by Jeremiah Hayden If you appreciate the Mercury's interesting and useful news culture reporting, consider making a small monthly contribution to support our editorial team. Your donation is tax-deductible. You can also subscribe and have our papers deli vered! Good Morning, Portland: It looks pretty clear out from now until Sunday, when some showers are expected. That's the weather report, let's get to the news. 📰 IN LOCAL NEWS: Employees at Portland Community College signed a tentative agreement late Thursday that will end their two week strike, but the faculty union strike is still ongoing. If the administration and the faculty union can’t reach an agreement soon, it could put classes in jeopardy. For the roughly 350 international students studying at PCC with an F-1 visa, that would have major consequences. International students are required to stay enrolled in classes full time to remain in the US legally. Students received a letter recently advising them that if the strike carries on and classes don’t resume, those who are temporarily staying in the US on education visas will either have to transfer to a different college or leave the country. Some students have already paid their spring tuition at PCC and can’t afford to transfer. Others rely on public transportation and can’t reasonably get to classes at another community college in a different county. And while some international students could temporarily return to their home countries, others would likely be blocked from re-entering the US due to visa bans on nearly 40 countries that were recently expanded by President Trump. You can read Anna Del Savio’s latest reporting in the Mercury here. How about some good Oregon news? Klamath Tribes have recorded naturally hatched Chinook salmon for the first time in over a 100 years, according to Southern Oregon’s Jefferson Public Radio. This is great news following the largest dam removal project in the US, which was completed in September 2024. Salmon are an essential part of the Klamath Tribes’ food and cultural practices, and this is also a major win for the environment, people who think men shouldn’t jam up nature with concrete for their own self interest, and people who think it’s important to keep their word. An 1864 treaty promised the fish would survive, and now it appears they are doing fairly well! Read more here. Okay. Portland’s balloon-letter and boxed-wine boyfriend artist is planning on making his biggest work ever. This time, instead of balloons, he’s using people. And he could use your help. www.oregonlive.com/trending/202...[image or embed] — The Oregonian (@oregonian.com) March 26, 2026 at 6:11 PM Multnomah County has now linked one case of measles to a March 7 exposure in Gresham WinCo. The county says risk is low, as most Oregonians have been vaccinated against the disease, which can be quite dangerous and even fatal. The county says people may have been exposed if they were at the WinCo at 2511 S.E. First Street in Gresham between 2 pm and 5 pm on March 7. Read more from the Multnomah County Health Department here. The restaurant at the top of Big Pink, Portland’s tallest building, is here to stay for at least another five years. Portland City Grill renewed its lease this week, meaning Portlanders and tourists can still dine with the city’s best view or get there just a little too late, take in the view while searching for a table, and end up at the bar instead, wondering what it would have been like to look over the city while jamming some happy hour calamari in your face (hypothetically). The city’s business community appears split on whether downtown is a cool place to be, or whether it’s a cesspool and the only thing that can fix it is lower taxes and a city contract that pays half the salaries of the Portland Metro Chamber executives while they lobby against things that could effectively boost the downtown core. But it is nice to see a Portland landmark play the long game and openly say they rather like the city actually, thank you very much. We at the Mercury do too. Here’s more in the Oregonian. New fresh bagel shop in town! Imagine walking to your neighborhood bagel shop or taking a quick ride on the 75 for a hot bagel fresh out of the oven. No, this isn’t New York—if the bagels at Pipsqueak Bagels live up to the hype, then baked dough rings of this caliber will soon grace Southeast Portland. On April 11, Pipsqueak Bagels will open its doors at Southeast 38th and Gladstone, churning out hot bagels five days a week. The Mercury’s Katherine Chew Hamilton has a preview here. Lots of good events this weekend! For live music, check out Mercury Music Picks here, and for other arts and culture events, check out Do This, Do That, here.           View this post on Instagram                       A post shared by Portland Mercury (@portlandmercury) IN NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL NEWS: President Trump keeps saying talks with Iran are “going very well,” but NEWSFLASH: Trump cannot not tell a lie. As the US and Israel’s deadly and illegal war on Iran continues, Iran’s foreign minister has said it does not intend to open the Strait of Hormuz. Trump and Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, appear drunk on power (or in Hegseth’s case, Jägermeister) and quite vulnerable as Iran blockades the Strait of Hormuz, jacking up oil prices and threatening catastrophic consequences more broadly. Not to bury the lede, but the US-based human rights group HRANA said the US and Israel have killed at least 3,300 people, roughly half of whom are civilians and children. Read the latest, here. An ICE whistleblower is speaking out about lowered training standards for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents under President Trump.           View this post on Instagram                       A post shared by Democracy Now! (@democracynow) Trump said Thursday that he’s going to sign an executive order directing new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin to immediately pay TSA agents amid a congressional standoff over DHS funding. The Guardian noted that “(t)he US president did not state where the funding to pay the agents would come from,” but TSA agents have continued working without pay with the risk of missing their second consecutive paycheck by Friday—totaling $1 billion in pay. Meanwhile, ICE agents are hanging around airports, reportedly “not doing anything” but sucking up all the money the federal government used to allocate toward having a society. The Senate passed a DHS funding package that excludes ICE in a rare overnight session, and the House will have to take it up as soon as Friday to end the partial government shutdown. Any real opposition party might see Trump on his heels and try to knock him over (as a metaphor, hi Kash 👋), but what the American people really care about is decorum. Speaking of Kash Patel: Who could have seen this coming? Iran linked hackers break into FBI’s chief’s personal email account: “A Justice Department official confirmed to Reuters that Patel's emails were compromised but did ⁠not go into detail.” Via Reuters[image or embed] — Michael Derby (@michaelsderby.bsky.social) March 27, 2026 at 7:31 AM I think we all know Wikipedia is not a primary source that students or journalists can use for truthful, verifiable writing. But it appears Wikipedia itself has raised the bar higher than FAR TOO MANY news organizations whose executives seem to think AI can produce informative work. The crowd-sourced info site is banning AI-generated content altogether after its editors became overwhelmed having to sift through AI slop. Maybe there’s something for news executives to learn from this, or from the recent announcement that Buzzfeed is nearing bankruptcy after it went all in on AI, etc. Anyway, good for Wikipedia. The people do not want this stuff. 404 Media reports on the move, here. after much deliberation and giving AI the benefit of the doubt, Wikipedia editors have had enough of AI slop. New policy bans LLM generated content, periodt www.404media.co/wikipedia-ba...[image or embed] — Emanuel Maiberg (@emanuelmaiberg.bsky.social) March 26, 2026 at 9:15 AM In related news: This is not journalism. www.wsj.com/business/med...[image or embed] — Jerad Walker (@jeradwalker.bsky.social) March 26, 2026 at 9:11 PM If you're traveling this weekend, maybe dad was right after all.           View this post on Instagram                       A post shared by The Onion (@theonion) ...read more read less