"OPB Politics Now" is a weekly podcast that takes a deep dive into the hottest political topics in Oregon and the Northwest. Every Friday, OPB’s political reporters and special guests offer in-depth analysis, discussion and insight into candidates, events and issues.
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Oregon Public Broadcasting Newsroom
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Hush is an investigative podcast from OPB, uncovering the buried truth about critical stories in the Pacific Northwest. In the first season, we look at the case of Jesse Lee Johnson, a Black man who lived for 17 years on Oregon’s death row for a crime he says he didn’t commit, and we try to understand why the state tried for so long to kill him.
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OPB's daily conversation covering news, politics, culture and the arts. Hosted By Dave Miller.
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Bundyville: The Remnant, a co-production between Longreads and OPB, explores the world beyond the Bundy family and the armed uprisings they inspired. This series investigates extremist violence that results from the conspiracy theories of the anti-government movement, who is inspiring that violence and who stands to benefit.
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Coverage and conversation on the federal trial for the people who led the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
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Salmon are essential to Columbia River tribal people. These fish represent not only a food source but a way of life. As a white kid growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Tony Schick heard a lot about salmon — how important they are to this region, and how much trouble they’re in now. But the history he learned was not the whole story. As an investigative reporter for OPB and ProPublica, he’s been working to uncover and understand a more sinister version of events. And along the way, he connec ...
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Back Fence PDX Radio, produced in collaboration with Back Fence PDX and OPB. We take the best stories from our live shows in Portland, then run them by a radio fairy who sprinkles magic radio dust on them so that the stories may be broadcast across airwaves and inter-webs. Live shows have been playing to packed audiences since 2008. The show pays homage to The Moth Radio Hour and is also the kissing cousin to San Francisco’s Porch Light storytelling series. Back Fence PDX Radio alternates wi ...
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The Inside Elections Podcast analyzes elections in a nonpartisan, data-driven, and accessible way. Inside Elections provides nonpartisan analysis of congressional, presidential, and gubernatorial races. With a combination of reporting and data, we break down the key races and bring valuable context to complex elections.
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The State of Oregon Podcast is a bi-monthly show that examines the ongoing and historical transgressions of white supremacy and fascist systems in Portland and the greater PNW. Our lens is focused on long term activists and organizers, within a narrative historical context for contemporary violence, and systemic oppression.
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Class of 2025 Jobs vs SchoolBy Oregon Public Broadcasting
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A deep dive into Oregon’s 5th Congressional District
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Oregon is home to one of the nation’s most consequential Congressional races. OPB’s Bryce Dole took a deep dive – and drive – through the district in recent weeks where he visited the fire-ravaged Santiam Canyon, talked housing in Deschutes County and delved into the issues on the urban/rural divide in Clackamas County. On the latest episode of OPB…
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‘Hush’ - The State of Oregon v. Jesse Lee Johnson
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On March 20, 1998, police in Salem, Oregon, discovered the body of 28-year-old Harriet Thompson inside her apartment. Within a week, they arrested Jesse Johnson for murder. Johnson drifted west after a troubled childhood in Arkansas and a stint in prison there. In Salem, he was known around town as a homeless drug user. A random encounter with Thom…
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The Department of Energy promised a tribal nation millions of dollars for solar energy, but has made it nearly impossible to access
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Washington’s Yakama Nation received both a grant and a $100 million federal loan to build a large solar project. Held up by a series of bureaucratic hurdles, the funding could expire before the government lets the tribal nation access the money. OPB Investigative Editor Tony Schick joins us to explain how bureaucracy is getting in the way of progre…
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Author Tom Spanbauer On Real Life With HIV
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Portland writer Tom Spanbauer is no less than a legend in some literary circles. A Portland Monthly profile earlier this year called him “The Godfather of Portland’s writing scene.” When we talked with him earlier in the year (2014), we focused on his latest novel, "I Loved You More“ and about his practice of teaching and creating “Dangerous Writin…
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GAVE FoundationBy Oregon Public Broadcasting
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Today we're sharing the first episode of 'Lost Patients,' a deeply reported podcast from KUOW and the Seattle Times examining our complicated system for treating people with severe mental illness – a system that, almost by design, loses patients with psychosis to an endless loop between the streets, jail, clinics, courts and a shrinking number of h…
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Remembering ‘Dangerous Writing’ author and teacher Tom Spanbauer
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Portland writer Tom Spanbauer is being remembered -- on social media, in articles and in countless conversations with those who knew and loved him, were taught by him or simply loved his books. He died of heart failure on Saturday, Sept. 21 at age 78, after living with Parkinson's for the last eight years, according to his husband, Michael Sage Ric…
