John Notarianni's Feed: Recent Episodes
John Notarianni
With the fall semester underway, schools across Oregon are facing a shortage of teachers. That shortage is especially severe when it comes to bilingual teachers, even as the demographics of some communities continue to change.
A program at Western Oregon University is reaching into Oregon’s communities to train more bilingual people to become teachers and getting them into classrooms in local communities.
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Two years ago, Oregon voters agreed to stop charging people carrying small amounts of illegal drugs with a crime. Now, that decision is a controversial talking point in the midterm elections.
As students return to class, schools everywhere are dealing with the ongoing consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic: a growing achievement gap, youth mental health crises, even violence in the hallways sometimes. But many students in East Portland’s David Douglas School District are coming back into the classroom with a little bit of additional support.
All of the district’s elementary schools have added a new assistant principal of restorative practices.
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You might not know the name Bob Stacey, but if you live in Oregon, you probably feel the impact of his work every day.
When he died this week at age 72, U.S. Rep. Earl Blumeauer said “Oregon just lost the most important person that most people have never heard of.”
He had a major impact on how dense our neighborhoods are, how we get from place to place -- and he even battled a notorious religious cult.
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Indigenous people have traveled on trails through the woods of the northwest for millennia. Some were adopted by early fur traders, and for a time, were major paths for turn-of-the-century logging operations. But many of those early trails have been almost completely forgotten.
Oregon Field Guide Producer Ian McClusky has been working to unearth the history of one of these forgotten trails.
Full story here.
There aren’t many college students who are headed back to class with an Olympic gold medal in their trophy case, but Jade Carey is not an ordinary college student.
The 22-year-old gymnast and Oregon State sophomore won gold for her floor routine at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. This summer, she added two more major accolades to her already sterling gymnastics career: last month, she won vault at the U.S. Gymnastics Championships in Tampa. She was also recently named the USA Gymnastics Athlete of the Year.
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The days of Astoria as a sleepy coastal hamlet are in the past. The city has seen an influx of new restaurants, businesses, and housing in recent years. The Astoria City Council is now looking to implement a new system development charge program in the city. The city would create a structure of fees that developers pay for the right to build in Astoria, which would then go into a special fund to help pay for the infrastructure improvements the growing city needs.
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Eugene recently took a big step towards becoming the first city in Oregon to require most new housing to go all-electric. It’s a bold step in the fight against climate change that’s already been adopted in cities like Seattle, San Francisco and New York.
Portland police announced this week that they have made an arrest in the high-profile 2019 murder of local anti-fascist activist Sean Kealiher. The arrest brings new light to reporting that OPB did last year in “Dying for a Fight,” a nine-part podcast investigating the unsolved killing.
The new documentary film, Sam Now, is about the complexity of family.
It’s narrated by Portland filmmaker Reed Harkness, who directed the film. And it stars his half brother, Sam Harkness. The two grew up making home movies together, but in 2000, Sam’s mom Jois suddenly disappeared.
Eventually, the two set out to find her – and made a film about it. The resulting story spans over two decades. It touches on the ways trauma can pass down through generations, and the stories we tell ourselves about why our families are the way they are.
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We’re entering day six of a heat emergency across much of Oregon and Washington, with temperatures still hovering near or above 100 degrees. It’s uncomfortable for all of us, but for the most vulnerable people in the Pacific Northwest, it’s dangerous.
Beginning Monday, we’re going to see temperatures peaking into the triple digits across much of the state, and that heat is expected to stick around all week. It might be a good time to cut out of the city and get outdoors: go find your local shady river. We've got some advice and some picks of places to check out.
Portland's Albina neighborhood was once a hotbed of blues, r&b, fun, soul, and gospel music. The Albina Music Trust has been working in recent years to preserve that legacy, and introduce that music to new audiences. This weekend at the Cathedral Park Jazz Festival, they're taking it live, onstage
Paseo is a free festival being put on by the Portland Parks Foundation in the South Park Blocks and Director Park this weekend. It features music, dance, spoken word and other performances, as well as vendors, activities and mutual aid groups, like Don’t Shoot Portland and Snack Bloc PDX.
