03-30-2023  4:32 pm   •   PDX and SEA Weather
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NORTHWEST NEWS

Most Gig Workers Paid Sick Leave Under New Seattle Law

The measure expands pandemic-era protections and strengthens labor rights for app-based workers.

Seattle Audubon Changes Name, Severing Tie to Slave Owner

James Audubon, a naturalist known for his watercolor paintings of birds, also owned, sold and bought enslaved African Americans through his general store in Kentucky and was a staunch opponent of abolition.

Idaho Law Could Criminalize Helping Minors Get Abortions

The measure would create a new crime of “abortion trafficking,” punishable by up to five years in prison, barring adults from obtaining abortion pills and “recruiting, harboring, or transporting" a pregnant minor.

Legislative BIPOC Caucus Announces 2023 Priorities

In a historic milestone for the state, this is the most diverse Legislature in Oregon history, with 20 BIPOC legislators serving this session.

NEWS BRIEFS

OHCS Applauds Gov. Kotek’s Signing of HBs 2001 and 5019 to Address Housing Needs

Oregon Housing and Community Services (OHCS) applauds Gov.Tina Kotek who today signed bipartisan legislation addressing the state’s...

County Distributes $5 Million in Grants to Community-Based Organizations

Awards will help 13 community-based organizations fund capital improvements to better serve historically marginalized...

Call for Submissions: Play Scripts, Web Series, Film Shorts, Features & Documentaries

Deadline for submissions to the 2023 Pacific Northwest Multi-Cultural Readers Series & Film Festival extended to April 8 ...

Motorcycle Lane Filtering Law Passes Oregon Senate

SB 422 will allow motorcyclists to avoid dangers of stop-and-go traffic under certain conditions ...

MET Rental Assistance Now Available

The Muslim Educational Trust is extending its Rental Assistance Program to families in need living in Multnomah or Washington...

Bill to criminalize help for Idaho minors’ abortions passes

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — A bill that would criminalize helping minors obtain an abortion without parental consent won final passage in Idaho's legislature on Thursday and is headed to the desk of Republican Gov. Brad Little. The measure would be the first of its kind in the U.S. It...

52 years after capture, orca Lolita may return to Pacific

MIAMI (AP) — More than 50 years after the orca known as Lolita was captured for public display, plans are in place to return her from the Miami Seaquarium to her home waters in the Pacific Northwest, where a nearly century-old, endangered killer whale believed to be her mother still swims. ...

MLB The Show breaks barrier with Negro League players

LOS ANGELES (AP) — MLB The Show has broken a video game barrier: For the first time, the franchise will insert some of the greatest Negro League players — from Satchel Paige to Jackie Robinson — into the 2023 edition of the game as playable characters. Video gamers are now able...

Jacksonville's Armstrong: HR surge 'out-of-body experience'

Jacksonville’s Kris Armstrong could always hit for power, but never like this. Armstrong slugged six home runs over eight at-bats against Central Arkansas this past weekend, and he's gone deep eight times in 15 trips to the plate since Thursday. “It's kind of an...

OPINION

Oregon Should Reject Racist Roots, Restore Voting Rights For People in Prisons

Blocking people with felony convictions from voting started in the Jim Crow era as an intentional strategy to keep Black people from voting ...

Celebrating 196 Years of The Black Press

It was on March 17, 1827, at a meeting of “Freed Negroes” in New York City, that Samuel Cornish, a Presbyterian minister, and John Russwurn, the first Negro college graduate in the United States, established the negro newspaper. ...

DEQ Announces Suspension of Oregon’s Clean Vehicle Rebate Program

The state’s popular incentive for drivers to switch to electric vehicles is scheduled to pause in May ...

FHA Makes Housing More Affordable for 850,000 Borrowers

Savings tied to median market home prices ...

AFRICAN AMERICANS IN THE NEWS

North Dakota governor vetoes transgender pronouns bill

North Dakota's Republican governor vetoed a bill that would generally prohibit public schools teachers and staff from referring to transgender students by pronouns other than those reflecting the sex assigned to them at birth. The state Senate voted 37-9 to override the veto Thursday...

Study: Biggest Hollywood films still go mostly to white men

NEW YORK (AP) — As Hollywood emerged from the pandemic, its biggest film productions dipped in diversity after years of incremental progress, according to a new study by UCLA researchers. Opportunities were notably greater for women and people of color on streaming platforms than in theatrically...

