Portland

Multnomah County has announced it’s going to open two cooling shelters, at Portland Covenant Church and Cook Plaza in Gresham.

They will be open from noon until 9 pm. 

"Four people, who had outstanding charges or were out on probation, were arrested and taken to jail. Two qualified for deflection and accepted services. One was issued a citation in lieu of an arrest."

So it's already getting more people into treatment than 110 did... who would have thought? "Get treatment or go to jail" is more effective than "Get treatment or here's a $100 ticket you can safely ignore."

“Thursday and Friday are going to be the hottest days of the week,” said Noah Alviz, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Portland, on Tuesday morning.

“Across the Willamette Valley, we could see temperatures up to 100 degrees or even 102 degrees,” he said.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/41181185

Hard to believe the Greek Cuisina has been closed for 14 years now... glad to see the space being revived.

Last I heard, the octopus ended up on a pizza joint on Barbur, but I don't know what happened to it now.

Kroger wants to buy Albertsons, a major competitor, who also owns Safeway, which Albertsons somehow was approved to buy 3-4 years ago. The attached is a good representation of what “choice” would look like if the merger were approved by the FTC for SE metro area of Portland; 6/10 larger grocers would be run by Kroger (WinCo, Costco, Grocery Outlet and New Seasons the only exception).

This is a big deal because:

• Kroger has already been price gouging like crazy since the pandemic as we all knew but has been recently confirmed by Kroger themselves (https://www.newsweek.com/kroger-executive-admits-company-gouged-prices-above-inflation-1945742)
• This would make bullet #1 above worse with that scale of market dominance
• Kroger was among the most appalling for worker and customer safety during the pandemic. They had sneeze guards up in their 172nd location in May of 2021, a full 1.5 years after the pandemic started, never enforced masking and refused to take any returns during the pandemic for any reason, but mainly to pad their bottom line.
• Kroger’s local workers are currently on strike for the crap wages and conditions they have endured. A larger corporate entity would only grow the awful employment and labor practices Kroger has.
• Pharmacy services are already under-served and with Rite-aid and Walgreens closing hundreds of locations nationwide, it would force more medically dependent customers to Kroger, who demonstrated its absolute indifference to worker and customer safety before, during and after the pandemic.

If you want to slow grocery price gouging, support better conditions for customers and employees, be able to choose other companies when one isn’t meeting your needs, I highly recommend sharing your thoughts with the FTC and boycotting Kroger/Safeway/Albertsons as much as you can.

"The New Seasons Labor Union, which said it represents 1,100 employees at 11 locations, characterized the action as a “warning strike,” accusing New Seasons of bargaining in bad faith in the months since employees first voted to form a union."

The union says the strike will last until the morning of Sept. 3 unless a deal is reached before then. Store executives say stores will remain open.

From https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/1f1jeum/all_of_our_states_fred_meyers_are_unionized_this/

Over the last month, Portland police leaders have moved to disband a unit that investigated reports of burglaries, identity theft, embezzlement and organized retail crime.

"During the interview, Justham refused to provide information about the dog's whereabouts and was booked into the Multnomah County Detention Center on three felony counts of first-degree aggravated animal abuse and multiple outstanding warrants."