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Several years of hot summers in Oregon have created fertile conditions for swarms of insects like grasshoppers and crickets. It’s bad news for farmers and ranchers already struggling with drought. In 2021 alone, Oregon, agriculture officials estimate 10 million acres of rangeland in 18 counties were damaged by bugs.
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Jan Haaken's 2020 documentary film “Our Bodies Our Doctors” focuses on the current generation of physicians performing abortions in Oregon and Washington. The film features candid conversations with medical staff and patients, along with rarely seen footage of abortions being performed. In many ways, the film foreshadows our current moment.
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For over 30 years, Leroy Sly Scott was a member of Portland’s Sunnyside community. He was houseless, but you could often find him, right there, on the stoop outside the Belmont Market.
Leroy died in 2020, but you can still find him on that block today. The Portland Street Art Alliance recently commissioned a mural there, honoring Leroy and Portland's houseless community.
We’re approaching the time of year when rain and cloudy days give way to warmth and sunshine.
The season brings to mind a piece of music by Portland sound artist Crystal Quartez called Sonic Blooming.
Political observers say they’ve never seen anything like the gloom Portlanders are showing about the shape of their city. The dour mood poses an interesting question in an election year that – nationally at least – appears to be headed in Republicans’ direction: What happens when residents of the state’s most fervently Democratic city decide that something is urgently wrong?
Today is Orthodox Easter. For Orthodox Christians, it’s their holiest day of the year — more than any other religious holiday. But today is also the two-month anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As the brutal war continues to intensify, the celebration will be laced with grief and uncertainty in Ukrainian Orthodox communities across the world — and here in the Northwest.
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In the Northwest, it’s been another week of April showers. But despite the soggy weather, it’s also the time of year when the outdoor adventure season begins to kick into high gear. But if you’re starting to think about planning your first camping trip of 2022, you’re not alone: competition for campsites and congestion in scenic areas has been growing steadily for years, and that boom has only been intensified by two years of pandemic summers.
So what can you expect once you head into the great outdoors this year? With Zach Urness, host of the Explorer Oregon podcast and Outdoors Editor for the Statesmen Journal.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, 45 people in the custody of the Oregon Department of Corrections (DOC) have died after testing positive for COVID-19. Another 5,000 people have tested positive for the virus while in custody. Last week, a federal judge approved a class-action lawsuit over the state’s response to the pandemic inside Oregon’s prisons.
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It’s estimated that there are 4,000 people who identify as descendants of the Kalapuya people living in Oregon today. But for the last half century, there have been no native speakers of the Kalapuyan language.
Now there’s an effort underway to preserve the Kalapuyan language. There’s a new dictionary, and some descendants of the Kalapuya people are now working to learn their ancestors’ language.
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Suzanne Hale can be gruff, but there’s a reason why her legions of adoring fans call her “The Lovely Suzanne.” Hale’s restaurant, The Roxy, was an anchor for downtown Portland’s nightlife aficionados for 27 years. Open 24 hours a day, except Mondays, the diner attracted partygoers, cab drivers, and graveyard shift workers in droves. It was also an anchor for the city’s LGBTQ community. For queer or homeless teenagers, it was one of the few places they could always find refuge, no matter what time of day.
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This is the first weekend that many Oregonians are going to feel free of the coronavirus pandemic, as mask mandates end statewide.
But even without masks, this pandemic is still very much a concern for a lot of us. Healthcare workers, who are still struggling to keep COVID-19 patients alive today. Small business owners who are barely hanging on after two years of accruing debts. Immunocompromised Oregonians, who still can’t take part in the simplest routines. And so many people who are still dealing with the fresh grief of losing the nearly seven thousand Oregonians who have died in this pandemic.
For those of us, the right answer might be to scream.
