Good Morning, News: We’ve Got a New Police Chief, But It’s Too Late to Save Your Stolen Car (It Was Crushed, Spectacularly, in Front of Capering Dogs)

So what can you expect from Portland’s soon-to-be police chief? Well, Larry O’Dea is a church-going man, who keeps a horse at his Oregon City home (though he’s publicly fretted over the costs of Portland’s perennially endangered horse patrol). And he tells the O, which sat down with O’Dea after his ascendency was announced yesterday, he’ll let his adjutants take care of the Dea-to-Dea business while he focuses on being a man of the people. Also: probably more of the same.

Literal lots of cars get crushed up on N Columbia every day, and cops now say two of that avenue’s endless scrapyards have knowingly been buying stolen vehicles for years. In what authorities call a historic indictment, two women were arrested yesterday, and eight individuals in total face racketeering charges. And there are fun details, like cops nonchalantly hanging out in the Chimney Park dog run trying to spy the (allegedly) shady enterprise.

Less than a month left of election season. Will you miss the absurdity? Like how US Sen Jeff Merkley, who’s taken every opportunity to malign his chief rival for dodging debates, is now himself dodging a debate with Monica Wehby?

Or how the guy whose job it is to tell public television viewers how to vacation is presented as a paragon of drug policy expertise?

Or how an unusually large bad batch of voter registrations have made their way to county elections officials, but there’s no way to tell who’s doing such a poor job registering voters?

It extends even to the national stage, where, the NYT tells us, President Obama is pretty much anathema to Democrats trying to win a race this mid-term, yet his vice president is welcomed by the Merkley campaign.

The Tribune follows up on the Division Street parking wars, and finds a developer who tried to ease neighbor concerns by going out of his way to build a parking lot. Only no one wanted to use it. The meters are coming, everybody. Believe it.

In Ebola News:Thomas Duncan, the first person to be diagnosed with the virus on US soil, has died.

Also: New scrutiny for people flying from West Africa into five busy, miserable US airports.

Now the Turkish government is sort of holding an imperiled Syrian border town hostage. Turkish leaders refuse to save the people of Kobani from a grisly fate at hands of ISIS unless the US agrees to do more to oppose Syrian President (and likely war criminal) Bashar al-Assad.

Speaking of those war crimes: The investigation into them goes quietly on, as teams of investigators scour the country for evidence tying Syrian officials to deadly attacks on their own people.

Twitter’s going to bat for all the racist, ill-wrought 140-character DMs out there (presumably the important or utilitarian or bashfully flirty ones, too), suing the US government for the right to disclose how much NSA scrutiny the company receives.

Summer(ish) persists.

Bear witness, I always say.