The Mercury provides news and fun every single day—but your help is essential. If you believe Portland benefits from smart, local journalism and arts coverage, please consider making a small monthly contribution, because without you, there is no us. Thanks for your support!

Good afternoon, Portland! We never thought we would catch fat bear fever. It's clearly a made-up marketing ploy, we scoffed. But now, on the last day of Fat Bear Week, we celebrate the fatness. There's more fat bear to come, once we get to the news!

IN LOCAL NEWS:

• The largest public employee union in Multnomah County has accused County Commissioner Sharon Meieran of retaliation for not receiving the union's political endorsement. AFSCME Local 88, which represents more than 3,000 county workers, chose to endorse County Commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson for county chair. Meieran has denied the accusations. Mercury News Editor Alex Zielinski wades through the whole mess to bring you the story.

• Portland Timbers and Thorns owner Merritt Paulson announced this morning that he will step down as CEO of both teams. But don't get too excited, he has no plans to sell the teams. Abe Asher reports. 

• Kudos to the Oregonian and education reporter Rose Wong for this first step in what will hopefully be more multilingual reporting:

• In our Fall Arts Guide, theater critic Max Tapogna spoke with Samantha Van Der Merwe about the decision to open Shaking the Tree's fall season with Suzan-Lori Parks' incendiary work, Fucking A. Now that the play has debuted, he writes his review.

• In this week's Savage Love, a reader asks for advice in how to gently ease into D/s play from a vanilla relationship? Dan reached out to sexual intimacy coach Rena Martine for some recs. 

IN NATIONAL / INTERNATIONAL NEWS:

• In a statement from her family, we learned today that Angela Lansbury—the actress who played Jessica Fletcher on Murder, She Wrote, as the voice of the motherly teapot Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast, Eglantine Price in Bedknobs and Broomsticks (yes, this list is telling you a lot about me), and so many others—died at the age of 96, at her home in LA. Alex is right that there was a delightful episode of Maintenance Phase about her exceptionally not terrible diet book:

• Sometimes when countries bomb people it's okay (?) and sometimes it's not. The Associated Press reports that the UN human rights office described Russia's most recent strike on Ukraine as “particularly shocking," saying that it should be considered a war crime. The G7 condemned the attack, in defiance of Russia's warning that they should keep their mouths shut.

• Just haunted by the cringe of this:

• The portion of this President Joe Biden exaggerations-and-grandpa-lies piece that digresses into "former President Donald J. Trump lied constantly" is just reporting due diligence for the reader, but it did seem like a bait and switch for about ten seconds this morning, and that gave me a giggle. 

• It's the last day of 2022 Fat Bear Week—which has honestly been like Fat Bear Two Weeks. I won't tell you how to vote, but I think YOU SHOULD: