The Trump administration is easing rules on medical marijuana, moving it out of the restrictive Schedule I and into Schedule III — a category shared by drugs such as Tylenol with codeine and anabolic steroids.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the move on Thursday, saying it “allows for research on the safety and efficacy of this substance, ultimately providing patients with better care and doctors with more reliable information.”

Rescheduling marijuana has been discussed in Washington for years. Here’s a guide to what’s changing now:

What does Thursday’s announcement do?

For decades, marijuana has been grouped in the same Schedule I classification of drugs as heroin and LSD and kept under the tightest federal controls. Drugs in the category are seen as not having any accepted medical use and being highly prone to abuse.

But many states have legalized marijuana — both medical (40) and recreational (24). And the Justice Department said Thursday that Blanche’s action “recognizes the longstanding regulation of medical marijuana by state governments and the need for a common-sense approach to this reality.”

The rescheduling does not immediately affect recreational marijuana. The new policy applies to only two types of marijuana products: ones that are FDA-approved and ones that are regulated under a state medical marijuana license.

In late June, the Drug Enforcement Agency will hold hearings looking at the broader rescheduling of marijuana, not just medical programs, the Justice Department also announced.

The administration says it wants to strengthen medical research but also maintain strict federal controls. And the shift to Schedule III does mean that medical marijuana researchers would no longer have to go through the onerous process of obtaining a Schedule I license to do that work. That process has long been seen as intensely rigorous, including tight laboratory regulations to acquire and study marijuana.

Anti-legalization group Smart Approaches to Marijuana, or SAM, condemned the changes.

“Today’s marijuana is more dangerous than previously thought, not less dangerous. And until data shows otherwise, it meets current criteria for Schedule I,” the group’s president, Kevin Sabet, said in a statement. “It’s a drug that should be carefully researched, of course, but not legalized through the backdoor.”

What does this mean for marijuana businesses?

Cannabis firms registered in state medical marijuana programs stand to get a huge tax burden lifted.

“I’m paying a full tax bill on my gross margin, which no other company does except for people in our industry,” said Sam Brill, CEO of Ascend Wellness Holdings, before the shift was announced. His company operates dispensaries in several states.

And in the past, most financial institutions have refused to provide basic banking services even to state-authorized marijuana businesses, because of potential liability. Companies like Brill’s largely operate entirely in cash.

After the new plan was announced, Brill said in a statement to NPR, “While rescheduling is not legalization, and it does not resolve all structural challenges in the industry, it is an important step toward a more transparent and accountable market that supports compliant operators.”

Sabet from SAM said the marijuana industry is “the new Big Tobacco” and that “President Trump is welcoming them into the homes of families across this country with open arms.”

“There are many ways to increase our knowledge without giving a tax break to Big Weed and sending a confusing message about marijuana’s harms to the American public,” he said.

What about cannabis consumers?

For lots of consumers, the effects of rescheduling might not seem dramatic at first, unless they’re users of medical marijuana.

But somewhere along the line, other policy changes are likely to ripple outward, such as the easing of federal drug testing requirements. The new announcement doesn’t mention the possibility of that changing.

The change comes as many states have developed thriving markets for THC — the active ingredient in marijuana. In many parts of the U.S., THC drinks and gummies are already easy to purchase, even in states that haven’t legalized marijuana. Since the category was created by a hemp loophole in the 2018 Farm Bill, it has blossomed into a market worth billions of dollars.

How did we get here?

The process of rescheduling marijuana got a boost during the Biden administration. Then, President Trump issued an executive order in December of last year directing the attorney general’s office to expedite rescheduling marijuana.

Generally, recategorizing drugs happens via an act of Congress or a formal rule-making process. But Trump’s order opened the door to a shortcut that ensures U.S. compliance with international drug treaty obligations. And Blanche invoked that streamlined process to recategorize medical marijuana. But for other changes, the administration says it will take a more traditional approach.

What happens next?

The Trump administration has to balance its desire to move quickly with the need to be able to defend these moves in court, because anti-marijuana groups such as SAM have vowed to block rescheduling.

Easing rules for regulated medical marijuana first, before taking up other categories of marijuana, could help clear that legal path.

The DEA plans to hold a new hearing on the proposed rescheduling of marijuana on June 29.

Chad Dunn used to spend his days on the floor of a Hyundai plant in Savannah, Ga., watching the clock, feeling the pressure, and wondering how long he could keep going.

“Life in America was pretty unfulfilling and pretty stressed out,” he said. “Like most folks, just in a rat race.”

Now, he lives in Da Nang, a coastal city in Vietnam, and makes a living helping other Americans leave.

“I can pick you up from the airport, set you up with a phone, a bank account, and get you settled in an apartment in under a week,” he said. “It’s becoming very popular.”

Dunn runs a relocation business built around a simple idea: that the life he found in Vietnam is something others want too. Many of his clients first find him on TikTok, watching his videos about daily life abroad. And increasingly, they reach out asking how they can move to Vietnam, too.

Global expat surveys have ranked Vietnam and Thailand among the most attractive destinations for affordability and quality of life.

Estimates from the Association of Americans Resident Overseas, based on United Nations data, show the number of Americans living in Southeast Asia has grown significantly over the past few decades, rising from about 32,000 in 1990 to nearly 88,000 in 2024. (That data does not include Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar and Vietnam, so the true number of Americans in the region is likely far higher.)

And for the first time in decades, the U.S. could be experiencing negative net migration — more people leaving than entering. A study published this year by the Brookings Institution estimates net migration turned negative in 2025, the first time in at least half a century.

People born in the U.S. who choose to move abroad still make up a small portion of those numbers, but influencers on social media are helping bring wider visibility to the shift.

Brooke Erin Duffy, an associate professor of communication at Cornell University, says the shift has been building over time, particularly as more people are able to work remotely.

“I think it is part of a broader trend … and in particular the rise of digital nomadism,” she said. “More and more people are working remotely … and trying to find ways to integrate work into their lifestyle,” rather than the other way around.

Duffy says social media is helping accelerate that shift. “We have this culture of … aspirationalism and relatability,” she said, pointing to creators who showcase remote work against “gorgeous backdrops.”

But she cautions that what people see online can be misleading. “The images that circulate about life and work are filtered through a glossy prism,” she said, noting the gap between curated content and the realities of living abroad.

Expats hype Vietnam for its affordability

Mia Moore, a holistic nutritionist, lives just minutes from the beach in Da Nang. She’s 37, from Northern California, and moved to Vietnam earlier this year after years of traveling through Southeast Asia. For her, the decision wasn’t sudden; it built over time.

“It was a slow realization that I wanted something different,” she said.

Back home in California, she had what many would consider a good life — a career, a routine, access to nature. But she says much of her time was consumed by one thing.

“Every day was about how I am going to make more money and keep up this quality of life,” she said.

In Vietnam, that pressure eased.

“I pay about a fifth of what I was paying for rent,” she said. “Utilities are basically nonexistent. I can go out to eat if I want to.”

A bowl of pho near her apartment costs about $2; even with extras, around $4.

“People say it’s cheap, but that makes it sound low quality,” she said. “It’s actually a really high quality of life. It’s just less expensive.”

Thousands of miles away, viewers are watching lives like these unfold in real time. On TikTok, Americans living in places like Vietnam and Thailand stream their days from beachfront cafés, city apartments, and late-night walks through streets that feel both unfamiliar and oddly calm.

The videos are simple, but the message is clear: Life in Southeast Asia looks easier.

In Thailand, social media influencers say stress levels are down

For Chris Michaels, the pull had nothing to do with money. He spent his career in the toy industry, working in a corporate role in Chicago. It was about stepping away from a life that felt relentlessly stressful.

“I’d get up, go to work, go to the gym, go to sleep — rinse and repeat,” said Michaels. “There was just nothing new, nothing exciting.”

The turning point came on a trip to Bangkok, escaping winter in Chicago for warm nights and a skyline view from a rooftop pool.

“I’m looking out over the city thinking, how do I live here full time?” he said.

He figured it out. Michaels retired early at 46 and has now spent more than seven years in Thailand. And like Dunn and Moore, TikTok has become part of his daily life. He posts videos and hosts livestreams several nights a week.

“The No. 1 question I get now is ‘Help me leave the United States and move to Thailand,’” he said.

For many Americans, the appeal starts with cost.

In places like Da Nang and Bangkok, rent, food and transportation can cost a fraction of what they do in major U.S. cities, especially for people earning or saving in U.S. dollars.

That difference reshapes daily life.

Moore says she no longer structures her days around financial pressure.

“My focus now is how I want my day to look,” she said. “How I feel. What I want to do.”

Dunn describes something similar — a life with fewer constraints and more connection.

“There’s a sense of community here,” he said. “People gather, they talk, they spend time together. It’s not the same kind of stress.”

TikTok doesn’t tell the whole story

Behind the videos and the lifestyle, there are limits.

Many expats say their lifestyle is made possible by earning or saving in U.S. dollars while spending in local currencies — an advantage that doesn’t translate to most Vietnamese or Thai citizens.

Making a living locally can be difficult. In Vietnam, foreigners are typically limited to a narrow set of jobs, most commonly teaching English, where pay is often significantly lower than what they could earn in the U.S. As a result, many rely on remote work, savings, or U.S.-based income streams — a dynamic that allows them to benefit from lower costs without participating fully in the local labor market.

Some point to lower health care costs. Moore says she recently paid about 200,000 Vietnamese dong — roughly $8 — for a dental cleaning, X-rays and a checkup. But access and quality can vary, especially outside major cities.

Long-term needs like schools, visas and stable residency can be more complicated for foreigners.

Many Americans in Vietnam are living on tourist visas that are typically valid for up to 90 days. That means leaving the country regularly and returning — a process known as a visa run. “You can take a bus to the border, walk across, get stamped, and come back,” says Moore.

In Thailand, visa options can vary, but long-term residency can still be complicated.

Even after years there, Michaels said he’s aware of where he stands. “I’m a guest in this country,” he said. “I will always be a foreigner.”

There are other trade-offs, too: distance from family, time zone differences, and the challenge of rebuilding a life from scratch.

When Michaels first moved, the adjustment wasn’t easy.

“I’d wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning thinking, what did I do?” he said. “It took months to feel settled.”

And the promise of a lower-stress life doesn’t come automatically.

“A lot of people move here and bring their stress with them,” Michaels said. “You have to let go of that.”

It’s a quieter part of the story, one that doesn’t always show up in a TikTok livestream.

From curiosity to commitment

For Dunn, the shift has been undeniable.

“When I first told people I was moving, they said I was crazy,” he said. “Now they’re calling me asking how to come.”

Michaels sees the same thing.

“It’s such a reversal,” he said. “People used to ask why I would leave. Now they’re asking how.”

For the Americans already there, the decision often feels permanent.

“There’s no going back,” Dunn said. “You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.”

The soaring cost of jet fuel is forcing European airlines to cut thousands of flights through the peak summer travel season as the ongoing impact of the war in Iran ripples across the aviation industry.

Jet fuel prices have roughly doubled since the start of the U.S. and Israeli-led war, and airlines in Europe — which imports about a third of its jet fuel, largely from the Middle East — have been hit particularly hard.

German airline Lufthansa said this week it would cut 20,000 flights from its schedule through the fall to save on jet fuel.

“That’s massive,” said Rico Luman, a senior economist for ING Research based in Amsterdam. European airlines might be preparing to make deeper cuts to their schedules as well, he said. “This could be the start of more announcements,” Luman said in an interview. “When we remain stuck in this conflict and face high fuel prices like this, we will see more coming out of other airlines.”

Other European carriers, including KLM and Scandinavian Airlines, have announced cuts to their schedules in response to rising fuel prices — though so far, nothing on the scale of the reductions at Lufthansa.

Energy experts have warned that a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway off Iran’s coast, would lead to higher jet fuel prices and possible shortages in Europe.

“We are facing the biggest energy security threat in history,” said Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, in an interview with CNBC on Thursday. Europe normally gets a large percentage of its jet fuel imports from refineries in the Middle East, Birol said, “and this is basically now almost zero.”

Birol had warned last week that Europe had “maybe six weeks or so” of remaining jet fuel supplies, though he said Thursday that the continent is trying to replenish those supplies with imports from the U.S. and Nigeria.

“I really hope that, first of all, the strait is opened,” Birol said on Thursday. “But we may well need to take some measures in Europe to reduce travel as well.”

The International Air Transport Association, which represents 360 airlines worldwide, also warned of possible fuel shortages in Europe.

“Along with doing everything possible to secure alternative supply lines, it’s important that authorities have well-communicated and well-coordinated plans in place in case rationing becomes necessary,” said Willie Walsh, the IATA’s Director General, in a statement last week.

In the U.S., major airlines have said they’ll pass some of their soaring fuel costs on to customers through higher fares and baggage fees. Some have also said they would reduce capacity this year. But so far, U.S. carriers have not announced major flight cuts on the scale of airlines in Europe or Asia.

Lufthansa said it would cancel short-haul flights, including unprofitable routes within Europe.

“They’re canceling flights on high-frequency routes, so travelers could just find an alternative for the canceled flight,” said Luman, the ING Research economist. But he warned that European travelers should expect to have fewer options during the peak of the summer vacation season in July and August.

“I’m afraid there’s no quick fix for this, because we’ve seen the damage [to] the infrastructure in the energy sector in the Middle East,” he said. “So we expect oil prices to remain high for longer, at least until the end of this year.”

Meta will lay off 10% of its staff in May, according to an internal memo which was published by Bloomberg. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the report’s accuracy to NPR.

The layoffs will take place on May 20 and affect some 8,000 workers. Meta will also not hire for 6,000 open roles that it had intended to fill.

In the memo, Meta’s chief people officer Janelle Gale wrote, “We’re doing this as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making. This is not an easy tradeoff and it will mean letting go of people who have made meaningful contributions to Meta during their time here.”

Calling it “unwelcome news” that “puts everyone in an uneasy state,” Gale wrote, confirming the layoffs to employees now “is the best path forward, given the circumstances.”

Meta and other big players in artificial intelligence have been spending vast amounts of money to build data centers and try to win the AI race — one in which Meta lags behind competitors such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

In January, Meta forecast record capital expenditures this year of up to $135 billion — almost double what it spent last year.

The pivot to AI comes at a time when Meta seems to be backing away from its previous focus on its virtual reality Metaverse products. The Metaverse was once key to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the company’s future — so fundamental that in 2021, he changed the name of the company from Facebook to Meta.