We just passed the two-year anniversary of the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Oregon: on February 28, 2020, an employee at an elementary school in Lake Oswego was diagnosed with the virus. In the two years since then, students, teachers and school staff have struggled through remote learning, masking, and uncertainty.
But this week, state officials announced plans to shift masking decisions to the local level beginning on March 12th.
So, the big question becomes: without statewide mandates, what rules will be put in place?
As a soloist with the Oregon Ballet Theatre, Chris Kaiser plays the role of the Prince of Darkness in the company’s staging of the ballet Dracula. It’s a world away from where he was in early 2020, when, like all performing arts venues, the Oregon Ballet Theatre had to shut down abruptly.
Ballet is physically demanding, so the closure presented an altogether different physical challenge for Kaiser: How do you stay in elite dancing shape when you have no instructor, no dance company and no studio?
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The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife recently had no idea of their population — not even an estimate. The agency classified them as a ”strategy species,” a category of wild animals with small, declining, or unknown population levels that could be at risk and may be in need of conservation.
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In My Shoes was started by the local nonprofit Word is Bond, whose mission is to change the relationship between young Black men and law enforcement. Word is Bond founder Lakayana Drury says the idea came after watching the program’s participants do ride-alongs with the Portland Police Bureau. He saw a need for a reciprocal program, where the young men could tell their stories too.
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The omicron variant of COVID-19 has ripped through Oregon, forcing dozens of schools to suddenly close last week. We'll take a look at how districts across the state managed the abrupt transition.
Jesse Springer has been making light of the ups and downs of Oregon politics since 1995. His new book, Only In Oregon, collects those weekly comics as a history lesson in the good, the bad and the weird of Oregon Politics
In his book Care for the Mental and Spiritual Health of Black Men: Hope to Keep Going, Grier dives deep into the challenges Black men face in America today: racialized trauma, sexism, homophobia and classism. But with his background as a therapist and minister, he’s looking to do more than diagnose a societal problem: he writes that the goal is to help Black men survive, become liberated, heal, and ultimately flourish.
“Slime molds have a PR problem,” said Kelly Brenner, a Seattle author and naturalist. “For one, they’re called slime molds and that’s not appealing and it’s not representative of how beautiful they really are.”
Despite their unappealing name, these one-cell wonders have been fascinating (and baffling) scientists for centuries.
Talking with OPB Science and Environment reporter Monica Samayoa about the most memorable stories she reported in 2021
Talking with OPB higher education reporter Meerah Powell about the most memorable stories she reported in 2021
Talking with Oregon Art Beat Producer Eric Slade about the most memorable stories he reported in 2021
Talking with OPB science and environment reporter/ Oregon Field Guide Producer Jes Burns about the most memorable stories she reported in 2021
The future of the former Concordia University campus in Northeast Portland is still uncertain nearly two years after the school shuttered. And the reasons that led up to the closure of Oregon’s largest private university are still hazy as well.
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More than 10,000 Oregonians have applied for rental assistance, had their applications accepted and yet, due to the state’s inability to process applications quickly enough, are at risk of losing their homes. Gov. Kate Brown has called lawmakers back to Salem this Monday with the hopes of fixing the issue and ensuring people stuck in the bureaucratic backlog don’t lose their homes this winter.
Portland software developer Panic Inc surprised videogame fans a few years ago when they . announced a product called Playdate: a brand new, hand-held piece of video game hardware, complete with its own line of games. But pandemic supply-chain snarls and a major manufacturing setback means gamers won't have the device in their hands until next year at the earliest.
Portland Public School students are finally back in the classroom, but they’re having a very rough time. The Portland Association of Teachers says teachers are at a breaking point: there are staffing shortages across the district, and teachers are struggling to keep up. That’s why the union wants PPS to suspend in-person high school classes one day a week for the rest of the school year and to cut some instructional time for younger students as well. But not everyone is excited about the proposal.