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An artist has created a comic strip to make voting easier for a group that doesn't speak EnglishBy Oregon Public Broadcasting
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GhanaBy Oregon Public Broadcasting
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Influential Oregon author Tom Spanbauer died last week after a long illness with Parkinson’s disease. He was the author of five novels, including "The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon" and "I Loved You More." Spanbauer shaped a generation of Pacific Northwest authors through his ‘Dangerous Writing’ workshops, with authors like Chuck Palahniuk, Li…
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Hanford through the lens of geologic time
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Brue Bjornstad has loved rocks since he was a kid, growing up on the East Coast. But his real love and expertise is the Missoula Floods – cataclysmic events that scoured the Columbia Basin, and laid thick deposits of sediments in other areas, washing all the way down the Columbia Gorge and out to the Pacific. These floods also shaped the Hanford ar…
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Hanford Challenge is a watchdog nonprofit focused on transparency and cleanup process at Hanford site
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The Hanford nuclear reservation produced more than 400 billion gallons of contaminated waste over its decades of operation. Workers have been sickened over the years, and some have successfully sued the Department of Energy with help from watchdog groups, including Hanford Challenge. The nonprofit advocates for whistleblowers and workers on the sit…
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Winemaking is central to the Hanford region
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JJ Williams is the third-generation of his family in the wine business out of Red Mountain – one of the world’s premier viticultural areas outside of Richland, WA. But before the wine business, his family first put down roots in the Mid-Columbia region to work at Hanford. During the Manhattan Project, Williams’s great grandfather worked at the site…
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Hanford radiation effects on people and the environment
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We’ve talked a lot this week about life and work specifically at Hanford, but not all of the waste stayed there. In the rush to process plutonium at Hanford, plant operators expelled radioactive byproducts into the local atmosphere and waterways. People who were affected by these radioactive toxins call themselves “Downwinders.” Northwest Public Br…
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Eighty years since the world’s first industrial-scale nuclear reactor went live at Hanford
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The National Park Service runs three different sites related to the WW II Manhattan Project. The one on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southeast Washington was the first full-scale nuclear reactor in the world. The B Reactor features hundreds of nozzles capping the metal process tubes on the reactor face and even a mint-green control room with …
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Hanford-area native and former Washington Poet Laureate on how the ‘Atomic City’ shaped her life
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Seattle poet Kathleen Flenniken grew up in Richland and worked as a civil engineer at Hanford in the 1980s. She served as Washington State Poet Laureate from 2012-2014. In her first year as poet laureate, she published a collection called Plume, which deals directly with how her Hanford area upbringing influenced her. The book explores the history …
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Hanford Department of Energy manager on tank waste, vitrification and overall clean up progress
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The 56 million gallons of radioactive waste created from decades of plutonium enrichment at Hanford are stored in 177 massive, underground tanks on 18 different ‘farms’ spread out over the 580 square miles of the nuclear reservation in Washington State. Most of the tanks are single-shelled, but 28 of them are double-shelled, which helps prevent was…
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If Jesse Johnson did not kill Harriet Thompson, then who did? It’s a question police and prosecutors rarely - if ever - considered. We take a deep look at three men who all had connections to Thompson and violence in their pasts, including one man who told Salem police detectives in 1998 he “dreamed” of a murder eerily close in circumstances to the…
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To this day, Det. Mike Quakenbush believes Jesse Johnson is guilty of murder. Even when confronted with significant evidence pointing away from Johnson, Quakenbush said there is no doubt. But what starts as a cordial discussion of DNA evidence and witness interviews at a Salem diner quickly turns into something much more revealing.…
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Hanford Reach National Monument area protects more than 195,000 acres of nature and wildlife
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The Hanford Reach National Monument, established in 2000, is a crescent of land with the last free-flowing stretch of the Columbia River flowing through it. It’s also a major incubator of salmon. The Department of Energy calls it “the largest natural animal and plant community in the arid and semi-arid shrub-steppe region of North America.” The Rea…
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Eltopia farmer grows 350 fruits and vegetables in Hanford’s shadow
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Farmer Alan Schreiber has an alarm on his kitchen counter, and another one in his office. But they are not to tell time, or warn him of impending storms. This alarms warn him that radioactive winds from Hanford are coming. Schreiber’s Eltopia farm is in the shadow of the massive cleanup site, and the alarms are tested regularly. So far, there’s bee…