In a separate round of layoffs this month, the company announced that it was laying off some 700 people as part of its efforts in "right-sizing" its investment in Reality Labs, the division that runs the company’s Metaverse products.

Meta is also facing a string of costly legal challenges. The company lost two pivotal court cases earlier this year: a New Mexico jury found that Meta failed to protect young users from child sexual exploitation. Penalties in that case could reach $375 million.

Meanwhile, a jury in Los Angeles found the company — along with Google — liable for the mental health problems experienced by a woman who used social media as a small child, awarding her $6 million.

In the Los Angeles case, the woman’s lawyers argued that Meta’s products were designed to be addictive to kids.

Meta has said it will appeal both lawsuits.

The company faces similar lawsuits, including one brought by several school districts against Meta and several other social media companies, which will be heard in Oakland, California this year.

“‘Hey Lauren, are your kids in school today?’” Weisskirk said. “Because they know there’s a high chance that the kids aren’t.”

From parents at the local level to the state’s top elected official, Oregon has long been known as a state with a short school year. Recent research backs that up.

Now, a new data tool from Stand For Children offers details on just how short Oregon’s school year is — and how broad the variation is from district to district.

“We’re not interested in comparing a single district to one another, but we do want to highlight a system with a serious design problem, one that combines our statewide low expectations with very high degrees of flexibility, a long history of cutting days when budgets get tight, coupled with some of the highest rates of chronic absenteeism in the country,” said Sarah Pope, executive director of Stand for Children, a national education nonprofit based in Portland.

The analysis was completed by ECOnorthwest and charts how many hours and days a year Oregon students spend in school. In the study, “student contact time” includes lunch and passing time. That’s different from Oregon’s definition of “instructional time,” which mainly consists of time in class but can also include parent-teacher conferences and staff professional development, as well as recess for students in grades one through three.

Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek orders schools to maintain instructional hours: What happens now?

According to the tool, students in some districts have as many as 177 days of school. Others only have 137. That’s a difference of 40 days — or eight weeks — of school. The numbers and hours can vary, but that variation is widespread across Oregon.

Oregon doesn’t have a mandatory minimum number of school days. Instead, the state rule is based on the number of instructional hours. As a result, school districts where the calendar of school days may look very different could be somewhat similar when it comes to counting hours.

For instance, Oregon has a number of school districts that only run classes four days per week — and those districts tend to have similar time in school compared to those operating Monday through Friday. Despite having 20 fewer days in elementary school, students in the Mapleton School District in Lane County only have one less hour of school than elementary students in the Parkrose School District in Multnomah County. Both Mapleton and Parkrose have some of the lowest elementary contact hours in the state.

Compare that to Lincoln County, on the Oregon Coast, where students have more school days and almost 150 more hours of contact time annually than Mapleton or Parkrose.

Those hours and days add up.

“Students in the lowest-time districts may receive up to three fewer years of school than students in the highest-time districts,” Pope said.

Short school years aren’t Oregon’s only problem. Oregon also lags when it comes to regular school attendance. A recent analysis from Stand for Children found that if school attendance returned to pre-pandemic levels and the state’s school year averaged out to 180 days instead of 165, academic outcomes in the state would improve significantly.

Virtually all of Oregon’s 197 school districts are meeting Oregon’s instructional time requirements, which are 900 hours for students in kindergarten through eighth grade, 990 hours for students in grades nine through 11, and 966 hours for 12th graders. The majority of states, including Washington, require a certain number of days every year. Oregon does not.

According to Brown University researcher Matthew Kraft, Oregon ranks 47th in the nation when it comes to time in school.

Carrie Pierce is a parent of two children in Portland Public Schools, including a son who receives special education services. Appearing at a press conference organized by Stand For Children, Pierce said that when school is cancelled or interrupted, it is destabilizing for her son.

“He ruminates on the change, becomes anxious, and talks about it long after it has passed,” Pierce shared. “Some disabled students we know also experience sleep disturbances and behavior struggles on half and no school days. It can be hard for some of those kids to re-engage in the classroom when they get back.”

This new tool arrives almost a week after Gov. Tina Kotek announced an executive order prohibiting school districts from cutting school days to balance their budgets. Also under the order, districts will no longer be allowed to classify professional development or parent-teacher conferences as “instructional time.” Currently, districts can include up to 30 hours of professional development and 30 hours of conferences in their instructional time count.

Pope was at last week’s announcement.

“What the Governor’s order does not do is get us to the national average, it simply stops the cutting of one of the shortest school years in the country,” Pope said. “That is an important first step.”

Pope and others at the press conference are pushing for more steps.

Oregon Rep. April Dobson (D-Happy Valley), who also serves on the North Clackamas School District board of directors, said she’s looking to the next legislative session to “raise the statewide floor”.

“I’m committed to collaborating with districts and educators around how we give students more time to learn, but the outcome is not negotiable,” Dobson said. “We need to do this. And we need to do it now. It’s what Oregonians expect, and it’s what our children deserve.”

But it will probably not be easy. As a state, Oregon has long prioritized local control over school operations, including the length of a school year. In addition, the length of the school year is going to have a direct effect on when school employees are working, which would require negotiations with labor unions.

Then there’s the role of the state as the primary funder of schools: Extending the school year would likely cost more. Those higher costs follow years of increased spending, but funding has continued to fall short of what districts say it costs to maintain services and avoid layoffs.

Dobson, the state representative and school board member, said there has to be a willingness at the state level to hold everyone — from legislators to school districts — accountable.

“We really need to fight against our own indifference to public education in the state of Oregon. There just have been assumptions for decades since I was a high schooler and Oregon passed Measure 5, that we could do anything that we want around funding for schools, that we can make any changes that we want around how much time kids are in school, and everybody will be fine,” Dobson said.

“And the kids are not all right. They’re not doing well.”

The sentiment was apparent after the Blazers won Game 2 against the San Antonio Spurs 106-103 to even the first-round series at 1-1 heading into Friday night’s game in Portland.

“This is why we do this, to have games like this, to experience wins like this,” Splitter said. “I told them before the game, I mean, all the stuff that we went through throughout the season is to get to these moments. And have fun. Go there and hoop. Go there and ball.”

Hired as an assistant last June, Splitter took over as interim head coach after Chauncey Billups’ surprising arrest and he led Portland to its first playoff appearance in five years.

But according to recent reports, new Blazers owner Tom Dundon has been looking at different candidates to fill the head coaching job on a permanent basis.

Splitter shrugged off the reports.

“Just trying to be a pro,” Splitter said before Game 2. “Try to focus on my locker room and my staff to stay and think about basketball. Same way when I got the job and all the stuff that was going on.”

Splitter, a 6-foot-11 center from Brazil, played seven years in the NBA with San Antonio, Atlanta and Philadelphia before officially retiring from basketball in 2018. He won an NBA championship in 2014 with the Spurs.

He previously served as head coach for Paris Basketball in the top French league for one season after a stint as an assistant for the Houston Rockets.

Just hours after the Blazers opened the season with a 118-114 loss to Minnesota, Billups was taken into custody in an early morning raid, part of an FBI takedown of two sprawling gambling operations that authorities said leaked inside information about NBA athletes and rigged poker games. Billups has pleaded not guilty to charges of wire fraud and money laundering.

Splitter was tasked with continuing Billups’ development of a young and inexperienced but talented squad that included Scoot Henderson, Shaedon Sharpe, Toumani Camara and Deni Avdija.

Along the way the Blazers withstood several extended absences because of injury. Henderson missed 51 games with a hamstring injury, Avdija struggled with a sore back, and veteran Jrue Holiday had calf injury that sidelined him for 25 games.

And then there was the speculation over Dundon’s acquisition of the team. The former majority owner of the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes struck a deal with the estate of former owner Paul Allen to buy the team before the start of the season. The sale became final last month.

There were concerns about possible changes under Dundon, based on cost-cutting measures he took with the Hurricanes. One has already drawn the ire of Trail Blazers fans: There will be no free T-shirts on the seats at the Moda Center for fans attending Friday’s game.

No matter what the future holds, the fact remains that under Splitter the Blazers finished the regular season 42-40, above .500 for the first time since the 2020-21 season.

“Just glad to be in this situation with that group, they make everything easier,” Splitter said about making the postseason. ”Great group of guys. I think Joe (general manager Joe Cronin) put a great group of human beings first, and that makes everything easier, the day to day. Even though we went through a lot of things throughout the season, I told them, I’m so proud of every accomplishment that we had, individually and as a group.”

Splitter has certainly made a case for removal of the interim tag among the players.

“He got thrown in a difficult situation,” Deni Avdija said. “It wasn’t easy for him to just all of a sudden take the head job. But I think he’s done phenomenal. He’s getting the best out of everybody. He’s believing in each and every single one of his players, and we love playing for him.”

___

AP NBA: https://apnews.com/nba

After a marathon vote-a-rama that dragged from Wednesday night into the early hours Thursday, the Senate adopted a GOP budget blueprint to provide roughly $70 billion to fund immigration enforcement agencies through President Trump’s term.

This comes as the Department of Homeland Security has faced a record-breaking partial shutdown, after Senate Democrats refused to fund the department unless major policy changes to immigration enforcement were made, following the deaths of two U.S. citizens at the hands of federal agents earlier this year.

Because compromise between the two parties is off the table, Senate Republicans are turning to a budget tool called reconciliation, which would enable them to fund immigration enforcement agencies without the need for Democratic support. It’s a lengthy and arduous process. It’s been used by both parties to implement major priorities along party lines, including President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Ultimately, Senate Republicans ultimately adopted the plan with a 50-48 vote. GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rand Paul of Kentucky joined Democrats in voting against the measure. Two senators were absent for personal reasons

The resolution would authorize the Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees to draft legislation that would increase the deficit by up to $70 billion each. A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said the final price tag is expected to be $70 billion total. That figure is expected to fund the agencies for 3.5 years.

The budget measure now heads to the House of Representatives, which must also adopt the resolution before committees can draft the actual legislation. There’s already been a push from some House Republicans to expand the scope of the effort, something that could complicate leadership’s plans. Any changes the House makes would then have to go back to the Senate, where the chamber would have to undertake another vote-a-rama.

President Trump has given a deadline of June 1 for the bill’s passage.

Reconciliation can be a complicated and lengthy process. Here’s a look at what’s involved.

What exactly is reconciliation?

Let’s start at the beginning. Bills need to pass both chambers of Congress to become laws.

In the House, a bill passes when at least 218 members (half of the 435 representatives plus one) support it. In the Senate, most bills need the support of at least 60 senators. Republicans currently have 53 seats.

“It’s nice to have the Senate majority, and you get pretty titles and gavels, and you can nominally control the floor, but as Schoolhouse Rock! would tell us, unless you have 60 votes for most things, you can’t move forward," Liam Donovan, a political strategist, previously told NPR.

One way to get around that 60-vote threshold and avoid the threat of a filibuster is budget reconciliation, a tool made possible because of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.

Reconciliation allows the party in control to pass legislation with a 51-vote simple majority in the Senate. The aim is to make it easier for Congress to make adjustments to laws that either bring in revenue or change spending levels.

It was first used in 1980 for the 1981 fiscal year and is not used every year.

“It’s become the preferred tool over the past 25 years in this modern, partisan political era,” said Donovan.

Republicans used reconciliation to pass tax cuts in 2017, and Democrats used it to pass elements of then-President Joe Biden’s agenda, like the COVID-19 relief package and the Inflation Reduction Act. More recently, congressional Republicans used reconciliation to pass Trump’s signature legislative vehicle, the One Big Beautiful Bill.

How does it work? 

Reconciliation is a two-stage process.

It starts with a budget resolution that gives instructions to congressional committees to write legislation that achieves certain budgetary outcomes. For example, a resolution might include instructions to the Committee on Armed Services to report changes in laws within its jurisdiction that result in increasing or reducing the deficit by a certain amount.

Once the budget resolution passes out of committee, the committees that received instructions get to work.

The Budget Committee then incorporates all those bills into one big bill that’s considered by the House and the Senate.

If there are disputes between the chambers, they have to resolve them.

Why do I keep hearing about vote-a-ramas?

Vote-a-ramas can be dramatic and drawn-out affairs where senators take up a marathon of amendments ahead of a final budget vote.

They begin in the Senate when debate on the bill ends. Senators essentially keep offering amendments on the bill until they run out of amendments — or steam — and decide to stop.

It is a rare chance for the party in the minority to bring legislation to the floor and is an opportunity for senators to try to undo parts of the budget resolution through objections known as budget points of order.

There are two vote-a-ramas in the course of the reconciliation process: one on the budget resolution, which is less consequential, and the second on the final proposed legislation itself.

“The amendments that happen in the final legislative package are really important — you’re playing with live ammunition when you’re on that final stage of reconciliation,” said Donovan.

Why wouldn’t reconciliation be used all the time? 

There are limits to budget reconciliation. It’s used to make changes to the debt limit, changes to mandatory spending or adjustments in revenues. It cannot be used for discretionary spending.

There’s also what’s known as the Byrd rule, named after former Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia.

The rule allows anything determined not to have a direct budgetary consequence to be removed from the bill. The goal behind this is to prevent reconciliation from being used for measures unrelated to the finances of the federal government.

In other words, reconciliation is about money going out from the federal government and the money it takes in.

If a senator thinks a provision in the bill doesn’t pass muster with the Byrd rule, the senator can raise a “point of order.” The Senate parliamentarian advises the presiding officer on whether the provision violates the rule.

This could include anything that doesn’t result in changes to spending or revenues, doesn’t cause changes to Social Security or doesn’t raise the deficit beyond the point of the budget window, which is usually 10 years.

This story is adapted from an earlier story, which can be found here.

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In their quest to regain control of both chambers of Congress, Democratic candidates are outraising Republicans in key contests that will decide the House and Senate majorities even as the national party faces record low approval ratings from voters.

As the Democratic Party reckons with its future, a handful of older incumbents face well-funded, younger primary challengers who are fueled by a surge of individual contributions. This as nearly 70 lawmakers from both parties have already announced plans to retire, run for a different office or have already lost a primary election.

For Republicans, the typical midterm headwinds that blow against the party in power are compounded by President Trump’s unpopularity and voter dissatisfaction around issues like the economy, immigration policy and the war in Iran.

At the same time, the national party’s committees and super PACs have hundreds of millions of dollars saved up that they can — and will — deploy to counteract Democrats’ enthusiasm.