For Indigenous artist, writer and activist Ka’ila Farrell-Smith "the painting process is a personal healing process" from a long history of trauma. She is one of four contemporary Indigenous artists featured in the new show MESH at the Portland Art Museum. Her works in the exhibition are a part of a series of 27 paintings called "Land Back, named after the contemporary movement advocating for Indigenous sovereignty. MESH will be on display until May. It is the first show Kathleen Ash-Milby has curated at the museum as Curator of Native American Art.
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Over three thousand Kaiser Permanente nurses and other healthcare professionals in Oregon and SW Washington are primed to go on strike Monday. Earlier this month, the Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals gave Kaiser 10 days’ notice that a strike will start at 6:00 am on Nov. 15 unless a contract agreement is reached.
Frank Herbert’s epic 1965 science fiction novel Dune tells the story of a future civilization fighting to control precious resources on a harsh desert planet. But while the story of the clash of civilizations on the planet Arrakis is set in a time and a place far away, Herbert’s inspiration for the story came from a battle between man and nature in the rolling sand dunes of the Oregon coast.
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Tomorrow is a big day for hundreds of thousands of workers in the Pacific Northwest: it’s the deadline for most teachers, health care workers and public employees in Oregon and Washington to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19, or lose their jobs.
One of the biggest hopes of removing the Condit Dam and draining the reservoir was that the White Salmon would return to its original river channel and that trees and other plants would regrow along its banks. But no one knew how long this would take to recover. Or if it even would.
Governor Kate Brown, a Democrat, is barred by term limits from seeking another four years when her current stint ends next year. That means voters are going to see a crowded ballot when they choose a new governor in 2022 -- and the shape of the race became much clearer this week.
In Portland, a new pilot program will aim to help renters work out disputes with their landlords before they head to eviction court. The city is working with the nonprofit Resolutions Northwest to establish their new free landlord-tenant mediation program.
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The pandemic brought big challenges in one couple’s working lives. In the face of uncertainty, they found the strength to leave their jobs and demand something better.
After her husband’s death, Sophia Stone-Holmbeck wrestled with whether to move ahead with the new home the two had been planning
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Don has been in recovery for alcoholism for 36 years. The pandemic created a new challenge: losing his in-person support community
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Sasha Mallett has an immunodeficiency that prevents vaccines from being effective. She’s watching as the world struggles with the health and safety questions she asks herself every day.
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The isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic was the opportunity Dana Coffman needed to come out as a transgender woman.
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Hospital beds across Oregon are near capacity as the Delta variant spurs a boom in severe COVID-19 cases. the ICU at OHSU in Portland is completely full
The death serves as a case study for another notable law enforcement problem the city is grappling with: powerful business interests turning to private security to do the work of police officers, enabling them to wield force against vulnerable Portlanders with a fraction of the oversight.
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The Olympics are getting underway this weekend in Japan, and several athletes with PNW ties have a shot at the gold
The Oregon Sex Workers Human Rights Commission held a public hearing Thursday to talk about why they believe decriminalization will protect sex workers from violence, decrease health risks and help to protect BIPOC and transgender communities.Full story here
The social justice uprising of the last year has led to a lot of conversations about the ways marginalized groups are often excluded. That’s not always because of conscious prejudice: but because built-in systems and cultures often limit the opportunities for women, BIPOC, LGBTQ individuals and others.
A new paper by an Oregon State University professor looks at how this kind of exclusion happens in the workplace- specifically, in the academic sciences.
Henry Richmond died last month at the age 78.
Now, you might not know who that is. But if you live in Oregon, you know his work: he played a major role in defining how Oregon’s cities and natural areas look today.
After last week's devastating heatwave, leaders across Oregon are trying to make sense of what the region's dryer, hotter summers will mean for local communities.
The Rev. Lenny Duncan took a long, winding path to finding his calling as a theologian. He’s an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and pastor of the Jubilee Collective, an LGBTQ+ affirming congregation in Vancouver, Washington. He’s also a queer Black man who spent his youth living on the road, following the Grateful Dead; occasionally selling drugs or doing sex work to get by.
He tells his story in his new book, “United States of Grace: A Memoir of Homelessness, Addiction, Incarceration and Hope.”
