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Good morning, Portland! How are we all doing the day after the first snowfall of the season? Merry? Bitter? Indifferent? Wherever you fall on the spectrum, be advised that we won’t be seeing white flakes fall from the sky again for a while. This week is only promising cold weather and rain. Wool socks, assemble! 

- On Saturday, the volunteer commission responsible for proposing changes to the Portland City Charter met to approve a slate of new charter amendments. As the Mercury’s Isabella Garcia reports, amendments involving environmental justice, a hotel tax, a city public records advocate, and more are now moving forward to council approval. 

- Public records show that controversial gunshot detection tech company ShotSpotter has been essentially offered a no-bid contract to run an upcoming pilot program in Portland. It's not illegal, but it certainly feels... not good?

- A federal judge will decide early this week whether or not she will block a voter-approved gun law days before it goes into effect. In a Friday hearing, U.S. District Judge Karin J. Immergut heard arguments in favor of issuing a temporary restraining order to keep Measure 114—a law that would require anyone purchasing a gun to get a permit first and limit high-capacity magazines— from going live on December 8. On Sunday, Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum urged Immergut to postpone the permitting piece of the measure by two months. Stay tuned for the ruling. 

- Providence announced Friday that its neonatal intensive care unit at the Portland Medical Center has asked the state to allow NICU nurses to care for more patients as Portland sees a surge of children and infants seriously ill with respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. Providence is the fourth Oregon hospital to request the state allow for “crisis care” standards at its hospital amid a RSV spike. 

-Weeee sports, yay!

- Some 40,000 homes are without power in North Carolina's Moore County after two power substations were damaged by gunfire Saturday night. The power outage is being investigated as a targeted “criminal occurrence.” 

- The US Supreme Court is poised to hear a case that could loosen the current oversight tools used to prevent district gerrymandering in states. The North Carolina case before SCOTUS questions whether the courts can intervene when a political party believes another party has drawn politically skewed congressional district maps. This is a big deal, since it’s rare for the US Supreme Court to interfere with state courts (and several conservative justices have expressed interest in limiting state courts’ powers).

- Today in boys with nothing to be proud of:

- Railroad workers are understandably pissed off at Congress for intervening on behalf of their robber baron bosses to undermine labor contract negotiations, ending the threat of a strike and effectively axing any hope of paid sick days for the country’s rail workers. Here’s a look at what kind of tradeoffs these workers currently have to make without sick days. 

- Weeks after American Shanquella Robinson's suspicious death in Baja California and Mexican authorities are now investigating the incident as femicide—a term for gender-based violence. According to NPR, the practice of femicide “is on the rise in Mexico.” 

- Last week, it was Hawaii’s Mauna Loa. This Monday, the volcano of the moment is Semeru, the tallest mountain on the Indonesian island of Java. Thousands of islanders are evacuating as Semeru spews hot ash into the air.Â