Another wildcard is Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC, which has nearly $350 million cash on hand to help sway what his final two years in office could look like – if he uses it.

Here are four charts that explain the current political landscape for control of the House and Senate.

Democratic Senate candidates lead the fundraising pack

To regain control of the Senate, Democrats need to defend two seats in states that Trump won in 2024 and flip four others.

As of the most recent filing deadline, Democratic candidates have outraised Republican candidates overall in seven seats held by Republicans — Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, Alaska, Florida, Iowa and Texas.

In the last quarter, Democrats also reported matching or exceeding Republican fundraising totals in several Senate races, too.

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Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico reported more than $27 million in receipts during the first quarter, followed by $14 million for Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff. Former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper reported nearly $9 million in his primary campaign account and millions more in a joint fundraising committee.

Additionally, independent candidates aligned with the Democratic Party raised more than Republican Senate incumbents in the deep red strongholds of Montana and Nebraska last quarter.

Republicans have more money to spend — but they’ll need it

While there’s enthusiasm for Democratic candidates in competitive races, the negative view towards the national Democratic Party extends to donors, too.

The Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, along with allied super PACs House Majority Project and Senate Majority Project have been outraised by their Republican counterparts in the 2026 campaign cycle.

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The Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, National Republican Senatorial Committee and allied super PACs Congressional Leadership Fund and Senate Leadership Fund also have roughly double the cash on hand than their Democratic counterparts.

Add in Trump’s MAGA Inc., and Republicans have nearly $850 million in the bank to defend vulnerable House and Senate races as well as pursue opportunities to pickup seats in toss-up contests.

Some older House Democratic incumbents still face well-funded young challengers

As NPR previously reported, a number of older House Democrats who have not yet opted to retire are facing younger challengers who have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars almost exclusively from individual contributions. In some cases, those young challengers have outraised the incumbent.

Nearly a dozen vulnerable incumbents fit the bill, like California Reps. Brad Sherman and Mike Thompson, as well as Massachusetts Rep. Stephen Lynch. More money does not always guarantee success in challenging a sitting lawmaker, however.

Rep. Valerie Foushee of North Carolina already won her primary against Nida Allam, despite Allam raising nearly $300,000 more. In the March 3 primary, outside groups spent a record-setting $4.2 million to influence the race, primarily to support Foushee.

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Most incumbents are doing just fine

Control of the House and Senate still boils down to a relatively small number of districts, and incumbents who chose to run again almost always win.

Many sitting lawmakers do not have primary challengers, or if they do, those challengers raise very little money or attention.

This is reflected in campaign finance data: the average incumbent still running for re-election accounts for 94% of the primary fundraising and 80% of the general election fundraising for their seat.

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Only 22 lawmakers report raising less than half of the money in their party’s primary in the last quarter or overall. This includes many of the vulnerable older House Democrats like Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen and Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and John Cornyn of Texas, who both face tough primary challenges.

One of them, former Rep. Sheila Cheriflus-McCormick, resigned April 21, 2026 before the House Ethics Committee was set to meet and decide on a punishment for violating campaign finance and ethics rules.

Local governments in the Portland metro area are having serious money problems. To fill their massive budget gaps, leaders are proposing to cut hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars for government programs. What will this mean for the Rose City and the region’s future? On the latest episode of “OPB Politics Now,” reporters Alex Zielinski and Bryce Dole discuss the budget happenings. Find the show anywhere you get your podcasts.

On Sept. 10, 2025, Battle Ground High School social studies teacher Amanda Gonzales was trying to stay in control of the churn of high school students during the minutes between class periods.

It was the day that conservative activist Charlie Kirk was killed during a speaking event outside Salt Lake City, Utah.

Looking back, Gonzales said, it was a hectic time of day when a student came up to her and asked if she had heard about Kirk’s death.

That’s where the two accounts diverge.

Gonzales recalls telling the student “thoughts and prayers,” and “he’s not my political cup of tea,” before moving on to wrangling her class.

The student’s account was different. “[Ms. Gonzales] was laughing about it, saying she had no sympathy for Nazis,” the student wrote in a text message to his mom, who soon shared a screenshot of the text on social media. There, it went viral, creating a firestorm online that inspired more than a hundred angry emails sent to administrators calling for the teacher to be fired.

Since then, the impact has been extensive for Gonzales.

“It’s burnt my life to the ground,” she said.

A few hours later that day, the district put Gonzales on paid administrative leave, where she has been for the past eight months. After the incident, she received online threats from a parent in the district, which led to a judge issuing a restraining order. Gonzales’ elderly parents got doxed. She has panic attacks and said she’s still afraid to go out in public.

Battle Ground School District spokesperson Amanda Richter declined an interview request for this story.

School Board Director Lorri Sibley also declined to comment for this story. The other four school board directors and Battle Ground High School Principal Heather Ichimura did not respond to interview requests.

In a letter outlining Gonzales’ cause for discharge, Superintendent Sherry Whitten wrote that multiple students were aware of Gonzales’ “political bias” because of statements she’d made in class about controversial topics. She added that, based on parent feedback, Gonzales’ expression had an adverse impact on the district and that her conduct had undermined the trust of students and families.

“The District finds the students credible,” Whitten wrote.

Battle Ground School District parent Shauna Walters, whose son’s text message catalyzed the investigation into Gonzales, agreed.

“We were assured multiple times that the district did not base their pursuit of termination solely on the testimony of my son, rather from the mountain of evidence from multiple sources,” Walters, who declined an interview request, wrote in a statement to OPB.

In January, a third-party arbitrator was hired to oversee an appeal between the teacher and the school district. Retired Washington state Superior Court Judge Elizabeth Martin determined that Gonzales did nothing wrong. After interviewing teachers, students, administrators and parents, Martin wrote in her findings that the allegation against Gonzales was “not credible,” and the opinion expressed by the teacher “was not egregious.”

Martin said the district had not met its burden of proof when it said that Gonzales had violated school policies about civility at school, staff expression and disciplinary action that it used to justify firing her.

“[Gonzales] is entitled to be reinstated to her teaching position,” Martin wrote, along with attorney fees and back pay. Arbitrators don’t have enforcement powers like an active judge, so a court would have to force such decisions to take effect.

The district has still not allowed Gonzales to return to class, and the situation at Battle Ground High School has left some other teachers feeling unprotected. Several told OPB that they don’t feel safe engaging with students or they are self-censoring when controversial topics come up in class.

Teachers censoring lesson plans

Shortly after the incident with Gonzales, something similar happened to Jordan Johnston, an English language arts teacher at Battle Ground High School. At the time, she was teaching “The Crucible,” a 1953 play by Arthur Miller that tells a story of mass hysteria during the Salem witch trials as an allegory for the Red Scare and McCarthyism in the 1950s.

An administrator pulled Johnston aside during a five-minute classroom passing period and told her they had overheard students talking about whether they could get Johnston to say something that would get her fired.

“Just be cautious,” Johnston recalled being told.

The next minute, she had to step into her classroom and teach “The Crucible,” a play about false accusations and reputations being ruined. It was something she had taught for years, she said, but now she was second guessing herself for fear that someone would misinterpret the lesson. She decided not to go into as much depth about McCarthyism, the political fearmongering named after Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy who made widespread accusations about communist infiltration into the U.S. government. His accusations ruined many careers in the 1950s, even when his claims were later found to be unsubstantiated.

In another class, Johnston avoided teaching a poem by Langston Hughes, a lauded Black American poet during the Harlem Renaissance. In the poem, the author talks about his race. She avoided the topic out of fear that she’d get negative feedback from students or their parents.

“In the past, I would have just done what I always do, but I feel bad that I actually didn’t teach some of those poems that I should have taught,” she said. “I shouldn’t have been worried that it was going to bother somebody.”

According to Johnston, other teachers feel the same way, or say they’re scared to attend protests or political rallies in their free time out of fear that they’ll be targeted.

“We’re all just kind of walking on eggshells,” said Joseph Drury, a math teacher at Battle Ground High School. Since Gonzales’ was put on leave, Drury said, he feels less safe engaging with students out of fear that district officials wouldn’t be supportive if something similar happened to him. Both Drury and Johnston testified in support of Gonzales when the arbitrator interviewed students and faculty at the school.

Combating cyberbullying

The controversy at Battle Ground High School underscores how teachers are increasingly navigating a pervasive online culture among their students and a political climate that can seep into the classroom.

In nearby Vancouver, Washington, teachers earlier this year protested over what they called their district’s lack of response to a student’s Instagram account that showed altered photos of teachers, including political and sexual references. And in Idaho last year, a middle school teacher resigned after a high-profile controversy when she was asked to take down a poster with the phrase “Everyone is Welcome Here” and a row of multiracial hands that the district said violated its policies.

Some teachers feel a Washington state law to ban cellphones in school would help combat cyberbullying of students and teachers.

“Teenagers are teenagers. They’re not fully thinking about the consequences of what that accusation can have,” said Ben Folgers, who teaches English language arts at Mount Rainier High School in Des Moines, Washington.

Folgers is a union representative for the Washington Education Association. He has noticed other cases in which teachers were targeted on social media after Charlie Kirk’s death. Usually they involved words taken out of context or blown out of proportion, he said.

While Oregon and many other states have rules prohibiting the use of personal electronic devices during the school day, Washington has no such rule. Gov. Bob Ferguson signed a law this year asking the state superintendent’s office to study policies in other states and make recommendations to the Legislature by the end of 2027.

“Washington is really behind the curve on that,” Folgers said.

Oregon students and staff say cellphone restrictions are going well

As a social studies teacher at Battle Ground High School for the past decade, Gonzales didn’t shy away from controversial topics. Her courses included a class titled “Holocaust and genocide studies.” Speakers included Holocaust and Cambodian genocide survivors, and a guest speaker about the Rwandan genocide.

“You have to be able to have discussion and debate and talk about tough things,” Gonzales said. “Do I like teaching the slave trade? No. But you have to. It’s part of history and you’ve got to make kids understand not everything is rosy and pretty all the time.”

Disagreement moves to court

The third-party arbitrator’s report notes that Gonzales had no previous disciplinary history or formal complaints and received the highest possible teacher evaluations for eight of her 11 years in the district.

Walters, the Battle Ground parent, also testified as part of the arbitrator’s report. She said she disagreed with the judge’s finding that Gonzales should be reinstated, arguing that not all the appropriate evidence could be included in the investigation.

“Several students brought in video evidence of [Gonzales’] classroom political rants that were not admissible in her proceedings due to Washington being a two-party consent state,” Walters said.

At this point, Gonzales has several options. The district has made multiple settlement offers, she said, but none has been sufficient.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said. “Why am I worrying about not having any medical coverage? Why am I worried about what my retirement is going to look like?”

Gonzales may only be able to get her job back by taking the issue to Clark County Superior Court. She and her lawyer plan to give the district until Monday, April 27, for her to be reinstated. Then they’ll try to get the arbitrator’s order enforced in court.

The standoff is complicated by the fact that Battle Ground Public Schools is one of several districts in Clark County that are trying to find their way out of significant budget deficits. If Gonzales loses her job, it will be tough to find a new one in the area. Later this month, Battle Ground Public Schools will detail staff cuts to address a $20 million budget gap. Cuts are also happening at Vancouver Public Schools and Evergreen Public Schools.

Gonzales said she’s open to transferring from Battle Ground High School to another school within the district but hasn’t had any such offers from administrators.

Correction: This story has been updated to correct Joseph Drury’s first name, which was incorrect in an earlier version. OPB regrets the error.

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The schedule below is subject to change. Please contact us to confirm meeting times and dates or to get more information.

Friday, June 12, 2026, 10 a.m.

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Thursday, May 14, 2026, 2:30 p.m.

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Monday, May 18, 2026, 3:30 p.m.

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Friday, May 22, 2026, 9 a.m.

Tuesday, June 2, 2026, 12 p.m.

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Tuesday, April 28, 2026, 8:30 a.m.

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TBD

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The schedule below is subject to change. Please contact us to confirm meeting times and dates or to get more information.

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Senate Bill 1516, signed into law by Gov. Tina Kotek on March 31, went into effect immediately due to an emergency clause lawmakers tucked into the legislation. The 16-page law was part of a public safety omnibus package that received bipartisan support, but it stood out for its restrictions placed on the use of automated license plate reading software and the street cameras it employs. Law enforcement agencies have used that technology to dismantle criminal networks, but their use has drawn increased scrutiny amid increased federal immigration enforcement.

“We have the possibility of multiple law enforcement agencies in the state entering into contracts that may not have those private protections of data,” Sen. Floyd Prozanski, a Eugene Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, told the Capital Chronicle in January. “There may be the ability for other entities (to be) getting access to that material for purposes that are not lawful within the state, specifically sharing with the federal government or other states.”

Oregon’s sanctuary laws prevent state and local law enforcement from assisting federal immigration enforcement without a court order. But civil rights advocates have raised concerns that the data collected by cameras could be used to track immigrants and people seeking abortions, even in states including Oregon that have laws to protect access to reproductive care and bar local police from working to enforce immigration law. 

The technology tracks more than license plates, including features such as car color, make or physical condition, and some researchers have found that its use can lead to misread plates or arrests of innocent individuals.

U.S. Border Patrol employed automated license plate-reading technology in the 1990s, and it spread to police departments across the country in the next decade. One vendor in particular, the Atlanta-based Flock Safety, has drawn condemnation from U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, who previously said the company is “unable and uninterested” in preventing abuses of its products.

University researchers and journalists have documented how U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement accessed camera data in states like Oregon and Washington. U.S. Border Patrol had access to at least 10 Washington police departments’ databases without explicit authorization, according to an October 2025 report from the University of Washington. And in June 2025, some local agencies outside of Oregon searched the networks of Oregon’s local law enforcement agencies hundreds of times on behalf of ICE, according to the Oregon Law Center.

In response to concerns from privacy advocates, the law limits the retention of such data to 30 days unless it is linked to a criminal inquiry or court proceedings, allowing for law enforcement to hold onto it as they pursue their investigations. Authorities would have to log the purpose of their searches and the specific type of crime or violation being targeted if their search through the data is for a criminal investigation. They are barred from using the technology in a manner that violates the state’s sanctuary laws.

Flock Safety cameras, meanwhile, have stoked increasing controversy in recent months, prompting some Oregon cities to turn off their usage. But they’ve been used for years nationwide in thousands of law enforcement agencies. This past year, the company announced new artificial intelligence tools allowing officers to search for vehicles with unique characteristics. 