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Oregon turned to a gamification expert to help boost vaccine numbers. Should more social programs come equipped with prize winnings?
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Closing a major art museum isn’t nearly as simple as turning out the lights and locking the doors. Protecting fragile, priceless works of art is a full-time responsibility: even if a pandemic pops up and spoils your plans.
So when COVID-19 forced the Portland Art Museum to shutter its doors last year, director and chief curator Brian Ferriso said there was still a lot of work to do.
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**“The Night Always Comes,” tells the story of a family struggling to keep their roots amidst Portland’s gentrification
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OPB “Weekend Edition” host John Notarianni sat down with Dr. Chunhuei Chi, professor of international health and the director of the Center for Global Health at Oregon State University, to get his thoughts on the change.
On the weekends, Tracy Roundy wakes up at 3:45 am to open Gramma’s Corner Kitchen, the restaurant she co-owns with her mother Terri in Milwaukie. On a recent Sunday, she was a flurry of activity in the kitchen: reading order tickets, tending to bacon and sausages on the grill and ladling soup into to-go containers.
The restaurant is doing plenty enough business for her to get out of the kitchen, except for one big problem: she can’t find a cook.
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COVID-19 is again surging in Oregon. This week, Governor Kate Brown re-imposed restrictions in 15 counties deemed as “extreme risk” for the virus’s spread. Strict limits on restaurants, businesses, places of worship, and social gatherings went into effect yesterday, and will last at least through May 6th
Some businesses had JUST begun expanding service after over a year of closure or reduced capacity. Cinema 21 in Portland had only started showing movies to the general public last week.
Today they’re closed, again. But I went down to the indie theater on Thursday afternoon to talk with its longtime owner Tom Ranieri. We sat in the chairs in a dark theater as his staff was getting to open the box office for the last time before this latest closure. I asked him what it was like opening back up to the public last week.
The Selective Service System is one of the last gender-based distinctions still on the books in federal law. Men ages 18 to 26 are legally required to register for the draft in the United States: fail to sign up and you could still face major penalties — even though the draft hasn’t been used since 1973.
A new petition before the Supreme Court argues that women should also be required to register for the draft. Its defenders say that’s only fair, following a 2015 decision by former Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter that opened all combat positions in the military to women.
But nearly 50 years after the Selective Service System was last used, a new bill in Congress poses a bigger question: why do we even still have the draft system in the United States?
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Everywhere you turn in Oregon’s higher education system, it seems like there are problems. The state’s largest university - Oregon State - just lost its president and named a new interim one.
Two other large public institutions are dealing with different, but very big problems, as well: Oregon Institute of Technology and Oregon Health and Science University
And it’s not just public universities. Linfield University - a private institution in McMinnville - has a conflict brewing between its faculty and top leaders.
Scientists have found that many species in the animal kingdom, including several found in the Pacific Northwest, practice social distancing. Some species of insects, fish, monkeys, rodents, birds and bats all have been observed using forms of social distancing when illness or pathogens are present.
California Condors will soon be released into the wild for the first time in 100 years in the Pacific Northwest. For the Yurok people, the birds are sacred creatures.
Thursday night, people across the region were watching an unexplained phenomena shooting across the night sky. It turned out to be a rocket from Space X re-entering the atmosphere. But in the moment, it was all silent awe
Prosecutors and public defenders in Clark County are pushing for more consequences after district court judge Darvin Zimmerman derided a Black man killed by police in October.
The University of Oregon is starting a new institute to look at the intersection of racial and climate justice. Earlier this year, UO received a $4.52 million dollar grant from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation to support a three-year environmental humanities initiative called the “Pacific Northwest Just Futures Institute for Racial and Climate Justice.”
As of this week, Oregon has administered 1 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine. It’s a huge relief to healthcare workers, teachers and older adults. But Gov. Kate Brown’s plan for future vaccinations designates that grocery workers in Oregon aren’t eligible for vaccination until May 1.
