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when you look over the longer history of what’s been going on in Portland — there’s something else happening. It’s not just the protests. It is not just covid-19. There is something else going on in Portland.”

Henning and others say crime was rising in the city before the pandemic shut it down and before Floyd died in Minneapolis with a White police officer’s knee on his neck. From 2019 to 2020, the number of homicides nearly doubled, something Henning called “unheard of” in Portland. This followed years with some of the nation’s lowest crime rates for a city its size.

“So these perpetrators, my guess, were coming of age, were in elementary and middle school right around the Great Recession,” said Brian Renauer, director of the Criminal Justice Policy Research Institute at Portland State. “Now they’re in their early to mid-20s. So what we’re seeing is the outgrowth of a breakdown in the family, in the economy, in those neighborhoods they came out of, if this is very much a homegrown phenomenon.”

President Joe Biden’s Justice Department is defending its use of an anti-riot statute that critics say is racist — a tool the Trump-era DOJ made aggressive use of to pursue some of those accused of violence in connection with last year’s racial justice protests.

“Constitutional statutory analysis begins with the statute’s plain language, not its provenance,” the brief prosecutors filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Portland, Ore., says. Spokespeople for the Justice Department could not say on Monday whether senior officials in Washington had approved the arguments submitted in Oregon late last week.

The government’s detailed new defense of the law came in the case against Kevin Phomma, an Oregon man charged with assaulting police officers last August during a protest outside a Portland Immigration and Customs Enforcement building.

crimped construct leaves no room for the very different perspective of someone like architect Charles Kelley in Portland, Oregon

“Portland,” Kelley said, “has become responsible for setting the frame for how China will look at urbanism for the next 50 years.”

consult with cities around the world to develop sustainable communities through everything from promoting renewable energy to opening bike lanes.

Bracing for the possibility of political violence stemming from Tuesday’s election, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown is declaring a state of emergency in the Portland area

It’s the second time in two months that the governor has declared an emergency in preparation for possible violence.

“I want to be very, very clear that voter intimidation and political violence will not be tolerated,” Brown said.

PORTLAND, Ore. — Calling on election officials to “count every vote,” protesters marched through the streets of several American cities on Wednesday in response to President Trump’s aggressive effort to challenge the vote count in Tuesday’s presidential election.

In Minneapolis, protesters blocked a freeway, prompting arrests. In Portland, hundreds gathered on the waterfront to protest the president’s attempted interventions in the vote count as a separate group protesting the police and urging racial justice surged through downtown, smashing shop windows and confronting police officers and National Guard troops.

In Detroit, another group of pro-Trump poll watchers gathered earlier in the day outside a ballot-counting center, demanding that officials “stop the count” of ballots after the Trump campaign filed suit to halt the cou

former acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said the president deserves some of the blame for the words he used last Wednesday before his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, but took no stand on removing him from office.

"The president's words matter and they do," Wolf told ABC News Wednesday. "He certainly has some level of responsibility for at least the words that he said."

Wolf, who is leaving the department this week, said when he first saw the images on TV of rioters at the Capitol, he though they were "sickening and disturbing" and that it reminded him "in a little different manner" of what occurred in Portland, Oregon, over the summer.

Rural Oregon’s LostProsperity Gives Standoffa Distressed Backdrop

a lifelong resident who has lost his job twice and has filed for bankruptcy once, said that was not the case anymore. He now works for the state as a prison guard, a job he said he hated.

“You do what you have to do to stay alive,”

Before Breonna Taylor's name became synonymous with police violence against Black Americans, she was an emergency medical technician in Louisville, Ky.The 26-year-old Black woman's friends and family say she was beloved, and relished the opportunity to brighten someone else's day.

Exactly one year ago, Louisville police gunned her down in her home. Now, her name is a ubiquitous rallying cry at protests calling for police reforms, and many social justice advocates point to her story as an example of how difficult it can be to hold police accountable for violent acts. The Louisville incident unfolded during a botched narcotics raid, when officers forced their way into her apartment in the early morning hours of March 13, 2020. Taylor was not the target of the raid and the suspect police were searching for was not at Taylor's home.

