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Good morning, Portland! Today is Tuesday, Aug. 27 and it’s also the last day for candidates to file if they want to run for mayor or a Portland City Council seat in the November election. Hopefully those who are serious about running for office have already filed, because anyone who thinks they’re going to run a successful campaign in just seven weeks is unfit for the job. Anyway, we’ve tracked every.single.candidate and managed to find out a little bit about their backgrounds and beliefs. You’re welcome.

The news cycle is a doozy, so buckle up!

In Local News:

• A preschool in inner Southeast Portland filed suit against Multnomah County yesterday, claiming the county violated public meetings laws by planning a drug deflection center near the preschool, with little to no public involvement or transparency during the planning phase. Willamette Week reports the new deflection center is slated for construction on SE Sandy in an old printing warehouse, just a block from Escuela Viva Community School.

• Beat check: This week’s Portland City Council agenda includes a 2023 annual report from the Portland Police Bureau that details everything from crime rates, to staffing levels at the bureau, and outcomes from things like PPB task forces, but it leaves out any mention of officer-involved shootings, except to mention that the bureau doesn’t count fatal shootings by police when tallying homicide rates. During the same meeting, PPB will ask the council to approve up to $98K for more police drones. 

Also on the agenda: a lengthy report about Portland’s housing production needs. A key takeaway: “Portland needs to support the development of 120,560 new units of housing by 2045 - an average of 5,200 units per year.” The report also notes that the city needs to “catch up” on underproduction from past years. To do that, we’d need to build 55,000 housing units by 2032. That’s a tall order.

@animal_oasis_ #cat #pets #catlovers #petsoftiktok #animalsoftiktok #animaloasis #funnyvideos ♬ Circle of Life - Furnace and the Fundamentals

• We all remember that one creepy teacher in school who gave us the willies. For Portland kids, that teacher is 38-year-old Craig Douglas-Meyers, who lives in Montavilla and until recently, taught at Hosford Middle School. Douglas-Meyers was arrested last week on charges of luring a minor, after a detective in California posed as a teen girl online. The Portland teacher flirted with the detective, who he thought was a teen girl, and the online conversation turned sexual in nature and included talk of a potential meet-up. Douglas-Meyers was in court Monday and could face up to five years in prison, the Oregonian reports.

• Summer isn’t over yet, so get out and enjoy the warm weather while it’s still permissible to wear shorts. Need help deciding what to do? We compiled the best list in the city for you!

 • You might consider yourself a progressive thinker, but have you reached the level of dropping $50K to aid a psilocybin treatment center? Soap company Dr. Bronner’s has. The company, which has boasted about the need for access to psychedelic treatments for years, reportedly gave $50,000 to an Oregon-based psychedelic therapy center. The company also advocated for the passage of Measure 109 in 2020–the law that paved the way for psychedelic mushrooms to be legally administered in therapeutic settings in Oregon. You can read more about the company’s advocacy for ‘shrooms here.

In National/World News:

If you just shoveled a bite of cereal into your mouth, finish it before reading any further. 

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. –the guy who bills himself as a champion of environmental issues and built a career as an environmental attorney–apparently also built a reputation for killing and/or mutilating wild animals. Kennedy, who suspended his presidential campaign last week and endorsed Donald Trump, recently admitted to trying to hide a dead bear cub in Central Park years ago. But that wasn’t the first instance of bizarre behavior involving wild animals. In a 2012 interview with Town & Country Magazine, Kennedy’s daughter recalled a family trip in 1994 where her father strapped a dead whale carcass atop the family’s minivan with a bungee cord and transported it home, where he later decapitated it with a chainsaw. 

Environmental groups are now calling for an investigation into the incident, which violates federal laws protecting marine mammals, including the Endangered Species Act. I double dog dare you to read this recap from Axios, which includes the best/worst quotes from the 2012 story.

• Speaking of weirdos, Florida man Ron DeSantis’s plan to allow business and leisure developments at nine state parks in Florida isn’t going so well. As the Associated Press reports, Gov. DeSantis’s plan has faced massive pushback and just recently, a major developer pulled out of the project. “It’s high time we made public lands more accessible to the public,” the governor’s press secretary posted on social media. Not sure what could be more accessible than a pristine, undeveloped park open to all. 

• One of X’s major advertisers, World Bank, is pulling its ads out of the social media platform now owned by Elon Musk, after it was reported the bank’s ads were showing up in racist content.

 • Let’s give a nod to the underappreciated athletic spectacle that is pro wrestling. Last weekend, fans piled into London’s Wembley Stadium to watch All Elite Wrestling (AEW) stars throw each other around and dive off the ring's top rope during AEW’s All In pay-per-view event. Sunday’s show saw three Pacific Northwest wrestling icons battle for a belt, but only one emerged a champion. Aberdeen, Washington's Bryan Danielson beat Tacoma's Swerve Strickland for a championship title. The match is likely to be one of Danielson's last, as he finally eyes retirement from the sport. During the same pay-per-view event, Seattle's own skateboarding prince of darkness, Darby Allin, lost to Jack Perry (son of the late actor Luke Perry) who threw Allin in a coffin and was moments from setting him on fire before retired '90s legend Sting came to the rescue.

• In the latest Trump vs. Harris debate update, the former president is now threatening to ditch the Sept. 10 debate altogether, after campaign teams for Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris couldn’t agree on whether each other’s microphones should stay muted when the other is speaking. Harris’s team is betting on Trump’s signature outbursts biting him in the ass. Trump wants the same terms he and President Joe Biden agreed to during their debate back in June, when Biden was still in the race. 

• In related news, does Kamala have the ‘vid? Several guests at last week’s Democratic National Convention are now testing positive for COVID, including members of Kamala Harris’s campaign staff.

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