This month’s snow and ice storms in western Oregon knocked out power for more than half a million utility customers and littered streets and sidewalks with branches. Now a lot of trees are needing some TLC to help them recover.
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The focus on Black history has intensified this year, as districts also consider broader curriculum changes amid a national reckoning with racism and racial justice since the death of George Floyd last May and the protests that followed.
The Bureau of Land Management oversees 16 million acres of public lands in the PNW. The Biden administration wants to protect 30 percent of U.S. lands by 2030, but they’ll have to contend w/ local control issues, right wing extremists & climate change.
Peter Cho is one of Portland’s most acclaimed chefs. His modern Korean restaurant Han Oak (that he co-owns with his partner Sun Young Park) was named restaurant of the year by both Portland Monthly and the Oregonian in 2017.
But this is a brutally hard time for restauranteurs to make ends meet. Han Oak is still closed because of the pandemic—he hopes to reopen outdoor dining sometime this month—but Cho is pushing ahead into new territory. He just opened his second restaurant, Toki, in downtown Portland. It remixes some of the classics from Han Oak and adds a few new dishes to the menu.
Oregon passed a surprising milestone last year: more people died in the state than were born, for the first time since we started recording this stuff. Preliminary data from the Oregon Health Authority shows that deaths outnumbered births in 2020 by a bit more than 200. It’s not a huge disparity, but it came sooner than expected. And has some pretty big implications for the state.
Oregon’s Rohingya community was shocked to find their home country of Myanmar added to the Trump travel ban in 2020. President Biden revoked the ban, but challenges to family reunification remain
If you’re an older Oregonian who’s desperate to get a COVID-19 vaccine in Oregon, it’s been a frustrating few weeks.
The Governor dropped a bombshell on Twitter this week: she said “States will not be receiving increased shipments of vaccines from the national stockpile next week, because there is no federal reserve of doses.”
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Oregon state lawmakers are preparing for the possibility of another armed protest at the Capitol in Salem and will delay gathering in-person on the first day of the 2021 legislative session.
Earlier this week, the FBI informed state legislators across the country to brace for large protests being planned in state capitals in the run-up to the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.
Court documents and interviews show the Oregon Employment Department paid many gig workers traditional benefits from the state’s unemployment insurance trust fund. People who drove enough hours for Uber and Lyft received benefits normally reserved for laid-off employees, as did many drivers with income from Grubhub, Instacart and DoorDash. Some gig drivers ferrying groceries and packages for Amazon Flex got regular benefits too.
The benefits went out, but payroll taxes hadn’t gone in.
Gray wolves now have no federal protection in Oregon and the rest of the lower 48 states. The only thing standing in the way of their recovery is us.
This is the last Sunday of 2020. And it’s been kind of a depressing year. The pandemic, protests and unrest, wildfires, the slog of the election. Not an easy one.
So how do we make sense of what we just went through? Well OPB’s reporters have been out on the front lines, trying to do that every day of 2020. And it was a lot to handle. But despite all the hardship, and pain we witnessed this year, there were still places to find hope and optimism. Here’s a few of those moments.
2020 hasn’t been short on big stories: I’ll do you the favor, I don’t think you need me to list what’s been at the top of the headlines this year.
But along the way, OPB’s reporters and producers have uncovered a number of smaller or less-reported stories that stuck with them. Here’s a few of em.
Jon Mooallem is a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine and a contributor to several magazines and radio shows, including This American Life, and Wired.
His most recent book is This Is Chance! The Shaking of an All-American City, A Voice That Held It Together.
It might be the most oddly reassuring disaster story you’ll ever read.
Mooallem spoke with OPB’s John Notarianni as a part of the recent Portland Book Festival, put on by Literary Arts.
COVID-19 vaccines are finally being distributed across the state. But what are the challenges still in front of us, and what needs to happen to distribute them more widely?
A number of critical programs that have protected Oregonians during the pandemic are at their end -- which means thousands of people could soon be facing severe financial problems.
That’s why legislators have been working to hammer out a plan for a one-day legislative session. But so far, no plan has materialized.