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Pacific Northwest National Lab scientist researching glass to bind up Hanford radioactive waste
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Carolyn Pearce is busy digging up, cutting up and even x-raying ancient glass across the globe for study. Why? She’s trying to figure out the properties of the strongest glass on earth today, ones that have survived for thousands of years. That way the U.S. Department of Energy can be confident in its science to bind up radioactive wastes for thous…
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Oregon's history with table tennis goes way beyond ping pong diplomacy
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Oregon's history with table tennis goes way beyond ping pong diplomacyBy Oregon Public Broadcasting
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Trail Blazers heading to Sinclair and streaming
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The Portland Trail Blazers have partnered with Sinclair Broadcast Group as the future broadcast home for Blazers games, quadrupling the broadcast reach throughout Oregon and Washington. They're also introducing a direct-to-consumer streaming service called BlazerVision.By Oregon Public Broadcasting
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Hanford History Project documents the legacy of the Manhattan Project and Cold War
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The history of Hanford nuclear reservation is often centered on the enormity of its original mission of refining plutonium to power the atomic bombs that would bring WWII to an end - and the clean up of the waste left behind. Robert Franklin is an assistant professor of history with Washington State University Tri-Cities and the assistant director …
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Before and after Hanford: Indigenous ties to the land
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Long before the Hanford nuclear reservation, the land was home to Native American tribes. The Yamaka Nation has strong ties to Laliik – or Rattlesnake Mountain — and Gable Mountain on the Hanford cleanup site. They are religious sites for the Tribes, and the whole area is ceded land for the Yakama Nation. The lands around Hanford were also used for…
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Climate change is pushing farmers to be more climate resilient
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Climate change is pushing farmers to be more climate resilientBy Oregon Public Broadcasting
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Fires have burned nearly 500,000 acres of BLM land in Eastern Oregon
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The Bureau of Land Management administers 16 million acres of land across Oregon and Washington, and wildfires burned a large swath of that land this summer, including nearly half a million acres in Eastern Oregon. For ranchers who lease BLM rangeland for their cattle, that can mean that new leases will be hard to find. The fires also threatened ot…
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Some Oregon schools are changing how they handle cell phone use in class
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More than 70% of high school teachers in the U.S. say cell phones are a major classroom distraction, according to The Pew Research Center. Across the nation schools are adapting new bans on phones as they continue to cause issues in student learning. A number of Oregon schools have been adapting new practices to minimize the use of phones in class,…
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Washington prison phone fees generates millions, state isn’t using much of the funding
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The Incarcerated Individual Betterment Fund is meant to improve the welfare for people in custody in prisons throughout Washington state. The fund is supported by the money collected from phone calls and other fees from people who are incarcerated. The pot of money has swelled upwards of $12 million. But recent reporting from the Washington State S…
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Oregon’s vaunted vote by mail system has a rare error
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In Oregon, we’ve been using vote-by-mail for more than 20 years without evidence of systemic fraud. So, it’s been easy for Democrats to dismiss conservatives who have been raising questions about the system. On the latest episode of OPB Politics Now, reporters Lauren Dake and Dirk VanderHart discuss the history of Oregon’s voting system and its var…
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Machinists’ union president rallies striking workers at Boeing’s Gresham facility
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Around 33,000 of Boeing’s unionized workers on the West Coast have been on strike since early Friday. That includes over 1,000 workers in Gresham. The walkout comes as the machinists’ union continues to negotiate toward better wages and pensions.By Oregon Public Broadcasting
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Study illustrates the economic value of Oregon’s arts and culture sector
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Americans for the Arts, a nonprofit that advocates for arts and arts education in the U.S., released data on how the arts sector affects Oregon. The study showed that Oregon’s nonprofit arts industry generated more than $800 million in economic activity in 2022. Randy Cohen is the vice president of research for the organization. He has toured acros…
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Umatilla County program reintroduces fines for school absenteeism
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The number of students regularly missing school across the country has soared since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. A state report released last year found that more than a third of Oregon students are chronically absent, meaning they miss at least 10% of school days. State lawmakers removed truancy fines in 2021, but a new program in Umati…
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WNBA returns to Portland after more than 20 years
