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So if Donald Trump were actually capable of firing people himself, Special Counsel Robert Mueller might be gone today. The New York Times reported yesterday that Trump really wanted to fire Mueller last June, but folded when his top lawyer, Don McGahn, refused to do the job for him. "Mr. McGahn also told White House officials that Mr. Trump would not follow through on the dismissal on his own."

New Shelter Alert! After a tense and at-times ugly hearing yesterday, the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners voted to move forward with a lease on an old grocery store at 6144 SE Foster. The plan is to make it 100 to 120-bed homeless shelter for at least a decade. Lots of neighbors complained. So did Commissioner Loretta Smith.

Well that doesn't inspire much confidence: The engineer piloting the Amtrak train that went off the rails near Olympia recently just... didn't notice that the turn was coming up, according to new information from the National Transportation Safety Board.

I do not think this "car-surfing" cat was being abused. I don't think anything after reading this account of a local dude who drives slowly through parking lots with a leashed cat on his car hood(?), in fact, except that I'm tired of this world.

RACHEL FROM BEND is still the Jeopardy champ! She needed some help from an overconfident leader to seal the deal in Final Jeopardy last night, though—an ingenious nil wager meant she came out on top when everyone got the question wrong. For the record: I knew the answer was van Gogh all the way. Someone get me on Jeopardy. (Also, Remember when traitorous former Mercury news editor Denis Theriault was on Jeopardy?)

The chaos never seems to stop at Portland Public Schools: Now the chief financial officer who'd only been on the job for five months has resigned.

It is a bad time to be a Spartan: Michigan State University, my alma mater, looks like trash and is the subject of numerous investigations into what it knew of serial rapist Larry Nassar's conduct, and when it knew it. Nassar was a long-time sports medicine doctor at MSU. Now he's serving 40 to 175 years in prison for being one of the larger pieces of shit in state history.

The Trib says that Metro's process for potentially asking voters to pony up big money for transportation in 2020 is off to a rocky start—Washington County officials didn't even bother showing up to the first meeting.

An ethics complaint against Gov. Kate Brown—alleging Brown didn't report lobbying conducted by her staff—has been tossed, the O reports.

Welp. The Eugene Register-Guard, which had been owned by the same family since the '20s, has been sold to newspaper behemoth GateHouse Media. This pretty much never goes well.

Sew a tarpaulin onto your skin and reconcile yourself to this fate.