Portland’s Third New Angle Music has just begun a new program that bridges the gap between the live experiences we miss and the solo outdoors explorations possible today: it’s a series of soundwalks. You pop in a pair of headphones and take a guided sonic tour through a local park, painstakingly mixed and guided by a local composer.
The Latinx community in Clark County, Washington makes up 10% of the population but has seen nearly 30% of COVID-19 infections. Now, the Clark County Board of Health has declared racism a public health crisis
As 'the freeze' ends, Governor Brown is rolling out a new set of guidelines for businesses navigating the level of COVID-19 risk in their county. Here's a few of the highlights
Hopworks Urban Brewery has locations in Portland and Vancouver, which means they're juggling different COVID-19 regulations in each state.
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Oregon becamhttps://www.opb.org/article/2020/11/16/how-will-oregons-new-psilocybin-therapy-program-work/e the first state in the nation this month to approve the therapeutic use of this psychoactive component of mushrooms. We'll talk with Dr. Matthew Johnson who helped pioneer the therapeutic use of psilocybin in his work with the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University.
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The Oregon Health Authority recently awarded nearly $600,000 to the Haymarket Pole Collective, an advocacy group for Black and Indigenous and other strippers of color. The program has received five times more applications than available grants,
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Saturday morning, the 2020 election was stretching into a fifth day of counting ballots. Across the country, people were beginning to feel like the official result could take a very, very long time. Then, just before 8:30 a.m., the Associated Press called Pennsylvania for Joe Biden. That put him over 270 electoral college votes, making him president-elect of the United States.
Across Oregon, people were waking up to the news.
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Beaverton City Councilor Lacey Beaty defeated incumbent Denny Doyle in the election. He’d been mayor of the city since 2009.
But earlier this year, Beaverton also approved a charter that adopts a council-manager form of government; it does away with the so-called “strong mayor” system the city had previously used. That means Beaty and the city will be learning the limits of the new role together.
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It's been more than five months of continual protests in Portland. They started as a cry for racial justice, but with the 2020 election just a few days away, some of those protests have become flash points for opposing political views
We’re days away from a Presidential election that’s become a breeding ground for distrust and uncertainty. There’s no credible report of widespread voter fraud anywhere in the country, but even once the votes are counted, there’s a lot that needs to happen before the next president is sworn into office. A lot of the uncertainty comes down to the electoral college — and the individual electors who will be doing our voting for us.
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Ballots are flying into the election headquarters in Multnomah County. We'll hear from the county's Director of Elections on how the count will work: it takes a lot of big machines.
Movie theaters are still closed in Multnomah County, so it’s usually only Williams and a few close friends and colleagues in attendance each week. They maintain social distancing and wear masks. He say’s it’s much like a normal screening — without the audience.
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More than 40 states have sent their most vulnerable kids to facilities run by a for-profit company named Sequel. Many of them were abused.
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The indie film “Phoenix, Oregon” is the story of two friends who quit their service industry jobs to restore an old bowling center and serve the world’s greatest pizza.
But today, Phoenix is just beginning to recover from the devastating Almeda fire. The wildfire tore through southern Oregon earlier this month, burning over 2,600 homes.
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Oregon became a state in 1859. But nine years earlier, on Sept. 27, 1850, the Donation Land Claim Act became law. That makes this week the act’s 170th anniversary.
The impact was staggering: In 1849, there were only 9,000 European Americans in present-day Oregon; by 1860, there were 50,000.
But crucially, the act also led to the displacement of the people who’d been living on this land for thousands of years.
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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 87, died Friday of complications from cancer, and was immediately mourned and remembered for her legal wisdom, her judicial legacy and her profound impact on civil rights and women’s rights in her 27 years on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Leaders in Oregon were among those sending remembrances.
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Thousands of people across Oregon have been forced to evacuate this week as wildfires burned across hundreds of thousands of acres of land. Often there was little time between the Level 1, or “Get Ready,” notification, and Level 3, or “Go Now.”
