called Women for Gun Rights, whose members say women should own guns in order to protect themselves. Of course, this ignores the fact that gun violence presents a unique danger to women, particularly those in abusive relationships with men. Nearly all intimate partner homicides in the US are committed with a gun, with women making up the vast majority of victims, and this trend is sadly rising. So don't be tricked by organizations weaponizing "female empowerment" to advocate against policies that would make a marked difference in reducing violence against women.  Even if House Bill 3075-1 passes, Measure 114's enactment depends on if the Oregon Supreme Court takes up the Oregon Court of Appeals' recent decision in favor of the measure, which could tie the policy up in court for several more years. If not, gun advocates still have nearly a month to appeal before the Court of Appeals can make its final judgement, allowing the gun control policy to go into effect.  • This summer, Portland Sunday Parkways—the wildly popular open streets event hosted by the Portland Bureau of Transportation—will return to Southwest Portland, Northeast Cully, and East Portland, where its been held annually since 2022. But there's something new coming, too—in addition to those three Sunday Parkways days (which will take place in May, June, and July, respectively), September will see a fourth event in downtown Portland. This is pretty exciting, and will hopefully help people visualize what downtown Portland would look and feel like without so much car traffic clogging up the place. Stay tuned for more info as summer draws closer.  Two Portland city councilors, Loretta Smith & Mitch Green, are exploring ways to provide $100M in new money for sidewalks, paved streets in east & Sothwest PDX. The Transporation Bureau is currently in the red and has a $6 billion maintenance backlog.  www.oregonlive.com/politics/202...[image or embed] — Shane Dixon Kavanaugh (@shanedkavanaugh.bsky.social) March 18, 2025 at 4:58 PM • Speaking of the virtues of car-free streets: A new pedestrian plaza is coming to the intersection of Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard and 37th Avenue this summer, turning a busy commercial intersection into a peaceful place for dining, public art, and even charging your phones with a public solar kiosk. (This is the future liberals want.) While I initially hoped the plaza would be ON Hawthorne, it will actually be located on 37th Avenue, just north of Hawthorne, right by Buffalo Exchange and Straight from New York Pizza. Still, it's a great place for a car-free plaza. While it's only funded on a temporary basis now, I suspect its popularity this summer will encourage visitors and adjacent business owners to rally behind it sticking around longer. Very exciting news, indeed.  The pilot pedestrian plaza on the popular street is part of a city program.[image or embed] — The Oregonian (@oregonian.com) March 18, 2025 at 8:00 PM   • From Astrid Sonne and her "lush minimalism" at Holocene (Friday, March 21) to Kim Deal at Revolution Hall (Sunday, March 23) to the Linda Lindas at the Crystal Ballroom (Monday, March 24), there's plenty of great live music to check out in Portland this week. Find out all about those shows and more in this week's Mercury Music Picks, wisely selected by our keen and discerning music editor.    Even without star Kelli Maroney in attendance, this double feature of Chopping Mall and Night of the Comet is perfection. Content warning for robot violence and exploding heads.[image or embed] — Portland Mercury (@portlandmercury.com) March 18, 2025 at 3:21 PM   IN NATIONAL/WORLD NEWS:  • More than 400 people were killed (and hundreds more injured) by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza on Tuesday. The bombardment marked one of the deadliest days for Gazans in the 17 months of near-constant Israeli attacks. For people in Gaza, who were already dealing with deathly, widespread famine and water shortages after Israel halted aid, the attacks were a surprise after a two-month cease-fire. Many people were killed in their sleep, hungry, before the early morning meal ahead of the day's Ramadan fast. According to UNICEF spokesperson Rosalia Bollen, people felt uneasy in the days before the attacks, but this was the "nightmare scenario." “It’s just heartbreaking that it is materializing right now and that it is shattering the last piece of hope that people had," Bollen said.    Israel says it ended the two-month ceasefire when it launched Tuesday's airstrikes in Gaza which killed more than 400 people and injured hundreds more.[image or embed] — NPR (@npr.org) March 18, 2025 at 11:19 AM   • The legal decisions against the Trump administration's many unlawful (and terrible) orders are piling up. In one of the latest high-profile cases, a federal judge in Washington D.C. issued a preliminary injunction against the administration for its ban on transgender US military troops, temporarily blocking the Department of Defense from enacting the policy. The judge, Ana C. Reyes, spoke harshly against the ban and its implications. Reyes said there's "cruel irony" in the fact that the ban seeks to deny rights "thousands of transgender members have sacrificed—some risking their lives—to ensure for others." • Regarding the mounting legal decisions against Trump's illegal policies...yesterday, the president called for a federal judge to be impeached after he made a decision Trump found unfavorable. The judge, James Boasberg, is the one who ordered the temporary halt to Trump's order to invoke the 1798 Enemy Aliens Act and deport alleged Venezuelan gang members without any semblance of due process. According to Trump, Boasberg is a "Radical Left Lunatic," a "troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama." 😑  Even Chief Justice John Roberts had to disagree with his main man Trump on this one, saying in a written statement that "impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreements concerning a judicial decision." A tepid response, to be sure, but I guess some opposition from the Supreme Court is better than nothing. We really are not doing well here, folks! • Violent bullfighting has been banned in Mexico City. A new policy, which lawmakers voted overwhelmingly (61-1) in support of yesterday, will prohibit the killing of bulls and using potentially harmful sharp objects in the fighting ring. The law also sets time limits on how long bulls are allowed to be in the ring. While animal rights advocates celebrated the bill's passage, saying it's a big step forward to protect bulls, others aren't so happy. Even though bullfighting is still permitted under the policy, some industry supporters say the bill will be economically harmful to the financially lucrative bullfighting business, which creates hundreds of thousands of direct and indirect jobs across Mexico. But, once again, bullfighting will still be allowed—just in a way that hopefully reduces the hundreds of thousands of annual bullfighting deaths.  • Finally...some cute bears. TTYL! View this post on Instagram A post shared by Department of the Interior (@usinterior) ...read more read less