Anatomy of a political takeover at Florida public college

SARASOTA, Fla. (AP) — Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has targeted a tiny, public liberal arts college on the shores of Sarasota Bay, as a staging ground for his war on “woke.” The governor and his allies say the New College of Florida, known as a progressive school with...

ENTERTAINMENT

'Bachelor' creator Mike Fleiss exits reality TV franchise

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Mike Fleiss, the creator of “The Bachelor,” has exited the reality TV franchise more than two decades after the iconic dating show launched. His departure was confirmed Tuesday, a day after “The Bachelor” aired its season 27 finale. “I want...

Special prosecutors appointed in Baldwin set shooting case

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — Santa Fe's district attorney has appointed two veteran New Mexico lawyers to serve as the new special prosecutors in the manslaughter case against Alec Baldwin and a weapons supervisor in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer during a 2021 movie rehearsal. ...

Melissa Joan Hart says she helped 'tiny kids' flee shooting

Actor Melissa Joan Hart said she and her husband helped a class of kindergartners that was fleeing the Nashville school shooting earlier this week. Hart said in a video posted on Instagram Tuesday that her children attend a school next to the private Christian Covenant School. She...

U.S. & WORLD NEWS

American detained in Russia a 'brave, committed' journalist

Working as a journalist in Moscow seemed a natural fit for Evan Gershkovich, the son of immigrants from the Soviet...

Joint Base Andrews lifts lockdown; no armed suspect found

WASHINGTON (AP) — Joint Base Andrews, one of the nation’s most sensitive military bases and home to Air Force...

9 killed in Army Black Hawk helicopter crash in Kentucky

FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. (AP) — U.S. Army investigators are trying to determine what caused two Black Hawk medical...

Israel's Palestinians mostly sit out democracy protests

HAIFA, Israel (AP) — Amal Oraby is usually a fixture at street protests. But as tens of thousands of Israelis...

Macron unveils plan to save water amid climate change toll

SAVINES-LE-LAC, France (AP) — President Emmanuel Macron launched a broad plan on Thursday to ensure that France...

Dior transforms Mumbai's Gateway of India into fashion ramp

MUMBAI (AP) — In a glittering splash of luxury fashion Thursday, Dior transformed Mumbai’s grand, historic...

Jim Kuhnhenn Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Senate on Friday firmly rejected a House Republican bill to slash spending and require a balanced-budget amendment, leaving unresolved with just days to go the urgent issue of increasing the nation's borrowing powers.

The 51-46 Senate vote against the tea party-backed measure - which had been expected in the Democratic-run chamber - came shortly after House Speaker John Boehner told reporters he and President Barack Obama had failed to reach a separate agreement to resolve the debt crisis.

"There was no agreement, publicly, privately, never an agreement, and frankly not close to an agreement," Boehner said. "So I suggest it's going to be a hot weekend here in Washington, D.C."

If progress is to be made over the weekend in the nation's steamy capital, it will have to be made behind closed doors and not in the open.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., canceled planned weekend Senate sessions, increasing the pressure on Obama, Boehner and other top-level negotiators to strike a deal.

Reid said that talks ongoing between Obama and Boehner are focused on producing legislation involving taxes and that the House would have to act before the Senate, because tax measures must originate in the House.

Boehner underscored his willingness to keep negotiations going, telling reporters, "As a responsible leader, I think it is my job to keep likes of communications open."

The administration says the government is in danger of defaulting for the first time in its history after August 2 unless Congress raises the federal debt ceiling so it can keep borrowing enough to pay its bills.

But Democrats and Republicans have been deadlocked over terms of a deficit-reduction package linked to the debt-limit increase, with Democrats demanding some tax increases and Republicans insisting on doing it just with spending cuts.

The focus now is on efforts by Obama and Boehner to come up with an ambitious $4 trillion "grand bargain" that would secure the support of rank-and-file lawmakers. But wide differences still remain.

The continuing Obama-Boehner talks kept alive the possibility of substantial deficit reduction that would combine cuts in spending on major benefit programs like Medicare and Medicaid and revenue increases through a broad overhaul of the tax code.