The fires are a reminder: We all need to prepare for earthquakes, wildfires or other emergencies.
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City of Portland employee Timur Ender’s family was caught in the clouds of gas Saturday night. Now he says the procurement of tear gas is a misuse of city funds.
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Before the 100th consecutive night of protests for racial justice began in Portland Saturday night, friends of the late Aaron “Jay” Danielson memorialized him and tried to strike a chord of defiance without encouraging violence.
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A person was shot and killed in downtown Portland Saturday night as a pro-Trump car caravan wound its way through city streets, clashing with counterprotesters along the way. It is uncertain whether the shooting is directly connected to the competing protests, but advocates on both sides quickly seized on the violence as a sign of a community out of control.
Violence erupted as right and left wing protestors clashed in downtown Portland yesterday. OPB's Sergio Olmos was there.
The initiative to decriminalize the possession of personal amounts of drugs and boost funding for drug treatment in Oregon is in a promising political position.
Some local groups worry Measure 110 will hurt efforts to raise the cost of alcohol to support more options.
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Juan “Tony” Sancho was an actor performing with the Oregon Shakespeare Company when this incident happened at the Jackson County Jail in Medford, Oregon, in April. Last month, he filed a civil lawsuit against Jackson County, alleging excessive force.
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Oregon’s tallest waterfall is barely a 30-minute drive from downtown Portland, and it is frequently filled to capacity as thousands of hikers, amateur photographers and tourists flood the attraction in the summer months.
That posed a significant logistical challenge for the U.S. Forest Service when it recently reopened the attraction for the first time since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Schonberg isn’t a musician dabbling in science, or an entomologist with a weekend hobby band. Through her career she’s managed the unlikely pairing of the two, alternating between playing percussion on tour with her bands and doing fieldwork, investigating ecosystems that sustain insect life across the world. But in her most recent project, Secret Drum Band, she’s found a way to marry the two.
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One of Oregon’s premiere arts organizations is laying down the conductor’s baton for 2020: this week, the Oregon Symphony announced the cancellation of all in-person concerts and events through the end of the year because of COVID-19.
Multnomah County Library announced Wednesday that it will no longer charge late fees on library materials. Effective immediately, it will also clear all existing fines and restore access to accounts that have been blocked because of late fees.
The spotted owl changed the fate of Northwest forests in the summer of 1990. Thirty years later, what hope, if any, do biologists hold for the fate of the spotted owl?
The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken up colleges and universities' projections for fall enrollment, state funding and other revenue sources. They're scrambling to put together new projections, but there's still more uknowns than knowns. We talk with Ben Cannon, Executive Director of the Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission and Jaime Moffitt, Vice President for Finance and Administration and CFO at the University of Oregon.
We're three months into the COVID-19 pandemic, and a lot has changed. OPB Science Reporter Erin Ross gets us up to speed.
Journalist Sergio Olmos has been out on the front lines of the protests in downtown Portland for every one of its 16 nights. His perspective on what happened the night of Friday June 12th, how the protests are changing and the fatigue he sees in everyone involved.
The Key To Oregon Study is a cornerstone of the state's plan to reopen safely, but community health activists are saying the study has a major blindspot when it comes to race. John Notarianni talks with OPB Health and Science Reporter Erin Ross and Tyler TerMeer, CEO of the Cascadia Aids Project.
Memorial portraits have taken a central role in the iconography of protests and social justice movements across the country in recent years. OPB's Claudia Meza & John Notarianni produced this talk with artist Ameya Marie Okamoto about her work and why putting a face to a name can be more powerful than a hashtag.
As the inaugural Black Birding Week comes to a close, Black and Indigenous people, and other people of color, are pushing for more visibility in conversations about conservation and the outdoors in Oregon. OPB's John Notarianni speaks with Keia Booker of Porltand Audobon.
Thanks for tuning in! This is going to be pretty simple for now, a way to keep up on the stories I'm producing for OPB. As time goes on though I might start producing some original content that never makes it to air in this feed as well.