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! It's fun to make jokes and be irreverent, but I'm definitely concerned that Russia is starting World War III—for real, this time. I'll tell you all about it in today's afternoon news!
IN LOCAL NEWS:
• Employees at the Arbor Lodge New Seasons in North Portland announced their intent to unionize today. If you've been to that location, you know those people deserve higher wages. News Editor Alex Zielinski reports they're the eighth location of the grocery chain to unionize in the last six months.
• In late July, Kolby Ross and his friend Lauren Abbott Jr. were both shot by a downtown security guard, killing Abbott and leaving Ross grievously injured. Charges against the shooter were dismissed days after Ross returned home from the hospital. Now, though he is far from fully healed, Ross is petitioning the DA's office to consider pressing new charges.
• Isabella Garcia has been keeping us all appraised on what implementation of Portland's charter could look like. Turns out that the Portland Business Alliance really did not want that charter to pass. The Oregonian's Shane Kavanaugh reports that—just between Nov 1-Nov 7—it gave more than $131,000 to the largest committee opposing the measure.
• Force me to concede sounds like a fetish—NGL.
"On Saturday, (Republican Joe Kent) declared multiple newspapers’ declarations for Gluesenkamp Perez 'irrelevant' and 'another narrative designed to stop voters from ballot curing & to force me to concede.'"https://t.co/73TNlOtBpf
— Ryan Haas (@ryanjhaas) November 15, 2022
• In this week's Savage Love a reader asks if 1) it's okay to like cleanly shaven armpits 2) wanting such pits might not be a feminist and cool look?
IN NATIONAL / INTERNATIONAL NEWS:
• In Poland it's already tomorrow and Russia might be about to start World War 3. While back on their bullshit, bombing the blazes out of Ukraine, it looks like Russia overshot a missile into Poland, killing two people. The hitch here has always been that SOME of the European countries are in NATO (Ukraine is not, Poland IS) and the thing that's so spicy about NATO is Article 5 of its founding document, which says that any attack on a NATO member “shall be considered an attack against them all.” For now Poland has only mentioned Article 4, which is talking about whether that was an attack that should be considered against them all.
• Now back to the thin-skinned man who is probably intentionally tanking Twitter to save himself money in the long run—although I'm not sure we should even give him that much credit:
Elon Musk has been directing subordinates to comb through Twitter's Slack and make lists of people making fun of him or his plans for firing. They've also been monitoring employee's tweets. Latest w/ @kateconger and @MikeIsaac)https://t.co/lMJKBrwbK4
— Ryan Mac 🙃 (@RMac18) November 15, 2022
• Did you ever watch that Tom Hanks movie where an Iranian refugee is forced to live in an airport? Well, the movie was based on a real guy: Mehran Karimi Nasseri. He lived in Charles de Gaulle Airport from1988-2006. Then he returned to the airport because he missed it. He recently died there.
• This is also the reaction of many US residents, upon reading our history:
@oreugene 1600s onwards really is just a global atrocities speedrun for us #fyp #history #taylorswift ♬ Anti-Hero - Taylor Swift