A year after Taylor's death, none of the officers who fired their service weapons — a total of 32 rounds — face criminal charges directly over Taylor's killing. At least three officers with connections to the raid have been terminated from the force.

Today, he and a partner run a small startup in Portland, Ore., called Leaders Become Legends. They mentor people involved with gun violence and connect them with companies who are hiring for green jobs, like solar panel installation companies and recycling facilities.

Through Leaders Become Legends, Rouse has been working with a local energy company to assemble and install solar panels. He says the most important skill he's gained in this program is not technical; it's how to compartmentalize.

In the last year, Portland, Ore., — like much of the country — has seen a devastating rise in gun violence. Homicide rates here are higher than they've been in two decades.

President Donald Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani has been working to bolster conspiratorial claims that left-wing agitators played a dominant role in the last week's Capitol riot.

Giuliani claimed in a tweet on Friday that has since been removed by Twitter that the Capitol siege was carried out "by groups like ANTIFA trained to riot."

He also claimed that the riot was something "that the President had nothing to do with."

That was when Trump supporters descended on a polling location in Fairfax, Va., and sought to disrupt early voting there by forming a line that voters had to circumvent and chanting, “Four more years!”This was no rogue group. This was no random occurrence. This was an omen — and a harrowing one at that.

Republicans are planning to have tens of thousands of volunteers fan out to voting places in key states, ostensibly to guard against fraud but effectively to create a climate of menace.

bragged to Sean Hannity about all the “sheriffs” and “law enforcement” who would monitor the polls on his behalf. At a rally in North Carolina, he told supporters: “Be poll watchers when you go there. Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do.”

“This guy was a violent criminal, and the U.S. Marshals killed him,” Trump said. “And I will tell you something — that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this.”

During his interview with Pirro that aired Saturday night, the President also threatened militaristic crackdowns on any potential “riots” that break out on November 3 if he were to win reelection.

“We’ll put them down very quickly if they do that,” Trump told Pirro. “We have the right to do that. We have the power to do that, if we want.”

the Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement.

Mr. Caputo and a top aide had routinely worked to revise, delay or even scuttle the core health bulletins of the C.D.C. to paint the administration’s pandemic response in a more positive light.

Joseph R. Biden Jr., would refuse to concede, leading to violence.

When people look back on this surreal election year, I suspect they will see plague as the core actor. If you take a normal, functioning society and then force it to go underground for months, freezing it in place, forcing its members into long and unnatural mutual isolation, suspending the usual ways in which people make a living, ratcheting up financial insecurity … well, that’s a recipe for serious social upheaval.

it strikes me that this medical achievement doesn’t resolve the psychological trauma, the suspension of normality, the anxiety of an invisible enemy. It merely diverts it away from the illness itself toward broader social and political grievances. I don’t think you can fully explain the sudden increase in intensity of the social justice cult, for example, and its explosion in our streets and in our media in the last couple of months, without taking account of this. I don’t just mean the pent-up plague-driven frustration of young people, who, often forced to live at home with their parents, took the opportunity to finally get out, get together and do something, after the horrifying murder of George Floyd. I mean the more general frustration and despair of a generation with a gloomy and unknowable economic future—suddenly finding shape and voice in a simple, clarion call to reshape all of society. 

I wrote about the Flagellants in the essay—a new group of fanatical, radical penitents who challenged and mocked the church authorities during the Black Death, whipping themselves bloody in large crowds across Germany, calling everyone to account for their sins. It’s the same dynamic now: a movement to use a plague to cleanse ourselves of the past and indict the entire community for its iniquity

critics of the “war on terror” under Bush might point out, as Jamelle Bouie did, that building up a massive militarized force such as DHS has always invited overreaching and authoritarian abuses of the kind we’re seeing now, and that they should prompt a rethink of DHS’s fundamental mission and makeup.

Of course, the fact that two of Bush’s homeland security chiefs — both of whom were involved in prosecuting that war on terror — are now condemning what’s happening might also be read as a sign of how far Trump has strayed into such abuses.

Chertoff suggested to me that DHS officials might ask themselves whether they have a similar duty, now that Trump has turned to them to create the TV imagery he thinks will help him get reelected.