Good Morning News: Report Confirms Earthquake Environmental Threat, Downtown Portland Isn’t Dead, Team USA Starts Strong Olympics – Blogtown

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A new report says tanks holding fuel along the Willamette River could become a massive environmental disaster when the Cascadia earthquake hits. Aaron Lee

Good morning, Portland! We’re entering the last week of July (!!!) on a hot, dry note expected: Expect highs in the high ’80s to low ’90s for the rest of the week, no raindrops in sight. One way to stay cool this week: take yourself on a date to one of Portland’s independent movie theaters, and check out our post-COVID updates! Now, the news:

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Portland officials celebrated the city’s “reopening” in downtown Portland this weekend with a free Pink Martini show at Pioneer Courthouse Square and the grand opening of a new food cart. It was enough even for some companies to carefully remove the panels from their windows. I can’t help but wonder…is Portland still over?

It’s no surprise that Portland expects one of the world’s worst environmental disasters when the Great Cascadia Earthquake hits. But a new report underscores this threat, stressing the damage it can cause to fuel tanks located on the banks of the Willamette River.

Wildfires continue to burn across the West, including areas of Northern California, Idaho, Washington, Montana and, of course, southern Oregon. While officials say the spread of the sprawling Bootleg Fire in Oregon has slowed, the fires have remained less than half.

– After a public callout, Portland Brewery Bar and Bottle Shop NWIPA will change its name to North West IPA. For years, the white-owned tape used a typeface that was clearly modeled after the all-black hip-hop group of the 1990s NWA After a Black Portlander made a viral TikTok video accusing the tape of having black culture, it’s got a makeover.

Early this morning, white nationalists defaced a Portland mural depicting the faces of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmed Arbery. Then today more than a dozen people appeared to help the artist restore it. https://t.co/zIbNYdXIAM— pdxlawgrrrl (@pdxlawgrrrl) July 26, 2021

Despite what you might believe based on reactionary news headlines, Portland isn’t the only American city currently dealing with high rates of violent crime. With urban crime rates on the rise across the United States, Democrats in Congress are hoping to tackle the crisis without putting their seats at risk of a GOP victory in 2022.

Mississippi has formally asked the US Supreme Court to overturn its landmark Roe v. Wade decision protecting a person’s right to an abortion. The state’s attorneys wrote: “The conclusion that abortion is a constitutional right has no basis in text, structure, history, or tradition.” It is very likely that the matter will be considered by the Supreme Court, as justices agreed to reconsider Roe earlier this year.

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– The Olympics have begun, I think, although no one is. Team USA started the games strong, with their swimming team taking six medals on opening day, women’s soccer victory against New Zealand, and the first USA goal medals in women’s foil (fencing) and women’s taekwondo history.

Today in “Meeting the Needs of Abusive White Men”:

US fencer facing Olympic sexual assault allegations has team ‘safety plan’ to keep him away from women https://t.co/FUe7RqUu7x – BuzzFeed News (BuzzFeedNews) July 25, 2021

– A week after floods swept Germany and Belgium, China was hit by similarly devastating floods, which displaced more than a million people from their homes. Climate change is here, oh will.

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