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After more than two decades, Portland will once again host a women’s professional basketball team. The as-yet-unnamed team will start playing in the 2026 season. The city’s last WNBA team, the Portland Fire, played from 2000 to 2002 before folding. The announcement comes roughly a year after a different deal to bring a WNBA team to the city fell th…
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Episode 31: New Montana Poll, Rating Changes, Connecticut 5 w/ Daniela Altimari of Roll Call
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Nathan Gonzales and Jacob Rubashkin unveil the latest Inside Elections/Noble Predictive Insights poll in Montana’s 1st District and discuss the latest rating changes, and analyze a critical House race in Connecticut with Daniela Altimari of CQ Roll Call. Twitter profiles: @nathanlgonzales @jacobrubashkin @capitolwatch @InsideElections The Inside El…
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Oregon's Congressional District 5 - Part 3By Oregon Public Broadcasting
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Why a small Oregon school is suing the state over a conservation plan
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The Western Oregon State Forest Habitat Conservation Plan, which was passed by the Oregon Board of Forestry in March, will reduce logging in western state forests to protect threatened species. Now a school district in Clatsop County is suing the state over the proposed plan. They argue reducing timber harvesting in the area could cause the distric…
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In Oregon and across the country, mental health providers are leaving insurance networks
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For many in the U.S., it can be difficult to find a mental health provider that’s covered by insurance. But many mental health clinicians say insurance companies can make it difficult to be a part of their network. They say companies have “clawed back” payments from therapists or questioned a patient’s need for services. Health care reporter Annie …
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Kroger-Albertsons merger hearings wrap up in Portland
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Hearings on the proposed merger between Kroger and Albertsons ended on Tuesday in Portland. The grocery chains argue that the merger is necessary for them to compete with non-traditional grocers like Costco, Amazon and even Dollar General. But the Federal Trade Commission sued to block the deal in federal court in Oregon on the grounds that it woul…
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Class of 2025 students getting to graduation with a little help from their friends
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Class of 2025 students getting to graduation with a little help from their friendsBy Oregon Public Broadcasting
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Police and prosecutors have always insisted they thoroughly investigated Harriet Thompson’s murder, but some people who did not appear at Jesse Johnson’s trial have insisted for 25 years that they have information that raises new questions. A former state of Oregon employee who was at Thompson’s house the night she died said police only ever wanted…
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The late 1990s and early 2000s were a time of rapidly evolving forensic science. Jurors at Jesse Johnson’s trial heard a lot about how forensic scientists at the Salem Police and Oregon State Police developed fingerprints of Johnson’s inside Harriet Thompson’s home. But newly revealed documents and DNA testing show those scientists may have been mo…
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New Protactile language emerges in Oregon
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It’s not often a new language emerges.But in the last 15 years, a new language was born right here in the Pacific Northwest. It’s called Protactile, and it was created by a group of DeafBlind people who prioritize touch. One of the people at the center of creating this new language is Jelica Nuccio. She moved to Monmouth, Oregon, where Western Oreg…
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Local elections officials are removing noncitizens from Oregon voter rolls, as controversy swirls
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The state is still working to identify how many people were improperly registered to vote despite not being U.S. citizens.By Oregon Public Broadcasting
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Oregon's 5th congressional district - Part 2
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Oregon's 5th congressional district - Part 2By Oregon Public Broadcasting
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Urban-rural divide underscores tensions as congressional candidates vie for Clackamas County
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The battle between U.S. Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer and state Rep. Janelle Bynum could come down to Clackamas County. Winning Oregon’s 5th Congressional District could help decide control of the U.S. House of Representatives.By Oregon Public Broadcasting
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How Eastern Oregon’s Great Salt Lick auction helps in the fight against Parkinson’s disease
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Hardly a week goes by in the U.S. without a mass shooting, as the recent shooting at a high school in Georgia earlier this month reminds us of. In that tragedy, a 14-year-old student is suspected of killing two students and two teachers with a semiautomatic assault-style rifle which was legally purchased by his father. The National Rifle Associatio…
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Prevalence of firearms, not mental illness, driving gun deaths in U.S., according to OHSU study
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Hardly a week goes by in the U.S. without a mass shooting, as the recent shooting at a high school in Georgia earlier this month reminds us of. In that tragedy, a 14-year-old student is suspected of killing two students and two teachers with a semiautomatic assault-style rifle which was legally purchased by his father. The National Rifle Associatio…
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