The company has also issued guidance around the new law and praised it for establishing Oregon’s “first comprehensive ALPR framework, setting rules for ALPR use while preserving its ability to help solve crime and locate missing persons.” 

“Flock Safety remains committed to responsible ALPR regulation and continued collaboration with policymakers and law enforcement agencies across Oregon and the country,” the company’s website reads. “As SB 1516 takes effect, our priority is to help agencies adjust to the new law while continuing to protect their communities.”

Enforcement questioned

Any member of the public could sue for damages caused by vendors who act “intentionally or with gross negligence” by selling, disclosing or sharing the data. That could include a vendor accessing and providing data to federal immigration authorities without a local law enforcement body’s consent or judicial warrant.

But that leaves a great amount of onus on individual Oregonians to enforce the law, according to Ky Fireside, an Oregon House candidate and Springfield-based progressive organizer who was part of a license plate reader workgroup convened by Prozanski.

“If I wanted to take a private right of action against a vendor, I’m gonna need to find some very powerful lawyers that are willing to work on contingency or something,” Fireside told the Capital Chronicle.

Under the law, non-Oregon law enforcement can also access Oregon law enforcement agencies’ database for information “relevant to the law enforcement purpose” rather than “unrestricted or ongoing access to captured license plate data.” The agency sharing data must log which government agency or entity requested the search and the number of cameras or devices accessed. 

And any vendor that contracts with law enforcement agencies must give the agency monthly and quarterly audits. Those audits, which must also be available to the public, would include information such as the number of unique vehicles the system has captured, what kind of data was searched for, the purpose of a search and any government agencies for whom a law enforcement agency conducted a search. 

Fireside said this transparency is particularly important given the public’s involvement with holding the technology accountable. Prior to halting their use, local authorities in Eugene confirmed that a license plate reading camera in the area was turned on without the city’s consent.

“Every misuse of the system that we found was because of the public auditing these companies, watching them, doing public records requests or just looking at transparency portals,” Fireside said. “It was not like internal affairs investigating themselves and realizing someone did something wrong. It was the public.”

Although the bill exempts license plate reader data used by law enforcement agencies from public records requests, it notes that audits can be disclosed if they are edited to remove personally identifiable information. Videos or images, for instance, would need to be “edited in a manner as to render the faces of all persons within the recording or image unidentifiable.”

One thing privacy advocates wanted, but didn’t get? The law requires that the captured license plate data be encrypted through end-to-end encryption, the process by which secure data is encoded before it is transferred to its destination and decoded. But it doesn’t spell out how that process is defined, a major issue for Fireside.

“The bill requires it, but doesn’t define it. My biggest concern is that these vendors are going to try and skirt that aspect of the bill,” Fireside said. “That is the most dangerous part, because that requirement was the thing that kept the data out of the hands of these private corporations.”

Oregon Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501(c)(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Julia Shumway for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on Facebook and Bluesky.

This republished story is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit opb.org/partnerships.

Victor Wembanyama will travel with the San Antonio Spurs to Portland for games this weekend, even while continuing completing the steps mandated by the league’s concussion protocol.

That said, Spurs coach Mitch Johnson stopped short Thursday of saying Wembanyama will play. Wembanyama is “progressing,” Johnson said, but his status for Game 3 of the matchup remains uncertain.

Wembanyama — the league’s first-ever unanimous Defensive Player of the Year and one of three finalists for the Most Valuable Player award — suffered the concussion in the Spurs’ Game 2 loss to Portland on Tuesday night, leaving the game in the second quarter.

Game 3 of the series — tied at a game apiece — is Friday in Portland, followed by Game 4 there on Sunday. The Spurs were flying to Portland on Thursday afternoon.

There are very specific steps that players have to clear before being removed from the league’s concussion protocol. Players begin the return-to-play process with light exertion — such as riding a stationary bike, jogging, agility work and non-contact basketball drills — and each step is followed by another neurological examination.

Wembanyama’s results will also be compared to his baseline neurological evaluation — which players undergo prior to each season — before doctors permit him to move forward in the return-to-play plan.

Any extended absence by Wembanyama would be a massive blow to San Antonio, which finished with the league’s second-best record behind the versatile 7-foot-4 center from France. They were 12-6 in the regular season without Wembanyama.

Wembanyama averaged 25 points, 11.5 rebounds, 3.1 assists and a league-best 3.1 blocks per game this season.

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AP NBA: https://apnews.com/hub/NBA

Thousands of people gathered at Holladay Park in Portland on Saturday to say goodbye to a piece of Oregon history.

Fans of trains and public transit had the opportunity to send off TriMet’s remaining Type 1 MAX train. The Type 1 is the original MAX train, in service since 1986, which TriMet is decommissioning to make way for the new Type 6 trains.

Type 1 trains can be recognized for having stairs on each side, as opposed to the ground-level entrances seen on modern train cars. Joe Taylor, who works in TriMet’s vehicle engineering department, said they are not wheelchair accessible.

These train cars were only scheduled to last 25 years, Taylor said. They ended up lasting 40.

“I think it’s important to reflect on the manufacturer, the maintenance teams, operators, everyone here at TriMet, who have basically kept these things alive,” Taylor said.

TriMet’s first service cuts begin Sunday as $300M budget gap looms

Each visitor to the Holladay Park gathering had the opportunity to explore the train, sit in the operator’s chair and write a farewell message on the side. The messages ranged from “Thank you for your service” to “I rode this train the first day it ran!”

Many people wore costumes of the Type 1 train. Davis Mackintosh made the journey from Hood River, donning a surprisingly realistic mask that resembled the train.

“They were sort of rare and unique when I sort of learned about the different types of trains,” Mackintosh said of the Type 1. “Now they’re going away and I think that’s kind of special too, to appreciate them.”

The look of MAX trains has changed in the past four decades. The newest Type 6 trains are wider, with flat entrances that are accessible to wheelchairs.

The event also comes as TriMet faces a significant budget crisis that is forcing the agency to make cuts to bus and light rail routes. Ridership across all TriMet services has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, a significant cause of the transit agency’s $300 million budget deficit.

Starting in August, the MAX Green Line will only run from Clackamas Town Center to the Gateway Transit Center. It currently runs all the way to Portland State University.

TriMet announces layoffs and service cuts to address $300M shortfall

Many people at Holladay Park remembered when the Type 1 trains were first unveiled in 1986. Billie Shults of Gresham said she was among the first commuters to take the train to her job in downtown Portland.

“It’s always been important to me,” Shults said.

She has an even more personal connection to the train. Her significant other, Richard Pond, was a journeyman at TriMet for more than three decades before he passed away in 2001. He regularly worked on Type 1 trains — a plaque with his name remains in Car 101, which is now at the Oregon Electric Railway Museum in Brooks.

At the event, Shults wore Pond’s old TriMet hat.

“Sometimes things change and things improve, and I’m sure that they’re more efficient, but it was really beautiful to be a part of that history,” she said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the location of the Oregon Electric Railway Museum. OPB regrets the error.

For people like Zack Loud of Farmington, Minnesota, it was a surprise to learn that under a new law, Canada already considered him and his siblings citizens because their grandmother is Canadian.

“My wife and I were already talking about potentially looking at jobs outside the country, but citizenship pushed Canada way up on our list,” he said.

Since the new law took effect Dec. 15, immigration lawyers in the United States and Canada say they have been overwhelmed by clients seeking help submitting proof of citizenship applications. Driven by politics, family heritage, job opportunities and other factors, thousands of Americans are exploring whether the easier process makes now the right time to gain dual citizenship.

Nicholas Berning, an immigration attorney at Boundary Bay Law in Bellingham, Washington, said his practice is “pretty much flooded with this.”

“We’ve kind of shifted a lot of other work away in order to push these cases through,” he said.

And immigration attorney Amandeep Hayer said his Vancouver, British Columbia, area practice went from about 200 citizenship cases a year to more than 20 consults per day.

How the new law works

Canada has been changing its citizenship laws for decades, whether to update historic interpretations of law or to address discrimination issues.

Previously, Canadian citizenship by descent could only be passed down to one generation, from a parent to a child. That changed when Canadian bill C-3 took effect Dec. 15, and opened up citizenship to anyone born before that date who could prove they have a direct Canadian ancestor — a grandparent, great-grandparent or even more distant ancestor.

Those born on or after Dec. 15 need to show their parent met a residency requirement of 1,095 days.

Under the new law, descendants of Canadians already are considered citizens, but they must provide proof to obtain a certificate of citizenship. Hayer estimated that there are millions of Americans who are Canadian descendants.

“You are Canadian, and you’re considered to be one your whole life,” said Hayer, who advocated for the new law in the Parliament of Canada. “That’s really what you’re applying for, the recognition of a right you already have vested.”

“The best way I can put it is like, if a baby’s born tomorrow in Canada, the baby’s Canadian even though they don’t have the birth certificate,” he said.

Americans interested in dual citizenship

American applicants have different motivations, but many say President Donald Trump’s efforts on immigration and other topics have led them to seek dual citizenship.

Michelle Cunha, of Bedford, Massachusetts, said she decided to move to Canada after reflecting on decades of political activism and deciding she had “nothing left to give.”

“I put in my best effort for 30 years. I have done everything that I possibly can to make the United States what it promises the world to be, a place of freedom, a place of equality,” Cunha said. “But clearly we’re not there and we’re not going to get there anytime soon.”

Troy Hicks, who had a great-grandfather born in Canada, said he was spurred by an international trip.

“I recently went to Australia and you know, first words out of the first person I talked to in Australia was basically an expletive about Trump and the U.S.,” said Hicks, of Pahrump, Nevada. “It was just like, whoa, I walked off a 20-hour flight and literally the first words of somebody’s mouth to me were that. ... So the idea of doing that with a Canadian passport just seemed easier, better, more palatable.”

Maureen Sullivan, of Naples, Florida, said she was motivated by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota, which hit home when her teenage nephew encountered federal officers near his high school in St. Paul. Sullivan, whose grandmother was Canadian, said she sees citizenship in Canada as an option in case things in the U.S. “really go south.”

“When I first heard about the bill, I couldn’t believe it. It was like this little gift that fell in my lap,” Sullivan said. “There was kind of this collective excitement amongst the (family) who just felt like, we wanted to feel like we were doing something to take care of our security in the future if needed.”

How much will Canadian citizenship cost?

For those with documentation ready at hand, the proof of citizenship application fee is a relatively inexpensive 75 Canadian dollars ($55).

But costs will climb for those seeking help from an attorney or genealogist.

Cunha said she used an attorney and estimates the cost will be about $6,500.

However, Mary Mangan, of Somerville, Massachusetts, filed her application in January using advice from online forums.

“There are some situations where a lawyer might be the right thing, but for many people, I would guess 90% of people can probably do this on their own,” Mangan said.

The website for the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada office, which processes applications, says processing times for a certificate is around 10 months, with more 56,000 people awaiting a decision.

The agency said that from Dec. 15 to Jan. 31, it confirmed citizenship by descent for 1,480 people, though not all were Americans. Last year, 24,500 Americans gained dual US-Canada citizenship.

What do Canadians think?

Fen Hampson, professor of international affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa, said Canadians are generally a “welcoming people.”

“I think where people start looking askance is someone who’s never been to Canada, who has very thin ties. They can get a passport, becoming Canadians of convenience. People don’t like that,” he said.

Hampson said some also worry a surge of interest from Americans could delay efforts by refugees and asylum-seekers fleeing vulnerable situations.

“Canadians don’t like queue jumpers,” Hampson said.

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The U.S. military on Thursday said it seized another tanker transporting oil from Iran in the Indian Ocean, a day after Iran took control of two commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

President Trump said in a new social media post he ordered the Navy to “shoot and kill any boat” laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz. He also said the U.S. is ramping up minesweeping in the strait.

This comes after Trump on Tuesday said he was extending the ceasefire with Iran indefinitely, hours before it was set to expire. He told Fox News on Wednesday there was “no time pressure” either on the truce or setting a new date for talks to end the war.

Iran dismissed Trump’s ceasefire extension as meaningless, saying the continued U.S. naval blockade on Iranian ports is a violation of the deal and it will not return to negotiations until the blockade is lifted. The U.S. Central Command said it has directed 31 vessels to change course since imposing its blockade earlier this month.

Brent crude oil, the international standard, was again trading at over $100 a barrel Thursday as the impasse continued to disrupt shipping through the strait, a chokepoint for roughly a fifth of the world’s crude oil and natural gas.

Hours after Trump’s announcement, Iran attacked three commercial vessels in the narrow waterway and seized two of them, further tightening its grip on one of the world’s most important shipping lanes.

Lebanon, meanwhile, is set to pursue an extension of its U.S.-brokered ceasefire with Israel during a second round of talks in Washington on Thursday. The talks come a day after Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon killed at least five people, including a Lebanese journalist.

The latest regional turmoil coincided with a shakeup at the Pentagon, where U.S. Navy Secretary John Phelan was dismissed following months of tension with senior Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Here are the latest developments on Day 55 of the Middle East war:

Israel-Lebanon talks | Navy Secretary dismissed

Second round of Israel-Lebanon talks in Washington

Israel and Lebanon are set to hold a second round of ambassador-level talks in Washington on Thursday, as both sides explore extending the fragile 10-day ceasefire that took effect last week.

The talks follow the first high-level contact between the two countries in decades and come as Lebanon seeks to stop the fighting between Israel and the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah.

Lebanon is also trying to secure the withdrawal of Israeli troops still occupying parts of the country’s south, where Israel wants to establish a “buffer zone” to keep Hezbollah from launching strikes into northern Israel.

The Israeli government has called on the Lebanese government to do more to pressure Hezbollah into disarming.

Salman Harb, a Hezbollah spokesperson, told NPR that the group maintained its “right to resist” if Israel refused to withdraw from Lebanon.

Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon on Wednesday killed at least five people, including Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil. Lebanese officials said Khalil and another journalist took shelter in a house after a nearby vehicle was targeted, but the building was then struck as well. Medics said they were able to rescue a wounded journalist accompanying her. They then came under fire and were forced to retreat before they could save Khalil, who later died under the rubble. The Israeli military said it was responding to an “imminent threat” and was reviewing the incident.

Lebanon Prime Minister Nawaf Salam accused Israel of targeting journalists.

“Israel’s targeting of media workers in the south while they carry out their professional duties is no longer isolated incidents, but has become an established approach that we condemn and reject, as do all international laws and conventions,” Salam wrote in a post on social media.

