January 26, 2018

Photos show OSU student govt. rep making Nazi salute, waving swastika flag

Andew Oswalt, a student government representative at Oregon State University facing a recall over his inflammatory views, marched with white power proponents in Portland, delivered Nazi salutes to cars traveling on Interstate 5 and appears to have stood with a swastika flag outside the home of a man who advocates the extermination of Jewish people last year.

Photos of Oswalt doing all those things appeared this week on the website of the Pacific Northwest Antifascist Workers Collective, a group comprised of unnamed antifa activists from Oregon and Washington.

Oswalt didn't dispute the photos Thursday.

"Germar Rudolf did nothing wrong," he wrote in an email to The Oregonian/OregonLive, referring to a chemist and Holocaust denier sentenced to prison by a German court in 1995 for inciting racial hatred. He provided no additional comment.

The details uncovered by antifa show that Oswalt for nearly a year worked with fixtures of the region's white nationalist movement to publicly organize and provoke at the same time he taught advanced chemistry and won election to the student congress at OSU.

Read more: http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2018/01/osu_student_rep_is_a_nazi-salu.html

January 26, 2018

Car-surfing Oregon cat sparks police call, but owner says pet loves it

Jesse Dorsett was a bit confused when a Sandy police officer called him Thursday morning asking about one of his cats.

He has three: Pixie, Dixie and Jinx -- named after the Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters.

Apparently someone had reported seeing Pixie, a 4-year-old domestic shorthair, perched on the hood of Dorsett's Volvo as it was driving slowly in the parking lot of a Taco Bell. The witness took video of it, called police and talked to TV stations.

Pixie was indeed on the hood of the SUV, Dorsett admitted.

The officer wanted to know if the cat was injured, Dorsett said. So Dorsett woke up Pixie at his Rockwood home, put her on his bed and took cellphone video as she sleepily looked around and sent the clip to the officer. Pixie then hopped down and went back to sleep.

Read more: http://www.oregonlive.com/clackamascounty/index.ssf/2018/01/car-surfing_oregon_cat_sparks.html

January 26, 2018

Finicum family files wrongful death lawsuit against FBI, BLM, Oregon State Police and others

The family of Oregon occupation spokesman Robert "LaVoy" Finicum filed a wrongful death lawsuit in federal court against the United States, the FBI, Oregon State Police, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, Oregon's governor and others on the second anniversary of his death.

The complaint claims Finicum was shot "assassination style'' by "one or more militarized officers of the Oregon State Police and/or FBI'' as he was trying to drive "across the county border'' to seek the protection of Grant County Sheriff Glenn Palmer on Jan. 26, 2016.

The suit likened it to what happened to a North Korean soldier who was shot while running across the border last November to South Korea, though he survived.

"Finicum was deliberately executed by a pre-planned government ambush, after he had exited his vehicle with his hands up,'' the complaint says.

Read more: http://www.oregonlive.com/oregon-standoff/2018/01/finicum_family_files_wrongful.html

January 26, 2018

Oregon to consider whistleblower protections in response to Statesman Journal report

Senate Republican Leader Jackie Winters has introduced a bill to expand whistleblower protections in Oregon.

The Salem lawmaker said she was moved to draft the legislation after reading a November story in the Statesman Journal about former Oregon Department of Transportation employee Gerritt Law.

Law, a technician in the Motor Carrier Division, repeatedly informed his superiors about problems he found after taking the job in 2013. He ended up getting fired.

Among his concerns: Employees lacked safety training and were asked to work in dangerous conditions. Equipment costing thousands of dollars was purchased without compatibility testing, and later found to not work. Contracts were being split so the dollar amounts stayed below open-bidding requirements. And contractors were overbilling for work.

Read more: http://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/politics/2018/01/25/oregon-consider-whistleblower-protections-response-statesman-journal-report-odot-jackie-winters/1066432001/

January 26, 2018

Oregon judge refuses to dismiss $1 billion timber class action

A judge has refused to dismiss a class action lawsuit seeking more than $1 billion from Oregon’s government for insufficient logging of state forestlands.

Linn County filed a complaint in 2016 accusing Oregon’s forest managers of breaching a contract to maximize timber harvests from forests donated to the state by county governments.

According to the lawsuit, Oregon began prioritizing environmental protection and recreational values over logging due to a policy change in 1998.

The lawsuit was certified as a class action by Linn County Circuit Judge Daniel Murphy, which effectively included 14 counties and more than 100 taxing districts as plaintiffs in the case.

Read more: http://www.capitalpress.com/Oregon/20180125/oregon-judge-refuses-to-dismiss-1-billion-timber-class-action

January 26, 2018

Oregon ethics watchdog rejects conservative group's complaint about Kate Brown

It took the Oregon Government Ethics Commission roughly 24 hours to vet and reject a complaint filed against Gov. Kate Brown this week.