"We have the opportunity to do something big and meaningful," Obama declared in a newspaper opinion piece. Later Friday, the president took his case to the public again in a town hall-style meeting. Earlier, from the Capitol, Boehner said House Republicans were prepared to compromise and prodded Obama: "The ball continues to be in the president's court."

Even as Republicans contended with the demands of tea party-backed House members, worry was shifting to how to keep Democrats in line if a compromise is reached between Boehner and Obama.

Talk of a deal prompted a spasm of distress among Senate Democrats worried that Obama would agree to immediate cuts but put off steps to increase tax revenues that the president has said are key to any agreement. The White House immediately sought to tamp down talk of an impending deal.

Democratic officials familiar with the talks said both the cuts to benefit programs such as Medicare and a tax overhaul are too complicated to undertake quickly and would have to wait up to a year to negotiate. The officials, however, said any agreement would have to have strict requirements that would guarantee Congress had to act.

First, however, the Democratic-controlled Senate on Friday dispensed with the House-passed measure that would raise the debt limit by $2.4 trillion on the condition that Congress sends a constitutional balanced budget amendment to the states for ratification and approves trillions in long-term spending cuts.

That left bargaining for a bipartisan compromise as the only alternative. Negotiations were proceeding on multiple fronts as officials searched for the clearest path to avoid a potentially devastating default. Each path faced sizable hurdles.

One short-term plan under discussion by some House Republicans would cut spending by $1 trillion or more immediately and raise the debt ceiling by a similar amount, permitting the government to borrow into early 2012. But Obama has insisted on an increase that lasts into 2013, past next year's elections. That would require raising the debt ceiling by about $2.4 trillion.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said Thursday that Obama remains "unalterably opposed" to debt limit extensions in the order of six months, nine months or one year. "His premise is that we have to raise the debt ceiling for an extended period of time into 2013 regardless," Carney said.

Another plan under discussion by Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., would guarantee that the president would get a debt ceiling increase through 2012. It would extract a political price from Obama, who would have to ask Congress for three separate increments, and it would allow Republicans to avoid casting a difficult vote in favor of the debt ceiling that would anger their constituents. Many House Republicans, however, were dismissive of the proposal because it did not guarantee deficit reductions.

Then there are the efforts by Obama and Boehner to close gaps on a deal to reduce deficits by about $4 trillion.

Democratic officials familiar with the discussions said both sides remained apart on key components of the deal, including the amount of revenue that a revamped tax code could yield, the nature of the changes to Medicare and Medicaid, and the process that would guarantee that both taxes and benefit programs would in fact be overhauled.

Republicans have insisted that entitlement programs such as Medicare need substantial changes, but have loudly objected to any revenue provision that could be deemed a tax increase. Democrats, eager to keep changes to their cherished health care programs to a minimum, have demanded that any plan must have new tax revenue.

Democrats in the Senate reacted angrily when word spread that Obama and the House leaders appeared to be closing in on a deal that would include $3 trillion in spending cuts but only a promise of higher revenues to be realized through a comprehensive overhaul of the tax code.

White House officials went out of their way to deny that a deal was near. By day's end Obama had asked the top four Democrats in the House and Senate to go to the White House to discuss the status of the talks. The meeting lasted one hour and 45 minutes.

In his opinion piece in USA Today, Obama said he was still insisting on tax revenue being part of the deal. Democratic officials said that Obama was not demanding that specific tax provisions, such as restrictions on tax subsidies or closing loopholes, be agreed upon immediately, but that they could be part of a broader tax overhaul that Congress would have to undertake.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., left the door open to such an approach to tax changes. "I'd like to see it have a revenue piece so we have tax fairness, whether immediately or something that's part of an extended plan to it," she said Thursday.

The Democratic officials said the negotiations focus on immediate cuts to day-to-day operations of government that are financed at Congress' discretion. The legislative work to cut entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid and to overhaul the tax system would have to be carried out over the next six month to a year, the officials said.

One key sticking point, they said, was how to force Congress to address entitlement and tax changes to achieve the desired deficit reduction. Under discussion were mechanisms that would trigger onerous tax and spending consequences if Congress tried to wiggle out.

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Associated Press writers David Espo, Ben Feller and Alan Fram contributed to this report.

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MLK Breakfast 2023

Photos from The Skanner Foundation's 37th Annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Breakfast.