At least eight journalists have been killed by Israel in Lebanon since the start of the conflict, according to the Committee to Project Journalists.

U.S. Navy secretary dismissed

The latest regional turmoil coincides with another shakeup at the Pentagon, where Navy Secretary John Phelan was dismissed on Wednesday.

The Pentagon said only that Phelan was “departing the administration, effective immediately,” and said that Undersecretary Hung Cao would serve as acting Navy secretary.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, called Phelan’s dismissal “another example of the instability and dysfunction that have come to define the Department of Defense under President Trump and Secretary [Pete] Hegseth.”

Phelan, a billionaire investor with no naval experience, was the service’s top civilian official who oversaw the Navy’s budget, personnel and effort to build more ships. He was not, however, responsible for day-to-day operations taking place in the Middle East.

Phelan’s departure puts him on a list of over 30 Pentagon officials who have been ousted since Hegseth’s arrival at the Pentagon, many of them generals and admirals.

Jane Arraf in Amman, Jordan, Kat Lonsdorf and Jawad Rizkallah in Beirut, Lebanon, Rebecca Rosman in London and Greg Myre Washington contributed reporting to this story.

Good morning, Northwest.

A new analysis shows the difference in instructional time between Oregon school districts can be as great as eight weeks.

OPB education reporter Elizabeth Miller explores what that means for students and parents to lead off today’s newsletter.

Also this morning, why scientists led by a Washington professor are moving forward with a national assessment of nature even after President Trump nixed it.

Here’s your First Look at Thursday’s news.

— Bradley W. Parks

Enormous variation in school instructional time for Oregon students, according to new data tool

From parents at the local level to the state’s top elected official, Oregon has long been known as a state with a short school year. Recent research backs that up.

Now, a new data tool from Stand For Children, a national nonprofit based in Portland, offers details on just how short Oregon’s school year is — and how broad the variation is from district to district.

The analysis suggests students in some Oregon districts get the equivalent of eight fewer weeks of school than kids in other parts of the state. (Elizabeth Miller)

Learn More

3 things to know

• A federal court in Eugene held oral arguments yesterday in a case over the ability of ICE officers to detain people near schools, churches and hospitals.(Nathan Wilk)
• Former legislative spokesperson Jonathan Lockwood and Deschutes County Commissioner Patti Adair are vying for the Republican vote in Oregon’s 5th Congressional District in the May 19 primary. (Mia Maldonado)
• Some families caring for children with disabilities are suing Washington, arguing the state has failed to provide services promised under Medicaid. (Jake Goldstein-Street)

Northwest headlines

• An Oregonian raised concerns about her company’s contracts with ICE. Then she lost her job (Jude Joffe-Block)
• Eugene petitioners begin push to get new climate tax on November ballot (Nathan Wilk)
• Trump canceled the National Nature Assessment first announced in Seattle. Scientists will publish it anyway (Bellamy Pailthorp)
• Gov. Ferguson fills seat on Washington campaign watchdog panel as recall effort looms (Jerry Cornfield)

Listen in on OPB’s daily conversation

“Think Out Loud” airs at noon and 8 p.m. weekdays onOPB Radio, opb.org and the OPB News app. Today’s planned topics (subject to change):

• Patrick Radden Keefe discusses his new book ‘London Falling’ at Lincoln High School in Portland

A slew of new Bigfoot sightings, on-screen and off-Broadway

Bigfoot won’t stop popping up everywhere: off-Broadway, in the critically acclaimed “Bigfoot! A New Musical” and as a new smartphone emoji.

Dozens of Bigfoot-themed festivals have taken off in small communities across the country over the past decade, from the West Virginia to Minnesota, New York to Alaska.

Half a dozen Bigfoot-themed low-budget horror movies are scheduled for a 2026 release, with such titles as “The Last Footprint” and “Slash Squatch.”

And a wave of alleged Bigfoot sightings in northeast Ohio recently made national news.

Sasquatch has always captured people’s attention and imagination, but what’s so different about this moment? (Neda Ulaby)

Learn More

Subscribe to OPB’s First Look to receive Northwest news in your inbox six days a week.

Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson has appointed Matt Segal, a founding partner of the Pacifica Law Group and former King County Superior Court judge, to the commission that enforces state campaign finance laws.

Segal, whose firm serves as Ferguson’s private counsel, was appointed April 16 to the state Public Disclosure Commission. His first meeting will be May 28.

His selection came two weeks after the launch of a recall effort against Ferguson for allowing two of the commission’s five seats to remain unfilled for months. One had been open for nearly all of Ferguson’s term, which began in January last year.

The longshot petition to remove the first-term governor from office accused Ferguson of misfeasance and violating his oath of office by failing to fill the seats within a timeline prescribed in state law. Ferguson is due to file a formal response to the petition Friday.

Segal will serve a term that runs through the end of 2030. With his selection, all four sitting commission members are lawyers and three are former judges.

Segal fills the vacancy created by the resignation of Commissioner Allen Hayward in January 2025. The other opening is for the seat held by Commissioner Nancy Isserlis, who left last August. An appointment for that vacancy could be made this week, according to a Ferguson spokesperson.

Conner Edwards, an attorney and prolific filer of campaign finance complaints, undertook the recall to spotlight a situation that could hamstring the commission in the upcoming election season. With only three of its allotted five members, all had to be present for the citizen panel to have the quorum required to adopt rules, conduct hearings and decide cases.

Edwards said Tuesday that he was “glad that the vacancy has finally been filled. Mr. Segal certainly has a very impressive and eclectic resume and I hope that he will bring a fresh perspective to the Commission.”

He reiterated that he’s prepared to end the effort to oust Ferguson if the other seat is filled soon.

Segal, a former print and broadcast journalist, earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley and a law degree from the Seattle University School of Law.

He helped found Pacifica Law Group in 2011. A decade later, former Gov. Jay Inslee appointed him to the bench and he won election in 2022. He retired two years later, rejoining Pacifica as a partner in its division devoted to public law and finance matters.

Segal did not respond to requests for comment.

He has donated mostly to Democratic candidates since 2009 including all three of Ferguson’s campaigns for attorney general, according to Public Disclosure Commission records.

While he did not give to Ferguson’s 2024 gubernatorial campaign, Pacifica Law Group contributed $4,800, records show.

A Pacifica Law attorney, Zachary Pekelis, defended Ferguson in two headline-grabbing stories in the campaign.

In 2023, a complaint to the Public Disclosure Commission brought scrutiny of Ferguson’s shifting of more than a million dollars raised for past campaigns into his new one for governor.

Commissioners found no wrongdoing but reached an agreement with Ferguson to disclose the identities of the donors to the past campaigns and treat their contributions as if they were for his gubernatorial campaign.

Then, in May 2024, a conservative activist recruited two other people named Bob Ferguson to file for governor in a not-so-subtle attempt to confuse voters. A flurry of activity ensued with the state Democratic Party and Ferguson — the one who was attorney general at the time — applying enough pressure to force that duo to withdraw.

Simultaneously, Ferguson and Pekelis pushed Secretary of State Steve Hobbs to reorder the names on the ballot and were prepared to sue if he didn’t. That issue became moot when the other Bobs pulled out.

Washington State Standard is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501(c)(3) public charity.

This republished story is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit opb.org/partnerships.

But Bigfoot won’t stop popping up everywhere: off-Broadway, in the critically acclaimed Bigfoot! A New Musical and as a new smartphone emoji. Dozens of Bigfoot-themed festivals have taken off in small communities across the country over the past decade, from the West Virginia Bigfoot Festival to Bigfoot Days in Remer, Minn. to the Whitehall, NY Sasquatch Festival to the Jasper Bigfoot Jamboree in Alaska.

Half a dozen Bigfoot-themed low-budget horror movies are scheduled for a 2026 release, with such titles as The Last Footprint and Slash Squatch. (This reporter was unaware, when beginning this story, that NPR’s Planet Money plans to release its first original board game, called “Sell Me A Sasquatch.”) And a wave of alleged Bigfoot sightings in northeast Ohio recently made national news.

“I understand the fascination with Bigfoot,” says filmmaker Marq Evans, whose documentary Capturing Bigfoot drew rave reviews at the SXSW Film & TV Festival last month. “It’s a mystery. Everybody loves a mystery. Although to some people, it’s not a mystery. They’ve seen it; it’s proven. And there’s nothing that you can tell them to say otherwise.”

Evans says Bigfoot thrives in a climate of disinformation. Online conspiracy theorists have accused his film of being AI fiction because it disproves the authenticity of a longstanding piece of evidence. Gone are the days when a hoax could be perpetuated for decades by film footage or a photograph, says Jessica Landau, who first became interested in Bigfoot as a grad student studying American mythological megafauna. Now an assistant instructional professor at The University of Chicago’s Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization, she says Bigfoot has become a potent culture war symbol.

“There’s a general distrust of expertise right now,” Landau says. “And I think people really like doing their own research, having their own belief systems and not trusting the scientific establishment.”

Landau notes that Bigfoot’s current popularity coincided with the rise of President Trump. In 2016, she noticed a lot of pro-Trump bumper stickers right by Bigfoot ones on trucks in rural Kentucky.

“I think that Bigfoot does have this appeal in rural white communities,” she says, adding that regional variations include the Florida Skunk Ape, the Woodbooger of Virginia, and the Ohio Grass Man. Often, she says they’re adopted as symbols of local pride in places that feel politically and culturally overlooked. Sightings, like the recent spate in northeast Ohio, bring attention and a feeling of importance.

“The majority of Bigfoot sightings are actually on state parks, which are generally smaller, generally with less wilderness,” Landau says. “And perhaps not so curiously, a lot of Bigfoot sightings are by people who are actively going out to find Bigfoot.”

One of them is a self-styled investigator who recently appeared on the Bigfoot Society podcast to talk about the sightings in Ohio, where he lives. “I tell everyone they let us see them,” Glenn Adkins said.

Perhaps they need to. If a Bigfoot saunters through a forest and no one sees it, does it really exist?

“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.

A Colorado prosecutor said Wednesday that the officer has been charged with third-degree assault and criminal mischief following an investigation into the treatment of a protester in October.

Multiple videos show a masked federal agent seizing a 57-year-old woman, who says she was put in a chokehold, during the protest in Durango.

Colorado is among several states to prohibit or severely limit the use of chokeholds and neck restraints by police officers. But immunity provisions under the U.S. Constitution and federal law limit the reach of local authorities in prosecuting federal agents.

Here’s what to know:

Investigations underway in Minnesota and Chicago

The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics have spurred an array of investigations by state and local authorities.

Earlier this month, a federal immigration agent was charged with two counts of second-degree assault by a county prosecutor in Minnesota amid investigations into the actions of several officers during the immigration crackdown in the Minneapolis area.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr. is accused of pointing his gun at occupants of a car after pulling alongside them on a Minneapolis-area highway. Investigators say Morgan said he feared for his safety after the vehicle swerved in front of him.

Minnesota officials also have sued the administration for access to evidence for investigations into three shootings during the crackdown, including those that resulted in the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Outside Chicago, an off-duty ICE agent has been charged with misdemeanor battery for throwing to the ground a 68-year-old protester who was filming him at a gas station in December. The Homeland Security Department that oversees ICE says the agent acted in self-defense.

In California, the shooting death of 43-year-old Keith Porter by an off-duty ICE agent on New Year’s Eve has prompted protests and calls for an independent investigation.

Federal officers and the supremacy clause

Federal law enforcement officers have broad legal protections when acting in the course of their official duties, and the Justice Department has taken a hard line against state efforts to arrest or prosecute federal agents.

Late last year, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said arrests of federal officers performing their duties would be “illegal and futile,” citing the Constitution’s supremacy clause and federal law.

Legal experts say those protections are significant but not absolute and that the supremacy clause does not provide blanket immunity.

Conduct by ICE officers is under additional scrutiny amid a rapid hiring spree and evidence that applicants with questionable histories were not fully vetted.

Flashpoint in Colorado mountain town

The altercation in Colorado arose from demonstrations over the detention on Oct. 27 of three Colombian asylum-seekers — a man and two children — while they were on their way to school in the morning. In late October, protesters gathered outside an ICE facility in Durango, a college town and destination for outdoor recreation in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado.

Multiple videos show a masked federal agent placing Franci Stagi in what she described as a chokehold. Chokeholds have been at the center of public discourse and state legislative initiatives about what constitutes an unreasonable use of force since Eric Garner died in New York in 2014 after he was put in a chokehold by a police officer.

Stagi, a retired hypnotherapist, said she reached for the agent’s shoulder to get his attention and that he then grabbed her by the hair, put her neck in the crook of his arm and carried her across the street by her head before throwing her down an embankment next to the street.

Court documents allege that Customs and Border Protection officer Nicholas Rice committed third-degree assault by causing bodily injury to Stagi, but the documents don’t describe how she was injured or make mention of a chokehold. Court documents didn’t list any attorney as representing the officer.

A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which launched its own investigation, didn’t immediately respond to questions about the charges.

Stagi says she’s disappointed Rice was charged with less serious crimes but hopes the prosecution sends a message that immigration officers can’t tackle people indiscriminately and use excessive force.

___

Lee reported from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Slevin contributed from Denver.

The child’s parent, Rose Inessa-Ethington, a transgender woman, is accused of taking the child to Cuba without the permission of the biological mother. Federal and state authorities sought the return of the child after a family member expressed concern that Inessa-Ethington went to Havana to get the child gender transition surgery.

Inessa-Ethington was arrested along with her partner, Blue Inessa-Ethington, and charged in the U.S. with international parental kidnapping.

The couple traveled with the child to Canada ostensibly for a camping trip in late March with Blue’s 3-year-old child. However, the two adults turned off their phones after telling the older child’s mother they had arrived in Canada. They flew from Vancouver to Mexico and then to Cuba on April 1, according to a criminal complaint filed Monday in federal court in Utah.

The charges don’t say if the couple actually planned on getting the child gender-affirming surgery in Cuba or how they would get it because that surgery isn’t legal for children in Cuba.

The FBI said that Blue Inessa-Ethington withdrew $10,000 from her checking account before leaving. Agents also found at their home a note with instructions from a mental health therapist in Washington, D.C., “to send the therapist the $10,000.00 and instructions on gender affirming medical care for children.” That note didn’t mention Cuba.

The use of the Department of Justice plane in a parental kidnapping investigation comes after President Donald Trump’s administration has sought to block access to gender-affirming care for minors and pressured health care providers over the issue.