The politically conservative nonprofit Oregon Capitol Watch Foundation filed a complaint Wednesday against the governor and her office alleging they failed to fully disclose their spending on lobbying as required under state law. The group, headed by former Republican state lawmaker Jeff Kropf, wrote that the governor's office failed to adequately disclose spending on 52 state employees who spent at least some of their time lobbying.

Oregon Capitol Watch Foundation cited public records released by the governor's office to a man in Illinois, Adam Andrzejewski, founder and CEO of a group called Open the Books. According to those records, the state spent more than $165,000 on compensation for employees who lobbied in support of the governor's office from April 2016 through the end of 2017.

The foundation alleged that the governor's office should have included overhead expenses for the state employees who lobbied. Some of the other issues the group raised – for example that the governor's office should have made sure the ethics commission was posting its lobbying disclosures online – do not appear related to state ethics laws.

Read more: http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2018/01/oregon_ethics_watchdog_rejects.html

January 26, 2018

A Fight Over The Height of Portland's Skyline is Raging. Who Wins May Determine Whether The City's

A Fight Over The Height of Portland’s Skyline is Raging. Who Wins May Determine Whether The City’s Housing Crisis Ever Ends.

A skyscraper backlash is rising.

Stanley Penkin, a transplanted New Yorker who lives on the fourth floor of Cosmopolitan on the Park, the tallest condo building in the Pearl District, is on the front lines.

He and his wife, Susanne, have a panoramic view: dogs cavorting in the Fields Park, sailboats rolling down the Willamette River, and the graceful arches of the Fremont Bridge.

But soon, if developers and city planners have their way, a 17-story glass-and-concrete tower will partly block Penkin's view of the bridge.

Not if Penkin can stop it.

"The city is so desperate for housing that it's sacrificing the integrity of our city," Penkin says with the distinctive honk of a Bronx native. "Is it just build, build, build to the maximum at any cost?"

Read more: http://www.wweek.com/news/city/2018/01/24/a-fight-over-the-height-of-portlands-skyline-is-raging-who-wins-may-determine-whether-the-citys-housing-crisis-ever-ends/

January 26, 2018

State Senate passes bill to help ill Hanford workers

A bill that should help more ill Hanford nuclear reservation workers qualify for state worker compensation was approved by the Washington state Senate Thursday night.

The vote was 35-14.

It returns to the House for concurrence on an amendment, but then could go to the governor to be signed into law.

The legislative effort had started last year with a bill sponsored by Rep. Larry Haler, R-Richland, a former longtime Hanford worker. The bill passed the House, but did not advance to the floor of the Senate until Thursday.

The bill would require the state’s worker compensation program to presume that a wide range of diseases were caused by occupational exposure at the nuclear reservation, rather that requiring employees to prove that it was Hanford exposure that made them ill.

Read more here: http://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article196783609.html

January 26, 2018

Effort to abolish death penalty in Washington gains steam after it clears Senate committee

A bill proposing the abolition of Washington’s death penalty has been voted out of a state Senate committee. The move reflects the latest — and what some lawmakers say is the strongest — push to replace capital punishment with life imprisonment without parole.

The chairman of the Law and Justice committee, state Sen. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, voted with three other committee members Thursday to advance the bill. Pedersen has said the vote represents the first time any bill to ban the death penalty has made it out of a legislative committee in the five years he’s served in the Senate — and possibly ever.

Three Republicans, including Sen. Jan Angel, R-Port Orchard, and Sen. Mike Padden, R-Spokane Valley, the prior committee chair, voted no. Padden supported two amendments that were voted down. One would have retained the death penalty for the murder of a police or correctional officer; the other would have asked for a public referendum on whether to keep the sentence.

“Since this was passed by an initiative of the people, which I believe is a directive to us, this needs to go back to the people to ask them whether this law should stay in effect or whether it should be repealed,” Angel said after the committee meeting.

Read more here: http://www.theolympian.com/news/politics-government/article196734029.html

January 26, 2018

Weyerhaeuser, others to pay $4M to restore Everett habitat

SEATTLE — Three companies have agreed to pay almost $4 million to restore habitat damage caused by mill and manufacturing operations in Everett that date to the early 20th century.

Weyerhaeuser Corp., Jeld-Wen Inc. and Kimberly Clark Corp. have operated pulp and paper mills, machine shops, casket builders and other endeavors in the Port Gardner area near the mouth of the Snohomish River.

The federal government and Washington state filed a complaint Thursday against them in U.S. District Court in Seattle, on behalf of the Tulalip and Suquamish tribes.

The tribes blame the companies for pollution, including from oil, heavy metals and PCBs, that damaged shellfish beds and other natural resources.

Read more: http://www.heraldnet.com/news/weyerhaeuser-others-to-pay-4m-to-restore-everett-habitat/