The Associated Press left telephone and email messages with the court-appointed attorneys who represented Blue and Rose Inessa-Ethington in Virginia. The defendants will be returned to Utah to face one count each of international parental kidnapping, according to court filings.

Search began after child wasn’t returned as scheduled

The search for the child began on April 3 when they were not returned to the mother in Utah as scheduled, court documents show. The 10-year-old’s mother, who was divorced from Rose Inessa-Ethington and had shared custody of the child, filed a missing-person report with police in Logan City, Utah, about 70 miles (115 kilometers) north of Salt Lake City.

Logan City Police Chief Jeff Simmons said his department’s initial focus was on the custodial interference allegations in the case, and he said investigators did not learn until later about the concerns over gender-affirming surgery.

Logan police spokesperson Sgt. Brandon Bevan said those concerns were raised by one family member. He declined to say who.

“They just had the concern about it, no actual physical evidence,” Bevan said.

A Utah state judge ordered the return of the 10-year-old to the child’s mother on April 13. Three days later, a federal magistrate judge issued an arrest warrant for the Inessa-Ethingtons. On the same day, Cuban law enforcement located the group. They were deported to the U.S. aboard the government plane Monday and arraigned in federal court in Richmond, Virginia.

The 10-year-old was returned to the child’s biological mother, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Melissa Holyoak in Utah indicated in a statement. Representatives of the FBI and U.S. attorneys office in Utah declined to say what happened to the 3-year-old child who had been with the group.

Parents engaged in custody dispute

The custody dispute between the parents does not appear to be a new development. An online fundraiser created five years go by Blue Inessa-Ethington titled “Help a Trans Mother Keep Custody of Her Child” raised $9,766.

“Last week, Rose’s ex relocated several counties away, negatively impacting Rose’s parent-time with the child,” she wrote in the fundraiser. She said the money would be used to seek a court order that would keep the child “safe and stable throughout this process.”

Anyone who has spent time with Rose knows “how much care and thought she puts into parenting her gender open child,” she wrote.

She later continued, “While her ex is not making an issue of Rose’s gender, as a trans woman, Rose is at a disadvantage against her cishet ex-wife. Rose also lacks the family resources and connections to face this litigation on her own.”

Family members said the child was assigned male at birth but identifies as a girl because of what they believed to be “manipulation” by Rose Inessa-Ethington, according to an April 16 affidavit from FBI Special Agent Jennifer Waterfield.

Gender-affirming care for minors has been limited

The Trump administration moved in December to cut off gender-affirming care for minors, prompting a third of states to sue.

It was the latest in a series of clashes between an administration that says transgender health care can be harmful to children and advocates who say it’s medically necessary.

Gender-affirming surgery is rare among U.S. children, research shows. And fewer than 1 in 1,000 U.S. adolescents receive gender-affirming medications.

In February, the nation’s largest professional organization for plastic surgeons recommended gender-affirming surgeries be delayed until patients turn 19, diverging from several other major medical organizations’ guidance.

In Cuba, gender-affirming surgeries are banned for minors and only performed for adults through the public health system under strict supervision in designated public hospitals for Cuban citizens. They must be authorized by a medical commission after a comprehensive review of the patient’s file. That process often takes years because it requires a wide range of medical and psychological evaluations.

___

Associated Press journalists Eric Tucker in Washington, Cristiana Mesquita in Havana and Devi Shastri in Milwaukee contributed to this report.

Houston, as well as Austin and Dallas — three of the state’s biggest cities and Democratic strongholds — are being confronted by GOP Gov. Greg Abbott with threats of losing public safety dollars over policies that dictate how law enforcement interacts with federal immigration authorities. The three cities are being threatened with the loss of about $200 million in public safety funding, including tens of millions expected to cover security at World Cup matches this summer in Dallas and Houston.

Two weeks ago, Houston City Council passed the ordinance, which eliminated a requirement that Houston police officers wait 30 minutes for agents with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to pick up someone with a nonjudicial administrative warrant. If ICE agents didn’t show up in time, police officers took a detained person’s information and then released them.

But Abbott warned city officials that the new ordinance and its limitation on cooperating with ICE agents violated the terms of $110 million in state grants Houston had received for police and security during the World Cup games the city is hosting in June.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had also filed a lawsuit against Mayor John Whitmire and members of the city council over the ordinance, accusing them of violating a 2017 state law that prevents cities from adopting policies that limit the enforcement of immigration laws and which also banned “sanctuary city” policies in the state. There is no strict definition for sanctuary policies or sanctuary cities, but the terms generally describe limited cooperation with ICE.

After more than two hours of discussion during its weekly meeting, Houston City Council voted 13-4 to make changes to the ordinance. Whitmire said he had consulted with Abbott’s office about making changes that would prevent Houston from losing its funding.

The amended ordinance deletes language that highlighted that administrative warrants — versus warrants signed by a judge — that ICE agents use to take individuals into custody are not enough for officers to arrest or detain an individual.

“We have no alternative for Houston to survive, prepare for (the World Cup), patrol these neighborhoods,” Whitmire said. “We’ve got to have today the restoration of the $114 million.”

Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesperson for Abbott, said the governor expects any policy Houston police adopt has to comply with the city’s certification that it will fully cooperate with the Department of Homeland Security.

“This vote is a step in the right direction after Houston leaders put public safety at risk with reckless policies that undermined law enforcement,” Mahaleris said in a statement.

Council member Abbie Kamin, one of three members who had pushed for the ordinance, voted against amending it, saying that doing so was giving in to bullying tactics from state leaders.

“If we rollover now to a bully, what will he come for next?” Kamin said.

Council members Edward Pollard and Alejandra Salinas, who also pushed for the ordinance, said they remained hopeful the changes approved Wednesday would not violate individuals’ constitutional rights and wouldn’t result in people being held on nonjudicial warrants.

Nikki Luellen, an advocate for criminal justice reform for the ACLU of Texas, called the amended ordinance “a greenlight for deeper collaboration between ICE and the Houston Police Department.”

Martha Castex-Tatum was one of several council members who had supported the ordinance but voted in favor of amending it in order to protect the city’s finances.

“For some people, this may feel like surrender. It’s not. It’s real stewardship,” Castex-Tatum said.

Dallas officials have said they are committed to ensuring public safety and would respond to Abbott’s threat by Thursday.

Austin Mayor Kirk Watson, a moderate Democrat, said the local policy complies with state law. He said Abbott’s threat to cut nearly $3 million in Austin would cut trauma aid for police officers and sexual assault victims.

“We don’t have the time and will not play into this political theater,” said Watson.

Austin officials have since indicated they could try to negotiate with Abbott.

The debate in Houston and other Texas cities comes amid the federal government’s aggressive enforcement of immigration laws. Whitmire and other local leaders in many of Texas’ left-leaning urban areas have tried to not get the federal government’s attention amid the aggressive immigration crackdown by President Donald Trump’s administration.

__

Associated Press writer Jim Vertuno in Austin contributed to this report.

__

Follow Juan A. Lozano: https://x.com/juanlozano70

Navy Secretary John Phelan is leaving his job, the Pentagon abruptly announced Wednesday, the first head of a military service to depart during President Trump’s second term but just the latest top defense leader to step down or be ousted.

No reason was given for the unexpected departure of the Navy’s top civilian official, coming as the sea service has imposed a blockade of Iranian ports and is targeting ships linked to Tehran around the world during a tenuous ceasefire in the war. Another Trump loyalist is taking over as acting head of the Navy: Undersecretary Hung Cao, a 25-year Navy combat veteran who ran unsuccessful campaigns for the U.S. Senate and House in Virginia.

Phelan’s departure is the latest in a series of shakeups of top leadership at the Pentagon, coming just weeks after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the Army’s top uniformed officer, Gen. Randy George. Hegseth also has fired several other top generals, admirals and defense leaders since taking office last year.

The firings began in February 2025, when Hegseth removed military leaders, including Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the Navy’s top uniformed officer, and Gen. Jim Slife, the No. 2 leader at the Air Force. Trump also fired Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown Jr. as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Showing how sudden the latest move was, Phelan had addressed a large crowd of sailors and industry professionals on Tuesday at the Navy’s annual conference in Washington and spoke with reporters about his agenda. He also hosted the leaders of the House Armed Services Committee to discuss the Navy’s budget request and efforts to build more ships, according to a social media post from his office.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a post on X that Phelan was “departing the administration, effective immediately.”

Phelan had been a major Trump donor

Phelan had not served in the military or had a civilian leadership role in the service before Trump nominated him for secretary in late 2024. He was seen as an outsider being brought in to shake up the Navy.

Phelan was a major donor to Trump’s campaign and had founded the private investment firm Rugger Management LLC. According to his biography, Phelan’s primary exposure to the military came from an advisory position he held on the Spirit of America, a nonprofit that supported the defense of Ukraine and the defense of Taiwan.

The Associated Press could not immediately reach Phelan’s office for comment. The White House did not answer questions and instead responded by sending a link to Parnell’s statement.

Phelan is leaving during a busy time for the Navy. It has three aircraft carriers deployed in or heading to the Middle East, while the Trump administration says all the armed forces are poised to resume combat operations against Iran should the ceasefire expire.

The Navy also has maintained a heavy presence in the Caribbean, where it has been part of a campaign of strikes against alleged drug boats. It also played a major role in the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January.

New acting Navy secretary ran unsuccessful bids for Congress

Taking over as acting secretary is Cao, who ran a failed U.S. Senate bid in Virginia to try to unseat Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine in 2024. He had Trump’s endorsement in the crowded Republican primary and gave a speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention.

Cao’s biography includes fleeing Vietnam with his family as a child in the 1970s. In a campaign video for his Senate bid, he compared Vietnam’s communist regime during the Cold War to the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden.

During his one debate with Kaine, Cao criticized COVID-19 vaccine mandates for service members as well as the military’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

“When you’re using a drag queen to recruit for the Navy, that’s not the people we want,” Cao said from the debate stage. “What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them and ask for seconds. Those are the young men and women that are going to win wars.”

Trump and Hegseth have railed against DEI in the military, banning the efforts and firing people accused of supporting such programs.

When he ran for Congress in Virginia in 2022, Cao expressed opposition to aid for Ukraine during a debate against his Democratic opponent.

“My heart goes out to the Ukrainian people. ... But right now we’re borrowing $55 billion from China to pay for the war in Ukraine. Not only that, we’re depleting our national strategic reserves,” Cao said.

Cao graduated from the prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, before attending the U.S. Naval Academy.

He was commissioned as a special operations officer and went on to serve with SEAL teams and special forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia before retiring at the rank of captain, according to his Senate campaign biography.

Cao also earned a master’s degree in physics and had fellowships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

Since becoming Navy undersecretary, Cao has championed returning to duty service members that refused a Biden-era mandate to take the COVID-19 vaccine.

In January 2025, the Trump administration rescinded a Biden-era memo that asked immigration officers to avoid enforcement in or around “protected areas” whenever possible.

Now, a group of labor, religious, and education organizations are suing the federal government, arguing the new policy tramples on religious freedom and the right to associate.

They say the loss of these protections has led their members to stay home, forced teachers and medical professionals to take new precautions, and caused psychological harm to children.

At a press conference Wednesday, Reyna Lopez—the Executive Director of Woodburn-based labor organization Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste—said the Trump administration has upended longstanding immigration policy.

“When ICE prowls a hospital to detain a family seeking care for their sick child, that harm cascades far beyond that building. Families stop going to doctors. Parents avoid the ER room,” said Lopez. “And the places where we’re supposed to be safe become places that people fear.”

The list of plaintiffs includes churches in Oregon, Florida and California, as well as several staff from a Beaverton school where ICE officers arrested a parent last July.

In February, they submitted an emergency motion to block the 2025 memo while the case moves forwards. The defendants, meanwhile, have requested that the case be dismissed.

During oral arguments Wednesday, government lawyer Stephen Tagert disputed the plaintiffs’ standing in this case, and he said the claims that the memo had led to their harm were unproven.

Tagert described the new policy as a “modest change” that moved the approval process for an ICE officer going into a sensitive location to a more local level.

He argued that because the Biden-era memo didn’t bar immigration officers from sensitive locations, and the Trump-era memo doesn’t tell officers to go there, the change is a matter of internal stucture.

“At the end of the day, an agency is going to make a decision or it’s not going to make a decision,” said Tagert.

On Wednesday, Federal Judge Ann Aiken expressed skepticism at some of the defendant’s arguments.

She said the rescission of the Biden-era Mayorkas memo had removed “all protective safeguards,” and enforcement action in Minnesota had created a “chilling effect” on people going to sensitive locations.

“There’s no comparison to what was happening under the Mayorkas memorandum, and now what’s happening, correct?” said Aiken to Tagert.

Aiken didn’t say how she planned to rule on each side’s motion at Wednesday’s hearing, but told the lawyers that something would be released shortly.

Nathan Wilk with KLCC. This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.

It is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit our journalism partnerships page.

On Earth Day in 2022, President Biden spoke in Seattle, announcing an executive order that created the first-ever national assessment of nature. Two and a half years later, President Trump rescinded the effort on his first day in office.

But the team that had started the work — led by a professor at the University of Washington — refused to give it up.

Now, an 868-hundred page draft of the assessment is out for public comment, with plans for publication by the end of this year.

Biden’s remarks in Seattle’s Seward Park highlighted his administration’s climate agenda before he signed the order. He chose the park for its old-growth forests that served as a backdrop for his pledge to map, catalog and conserve old-growth trees in national forests, garnering spontaneous applause and extensive media coverage.

But Biden also spoke more broadly about the benefits of nature.

“Scientists estimate that the protection and restoration of our natural lands and waters can provide more than a third of the solution to climate change,” Biden said, pointing to the simplicity of preservation as a climate solution, even “if we did nothing else.”

Started in Seattle

Tucked into the order was a short clause that garnered far less attention that day. It stated that new research would include “an assessment of the condition of nature.”

About a year after the announcement, Phil Levin was appointed by the Biden administration to direct the National Nature Assessment.

“It was the first time that there was going to be a holistic assessment of the condition of nature in the U.S.: our lands, our waters, our wildlife, and all the benefits that nature provides to people,” Levin said. “From jobs and livelihoods to health and well-being, to safety from natural hazards and even to our cultural heritage.”

Judge orders protective measures for Columbia River salmon after Trump canceled historic deal

Levin is a professor of environmental sciences and the interim director of UW’s EarthLab, which promotes climate action and equity. He has also worked as lead scientist for the Nature Conservancy in Washington and on the federal Integrated Ecosystem Assessment at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Levin said expanding the assessment work from marine environments to the entire country presented a rare opportunity.

His initial team produced an annotated outline of the assessment, which made it into the Federal Register. They were almost done with the first draft when Trump canceled the effort. Levin said he had no doubt that he would find a way to continue.

“I believe this work is really important for our country. So, OK, the government isn’t going to support it anymore. It doesn’t mean that the work’s not needed,” he said. “And so we just kept going.”

Canceled but not quitting

The original authors were volunteers. About a quarter of them were federal employees and unable to continue after Trump’s cancellation. So Levin had to rebuild the team and raise about $3 million to pay for staff, administrative costs and the planned technical review by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

But Levin never doubted that the assessment was needed. That hunch was validated when he saw the team’s preliminary findings about the state of nature today.

Half of wetlands have been lost since the 1780s. “Half the country is used for agriculture. A million acres of land every year are converted to development across the U.S., and there are 90,000 dams in rivers across the U.S. that are disrupting fish migrations,” Levin said. “At the same time, there’s a lot of hope and optimism. There’s a lot of bright spots out there.”

As U.S. abandons climate fight, Washington state feels the heat to do more

Local examples include the successful dam removal and restoration of the Elwha River and the rebuilding of West Coast fisheries that were nearly wiped out. He also noted the recent recognition of Indigenous stewardship and the need to plant trees and re-green our cities as reasons for optimism.

Out for comment

Levin formed a nonprofit and rebranded the National Nature Assessment as a national initiative, called The Nature Record, with 171 authors on the team. Their third draft is now out for scientific review. They plan to have six drafts altogether.

Levin said one of the first things he had to do as director was define the scope of the work in the assessment. Within that, his team worked to come up with an answer to the question: “What is nature?”

“Some people think nature is far away…over there,” separate from people, he said. “Other people say, ‘We are part of nature. Nature is everywhere….nature is in your backyard, nature is in a vacant lot.’”

Levin’s team worked to reconcile these very different worldviews.

“Our definition of nature really focuses on the living aspects of nature and the nonliving parts of nature that affect life,” he said. “So we don’t talk about, necessarily, water by itself. But we talk about how water impacts plants and animals and other forms of life, and we made it a real intentional decision to say that people are part of nature. People are not separate from nature.”

Levin and his team are also touring the country with this draft, making presentations and asking for public comment.

“Whether you’re a technical expert or just an interested person, we are wanting to hear from everyone,” Levin said.

Trump’s EPA plans to end a key climate pollution regulation

He said they have recently started working with partners in the arts community, sponsoring a contest for young artists, asking them to respond to prompts based on the findings in The Nature Record. There is an anthology of poetry that is a companion to the assessment; one of the featured poems is by Washington state poet laureate, Derek Sheffield. Levin said these contributions are great compliments to the science in the assessment.

“We all have something to contribute to this record,” he said. “Scientists can contribute in one way. We all see things that are changing. We all see hope, I think. And so these artists are engaging and creating the record through their own skills and lens.”

The Nature Record’s public presentations in the coming weeks include venues in North Dakota, upstate New York and Southern California. There is also a virtual event on April 29.

Comments are open until May 30. After they are processed, the first edition e-book of The Nature Record will be available for download. MIT Press is also publishing it as a paperback book for sale.

Bellamy Pailthorp is a reporter with KNKX. This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.

It is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit our journalism partnerships page.

Republican voters in Oregon’s 5th Congressional District will choose between a longtime Republican communications professional and a local elected official in the May 19 primary.

Former legislative spokesperson Jonathan Lockwood and Deschutes County Commissioner Patti Adair are Republicans from opposite generations vying for the Republican vote. Both are seeking to flip a district that has more nonaffiliated voters than any other party, and more registered Democrats than Republicans.

Oregon’s 5th Congressional District spans from the suburbs of southeastern Portland, across parts of the Willamette Valley and stretches over the Cascade Mountains to Bend. It’s the most competitive congressional district in Oregon and was represented two years ago by a Republican, though the Cook Political Report rates it as “likely Democratic” in 2026.

The winner will face U.S. Rep. Janelle Bynum or challenger Zeva Rosenbaum, who are competing in the Democratic primary.

Bynum, a Happy Valley Democrat and former state representative of eight years, won the seat in 2024 after defeating her Republican predecessor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer. President Donald Trump picked Chavez-DeRemer as his labor secretary, but she resigned Monday amid an internal investigation of misusing funds and sending inappropriate messages to younger staff.

Jonathan Lockwood

Party: Republican

Age: 36

Residence: Lebanon

Education: Bachelor’s degree in journalism from the Metropolitan State University of Denver and a master’s degree in public relations and corporate communications from Georgetown University. Studied international law during summer programs at the University of Cambridge and Leiden University. Pursuing a juris doctorate at Santa Clara University School of Law.

Current occupation: Law school student

Prior elected experience: None

Fundraising: Lockwood has not reported any fundraising to the Federal Election Commission. Candidates are only required to report fundraising if they’ve raised or spent more than $5,000 on their campaign.

Lockwood spent 15 years in public relations and corporate communications representing conservative organizations, Republican lawmakers and campaigns in his home state of Colorado and in Oregon.

In Oregon, Lockwood worked for Senate Republicans in 2016, on the gubernatorial campaigns of Republican candidates in 2018 and served as the spokesperson for several Republican state lawmakers in 2019. In between those jobs, he obtained his master’s degree and did four fellowships with conservative think tanks, including the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Charles Koch Institute. When the pandemic hit, he went to work in public relations in the private sector.

When he’s not on the campaign trail, Lockwood is finishing up law school and is set to obtain his juris doctorate in May.

“I have an extensive political and professional career and I think that we need people in Congress that understand the nuance of policy,” Lockwood said.

Lockwood regularly criticizes Bynum on social media, calling her positions extreme and claiming she sides with terrorists because she voted against a package to fund the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, calling it “murder money.”

He’s equally critical of Adair because in 2020 she encouraged people to stay home and save lives amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I think she hides behind being a Trump delegate and taking VIP photos with Republican figures to shield her from public scrutiny of her liberal record as a county commissioner,” he said about Adair.

If elected to Congress, Lockwood said he’d prioritize reviving the timber industry and strengthening the state economy, improving education outcomes, funding domestic security programs and law enforcement and addressing affordability.

“I’m a bold, unapologetic conservative and always have been,” Lockwood said. “I was raised by rural and suburban people who instilled values in me that I’ve carried forward to today and the opportunity to represent Oregonians would be a privilege and an honor that I would take.”

In 2020, Lockwood in an opinion piece to the Denver Post endorsed Democrat Joe Biden for president, criticizing Trump’s handling of the pandemic and deployment of troops to Portland to protect federal property during racial justice protests following George Floyd’s murder.

Those criticisms, he told the Capital Chronicle, were anchored in conservatism and limited government.

Patti Adair

Party: Republican

Age: 74

Residence: Sisters

Education: Graduate of Heppner High School; bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Oregon. Received her Certified Public Accountant title at Central Washington University.

Current occupation and prior elected experience: Deschutes County commissioner since 2019

Fundraising: Adair had raised nearly $272,000 as of March 31, according to her latest campaign report to the Federal Election Commission. She has $189,000 left in her campaign account.

Adair is in her second term as a Deschutes County commissioner since being elected in 2018. She has lived on a horse ranch in Sisters since moving from California in 2014. She’s been a longtime supporter of Trump, attending the Republican National Convention as an Oregon delegate for his nomination in 2016.

As commissioner, Adair said she prioritizes accountability when it comes to spending taxpayer dollars.

“Oregonians have to realize that right now we are one of the very highest tax states in the nation,” she said. “That’s a state issue, but we have to have accountability in our state.”

Adair said she brings in years of experience as an accountant with expertise in conservative finances.

“I have a thing for numbers,” she said, describing how she often catches data entry errors when combing over the county’s budget.

“What I do in Deschutes County can clearly be transferred to our federal government,” she said. “The federal debt needs to be very closely monitored. We’ve got to leave something for our next generation.”

Adair said she practices what she preaches, using the example of her opting out of the state’s public employees retirement system — a decision that is saving $200,000 worth in taxpayer dollars for Deschutes County residents, she said.

Her campaign priorities include making Oregon more affordable, improving education outcomes and public safety and extending tax cuts for tips, overtime and recipients of social security benefits. She criticized insider training among Congress members and called it “so wrong” that during the latest government shutdown, Congress members were getting paid while Transportation Security Administration workers were not.

Adair grew up on a ranch in Heppner to a family that raised Pendleton beef, an upbringing that motivated her decision to run for Congress.

“We have got to turn my beautiful state around,” Adair said. “I’m a fourth generation Oregonian. I was born here. I have a degree from the University of Oregon. I love people that will live here. Our state is so beautiful, and yet we have got to turn it around.”

Oregon Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501(c)(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Julia Shumway for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on Facebook and Bluesky.

This republished story is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit opb.org/partnerships.

Researchers in Washington state have found that about a third of the local coyotes studied have a species of tapeworm. These can be passed to dogs, and in rare instances humans. These parasites are also present in foxes and other canid urban wildlife. Domestic dogs can also contract them, and it can be years before the symptoms of the severe disease they cause are detected, making diagnosis and treatment difficult. We talk with Yasmine Hentati, the study’s lead author who recently got her doctorate in environmental and forest science from the University of Washington. She shares more about these parasites and the relative risks for people and dogs.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. A tapeworm that can cause serious disease in dogs, foxes and coyotes was recently detected in the Pacific Northwest. The tapeworm was connected to cases in Canada and the American Midwest about 15 years ago, but this study by researchers at the University of Washington was the first to find it in wild animals on the West Coast. And the results weren’t subtle. More than a third of the 100 coyotes surveyed in the Puget Sound region tested positive. What’s more, while it is rare, it’s possible that humans can get sick from these tapeworms as well.

Yasmine Hentati was a lead author of the study. She recently got her doctorate from the University of Washington and she joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.

Yasime Hentati: Hey, thanks for having me.

Miller: What were you hoping to learn when you started this study?

Hentati: That’s a great question, because this result actually happened completely by accident. Part of my PhD project was looking into gastrointestinal parasites of coyotes in general. I wanted to know what worms they had because no one had really looked into that in the Seattle area, and also how those infections related to what they were eating and where they were on the landscape. We weren’t expecting to find this specific parasite. We knew that it was spreading throughout North America, but it wasn’t necessarily on our radar. So imagine our shock when our genetic results came back with this parasite. Echinococcus multilocularis is the name, which I know is a mouthful.

Miller: Yeah, a couple of mouths full. If this tapeworm had only been found in the Pacific Northwest earlier this year and basically wasn’t known to be here until this year, how do you explain the fact that you found it in more than a third of the coyotes that you studied?

Hentati: So in the time that it took for us to analyze our results once we started getting them back, another paper came out that found E. multilocularis in a handful of dogs here in Washington and elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest. So it was really interesting because these authors were able to identify some infected dogs, but they didn’t necessarily know where the parasite was coming from because it has a primarily natural life cycle in the wild. And now we know that coyotes are hosting a really healthy population of this tapeworm, at least here in Western Washington.

And it’s thought throughout the northern hemisphere, where this parasite is present, that it’s potentially in a lot of different places where we don’t know, because people just aren’t looking. It’s not because it’s not there, it’s because no one has necessarily taken the time to look in a lot of different places. And I think that was the case here in the Puget Sound region as well.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for the life cycle of this particular tapeworm? And I should give our lunch eating listeners a warning that this could get gnarly.

Hentati: Yes, definitely. So it’s a complex life cycle, which means that it involves multiple hosts throughout the parasite’s life cycle. Wild canids – so members of the dog family like coyotes, wolves, foxes – they host the adult parasites in their intestines. And these are really tiny worms, like 2 to 3 millimeters long, so they can support thousands of worms in their intestines without showing really clinical signs of being ill. And the worms then shed eggs that are passed in the feces of the canids, which contaminate the environment.

The next host in the life cycle is rodents – think mice and voles. They become infected by eating food that’s contaminated with the eggs. The parasite then migrates to the liver of these rodents and forms tumor-like cysts that can spread throughout the body like cancer. And then the life cycle starts again when our canids, or our coyotes or our wolves, eat these infected rodents.

Unfortunately for humans, if we accidentally consume the eggs of E. multilocularis, we can experience the same symptoms as the rodents with the liver cysts. The disease is called alveolar echinococcosis and it’s considered one of the most important foodborne illnesses globally. About 1 million people worldwide are currently infected with this disease. It’s very, very rare here in North America, but because of that and because of the fact that symptoms can take many years to show up, people sometimes don’t get diagnosed until they’re in advanced stages.

And dogs are a really interesting host here because they can actually be in both situations. So if they consume infected rodents, they can be hosts of the adult tapeworms, like other canids where they live in their intestine and the dog passes the eggs in their feces. But if they’re exposed to eggs in the environment, they can also be that accidental middle host like us, and they can develop the cysts on their livers and potentially on other organs as well.

Miller: We asked listeners if they had concerns about urban coyotes, given your study, and we got a lot of responses. Several people said that they had no concerns. Others mentioned being afraid for their pets. A few said they were troubled by the human activity that’s affecting coyotes and other wildlife. Michael D. Barton wrote this: “People think they need to post to neighborhood Facebook groups and Nextdoor every single time they spot a coyote and warn others to keep their pets inside, as if those are the only times they’re around. They are around all the time.”

It did make us wonder, given that ubiquity, what advice you have right now for dog owners?

Hentati: Yeah, that listener totally nailed it. They’re everywhere here in Seattle where I live, in the Portland area, even if we don’t see them, they’re there. And the advice that I would have is, especially with your dogs, try not to let them hunt rodents or eat feces. I’m sure there’s many dog owners out there that struggle with their dogs wanting to eat poop, so try not to let them do that. Wash your hands after handling dog waste. And if your dog does have behaviors that you’re concerned about, you can talk to your vet about deworming medications that target tapeworms.

And of course with coyotes, don’t feed them or other wildlife. But generally the biggest concern here is for dogs consuming coyote feces by accident, say, while going for a walk in the park.

Miller: What would it take for humans to get infected?

Hentati: We would have to consume the eggs through a contaminated environment. So this can happen through, for example, if you’re foraging and you eat a fruit or a vegetable that didn’t get washed and it was contaminated with eggs, then you could potentially become exposed. Or if your dog is infected and you don’t know, and you handle their feces, you don’t wash your hands, and you accidentally consume it that way. So those would be, I would say, the most common potential ways.

Miller: But just to be clear, you’re saying the risk of dogs is relatively low and the risk to humans is even lower?

Hentati: Yeah, the risk to humans is quite low. It’s not zero. The bigger concern is definitely for dogs, especially for dogs that tend to have a habit to hunt and kill rodents or to eat poop. But yes, I would say it’s a low risk.

Miller: But you said earlier that the fact that this wasn’t identified until now, likely it’s not that it wasn’t here until now, it’s just that you hadn’t really been looking. We also heard that this has been spreading throughout North America for decades now. Can anything be done to slow the spread of this parasite?

Hentati: That’s a good question. In general, parasites are pretty good at spreading where they want to spread, especially with this type of parasite that has a mostly wild life cycle. That kind of middle host is rodents, there are a lot of different rodent species out there that could be potential hosts. We don’t even know necessarily in Washington which rodent species the coyotes are getting it from – that’s a potential area of future research. And similar with coyotes, dogs and foxes, they can disperse pretty large distances from where they were born.

So I would say instead of focusing the spread of the parasite in the wild, we can focus more on making sure that we don’t get infected and our dogs don’t get infected and kind of reducing that risk through the methods that I talked about.

Miller: Just briefly, how did you become a researcher who wanted to focus on parasites?

Hentati: I grew up on the East Coast in Maryland. When I was a kid, I got Lyme disease. I ended up having it a couple times. And for some reason that got me really interested in kind of the urban interface and wildlife diseases, and how we live with wildlife and potentially become exposed to the same diseases as them. And I ended up working on a tick-borne disease project right after college when I got my degree in wildlife ecology. So that was the first step into urban disease research, wildlife disease research. And my mom did not love that I went and sampled ticks on purpose. [Laughs’ But that’s how I got into it.

Miller: Yasmine, thanks so much.

Hentati: Thank you.

Miller: Yasmine Hentati recently got her doctorate in environmental and forest science from the University of Washington. She’s the lead author of this new tapeworm study.

“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.

The Fertile Ground Festival of new plays in development has become a staple of the Portland theatre scene since it first began in 2009.

This year’s festival has expanded to 17 days, the longest festival yet, to take in the 80-some different productions that run through April 26.

We talk with the festival director, Tamara Carroll, and Kristin Tehrani, who helped create “When I Was a Mexican: A Bollywood Musical.”

“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.

Environmental activists in Eugene have started gathering signatures to get a new climate tax on this fall’s ballot.

The Eugene Clean Energy Fund would raise taxes on some large retailers and banks, taking 2% of gross profits from their retail sales in the city.

Only companies that make more than $1 billion nationally in gross profits each year — and more than $500,000 in Eugene — would be required to pay. Basic groceries, medicines, healthcare and garbage services wouldn’t be included.

The revenue generated by the tax would be put towards climate infrastructure projects and green jobs programs.

Aya Cockram, the initiative’s chief petitioner, said organizers were inspired by the Portland Clean Energy Fund. That tax on retail profits has generated more than $1.7 billion since voters approved its creation in 2018.

“One of the roadblocks that environmental activists and community justice advocates have really run into is the lack of funding,” said Cockram. “So the question became ‘how can we generate that?’”

Cockram said there’s no firm list on what companies would qualify. But she said it’s likely businesses like Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot, and Chase Bank would be included.

The initiative is backed by Beyond Toxics, the Breach Collective and the Oregon Chapter of the Sierra Club, among others.

Petitioners began collecting signatures on April 16. To get the measure on the ballot, they’ll need to gather more than 8,700 signatures within 100 days.

Cockram said they’re aiming for more than 15,000 and are feeling confident about their goal.

“We are so excited to get out in the community,” said Cockram, “to show that this is really a progressive revenue generation mechanism that won’t affect Eugenians, but will help hold billion dollar corporations accountable.”

Nathan Wilk is a reporter with KLCC. This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.

It is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit our journalism partnerships page.

The Builders and The Butchers will have an album-release party at The Aladdin Theater in Portland April 16.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The Portland-based band The Builders and The Butchers started in 2005. They busked and played house shows at the beginning. Pretty quickly they had burst onto the scene with larger, raucous audience-involved shows and music that combined all kinds of seemingly disparate influences: punk and bluegrass, gospel and metal. They just released their seventh album. It’s an apocalyptic collection of songs called “No Tomorrow.” It’s full of floods, fire and ash.

I’m joined now by a slimmed down, acoustic version of the band. Ryan Sollee is the songwriter, lead singer; he’s on guitar today. Harvey Tumbleson is on banjo. And Matt Radtke is on viola. Welcome to all three of you.

Ryan Sollee: Thanks for having us.

Harvey Tumbleson: How’s it going?

Miller: Can we start right in with a song? The first song from the new album is called “World’s on Fire.”

[“World’s on Fire” by The Builders and The Butchers playing, live in studio]

Sitting around here waiting for my Lord

Sitting around here waiting for my Lord

And if he don’t show, I’ll have another cigarette and beer

‘Cause only a fool thought that the good Lord would end up here

My home town is broken, bare, and lost

This old town is broken, bare, and lost

Left me and my family make a living out of heart attacks and dust

So I spend my whole life shaking down the Pentecost

Can’t wait just one more minute for my Lord

Can’t wait just one more minute for my Lord

Watch the world’s on fire

Yeah, the world’s on fire

Like a blind man burning, doing nothing but he’s so dеvout

Oh, before I go, I’ll do my best to put him out

There’s no shame in loving someone you don’t understand

Only wasted time in keeping heads down in the sand

I shot my bullets at my feet, I cut your name into my hand

There’s no shame in living life in full light while you can

Can’t wait just one more minute for my Lord

Can’t wait just one more minute for my Lord

Watch the world’s on fire

Yeah, the world’s on fire

Can’t wait just one more minute for my Lord

Can’t wait just one more minute for my Lord

Watch the world’s on fire

Oh, the world’s on fire

Can’t wait just one more minute for my Lord

Can’t wait just one more minute for my Lord

Watch the world’s on fire

Oh, the world’s on fire

Oh, before I go, I’ll do my best to put it out

Oh, before I go, I’ll do my best to put it out

[Song ends]

Miller: Ryan, you’ve said in the past that songwriting, that songs come to you seemingly in bursts. Sometimes there’s a drought and then there’s a flood. What was going on for you when these songs came?

Sollee: Yeah, it was like post-pandemic and pre-election, and it was just a really stirred up time for me. And I don’t think too consciously about “I’m going to write a song about this or that or the other,” but these things kind of leach in, and these ideas about what’s going on in the world, things like that.

Miller: I called it apocalyptic. Does that feel accurate to you? Or is that just like what someone else listening puts onto it?

Sollee: What’s funny about it is we’ve been a band for 20 years and the nature of the songs have always been pretty apocalyptic. But it’s like the world has caught up.

Miller: There’s always been death, fire and floods, but now there’s more of it in real life.

Sollee: It feels a little more real. [Laughs]

Miller: How does it feel that the world caught up to you there?

Sollee: Oh just really great. [Laughter] I know Mike Judge was saying how “Idiocracy,” he’s like “Oh, I didn’t know I was making a documentary.”

Miller: Although it’s interesting that my first listen to that song, I think I focused more on the darkness of it. It’s called “World’s on Fire,” the world on fire, the blind man burning. You have a line about heart attacks and dust. But when I listened to the song a couple more times, some of the humor of it, maybe gallows humor, came out. You have this line, “If the Lord don’t show, I’ll have another cigarette and beer, because only a fool thought that the good Lord would end up here.” It’s a great line.

How do you think about the mix between pain and humor?

Sollee: I think that’s the best way to deal with pain is humor. What else do we have other than to laugh? You have to laugh at the ridiculousness of things that are going on. But that song specifically is, it’s a disconnect between like what has happened to middle America and the cultural void, that people think somebody’s coming back or some great religious thing is happening, but looking around and seeing we’re destitute, it’s a food desert, and we don’t have any medical care and all these things. It’s this disconnect of we’re living this way we want to live and it’s kind of terrible, in a sense.

Miller: Harvey, when Ryan comes to you and the band with a song, what state is it in? How close is one of the songs that you first hear to what we just heard?

Tumbleson: Well, I think that’s one of the things I love the most about playing with these guys for the last so many years. It’s there, the skeleton of the song is there. It’s just a matter of let’s get creative with X, X, X, X and X, and hey maybe don’t play this chord. I love that, I love the collaboration of this particular band.

Miller: It feels free enough and open enough that you can say that and you feel like you’ll be listened to?

Tumbleson: I think everyone in the band is free to be like, “I don’t like this.” And a good chunk of the time, someone’s gonna compromise. Like, “OK fine, I’ll play a C.”

Miller: And it can be that granular? “I don’t like this chord?”

Tumbleson: Oh yeah. I threw a fit last album because you guys played a major when it was supposed to be a minor.

Miller: You knew it should have been a minor. Who won that argument?

Tumbleson: I think I did.

Sollee: You did. We crammed a minor in at the end.

Tumbleson: I’m just like, “Hey, this is bugging me.” They changed it. I didn’t think they would. But it’s just something like that.

Miller: This gets to both a musical sensibility but also ego, right? Ryan, you’re the songwriter, you’re the front man for the band. How do you think about balancing voices and ideas?

Sollee: It’s a really tricky thing, because you’re like, I have this song that I think is good. And you’re presenting it. And then you have to also be like, I want everybody to feel heard and I want the band to have longevity, where everybody feels satisfied and feels like they have a voice. So I can’t be some kind of a dictator about it. You have to be open to change. And honestly, I’m the least good musician in the band. I trust everybody else with their tastes and their talent. So I think that’s a really good place to come from.

Miller: Can we hear another song? What do you have for us?

Sollee: I believe it’s called “Mother Mary.”

Miller: Harvey, you seem surprised by that.

Tumbleson: Yeah, I just kind of go with it, man. [Laughter]

Sollee: One, two, three, four…

[“Mother Mary” by The Builders and The Butchers playing, live in studio]

Hello, Mother Mary

Won’t you let me in?

I need some retribution

‘Cause I’ve got a little sin

You look so good, my darling

I’d hold you if I could

But my feet don’t work for dancing

And my mouth don’t do me no good

And we don’t go to heaven

We’re way too wild

I’m swinging low, I’m blind and cold

And baby, don’t you see me shine?

You won’t see me in heaven

We’ll shuffle to the gates with a smile

With dirty old shoes, got nothing to lose

You’re rotting on the old dead vine

Hello, Mother Mary

A pardon for your time

For you’re a desert flower

And I’m a lifetime past my prime

I lost what I’ve forgottеn

And I can’t tell wrong from right

But I’m shaking at the holy thought

Of living in your arms tonight

And wе don’t go to heaven

We’re too wild

I’m swinging low, I’m blind and cold

And baby, don’t you see me shine?

You won’t see me in heaven

We’ll shuffle to the gates with a smile

With dirty old shoes, got nothing to lose

You’re rotting on the old dead vine

No, we don’t go to heaven

We’re too wild

I’m swinging low, I’m blind and cold

And baby, don’t you see me shine?

You won’t see me in heaven

We’ll shuffle to the gates with a smile

With dirty old shoes, got nothing to lose

You’re rotting on the old dead vine

[Song ends]

Miller: This is, I think, the closest thing on the new album that you have to a love song or a party song. As in, “we’re going to hell anyway, so we might as well have some fun on the way down.”

Sollee: Yeah. I love songs like “Friends in Low Places” and country, kind of classic, loser-y guy songs. Loser but romantic kind of a thing. So that’s the idea there.

Miller: It’s interesting you brought that up, that’s a sort of a classic sing-along too. Do you write songs hoping if the fans know it they can sing along with this part?

Sollee: I think that’s always in the back of my mind. Our first album has a lot of sing-along songs, so that became like a call and response kind of with the audience. So that’s what I try to do as much as possible.

Miller: There’s a lot of religious language and imagery in this album. What’s your relationship to the church?

Sollee: I am an agnostic person, straight up, but I love gospel music. I love the emotion of gospel music. I think it’s one of the greatest American forms of music, just the musicianship, the singing and the passion. So I love the idea of that, but kind of having more of a question about it, or a little bit uncertain. I like songs that are religious but have gray area in them. It’s more interesting.

Miller: Your last album was a pandemic-era production, right? So Harvey, how did it work making an album when you were separate?

Tumbleson: I loved it. I got to record just about the whole album in my basement while we were all separated and distancing. We all recorded in our separate homes and sent everything via email to Ray and Edgar – shout out Edgar. They picked out what they liked, what they didn’t like, and they made an album out of it.

Miller: It works, you said you loved it. I can imagine somebody missing the communal aspect of music making.

Tumbleson: From a musician’s standpoint, I love that I don’t know what’s gonna happen with this song. I love the idea that I sent them so many files, so many little, tiny flourishes…

Sollee: One could say too many. [Laughter]

Tumbleson. I am that one.

Miller: One could say that that’s what you didn’t get, that kind of making fun of each other when you were alone. [Laughter]

Tumbleson: It was quite streamlined. We don’t stay on task very easily.

I love the idea of just giving someone everything and that they choose what they want to do with

Miller: So Ryan, what about this time? What was it like to be back together?

Sollee: It was really, really good this time. And the really cool thing about this time is that we also had broughten Matt into the fold. The addition of strings really opened up the space in the record.

Miller: Why bring a viola into the mix? I say this as a mediocre viola player myself.

Sollee: I would say you’re a great viola player. We heard you in the hallway playing. It was beautiful.

On our very first record, we have quite a bit of violin and strings, and on our second record, we have some too, and then it’s slowly kind of not done that. And then we’re going on a pretty big tour and we were like, we should add that back. Our friend Matt plays viola, so let’s have him do the tour. And that worked really well. We’re like, we’re doing this new album, let’s have you play on these new songs.

So it’s a very natural thing, but it’s been fun to kind of expand the sound, give it space and all that.

Miller: Can we hear another song? This is “Rise My Son.”

[“Rise My Son” by The Builders and The Butchers playing, live in studio]

In the depth of the water were wringing our hands

‘Til our fingers fell out of our palms

We climbed over rocks to the tops of the mountains

We offered the last of our blood

Look at all of those pieces we laid down before

A false idol, a prophet so small

And the fire still raged and the tidal wave came

In the morning

Rise, my son, to the day

Don’t you keep coming round, kicking me down

In the dirt around here where I lay

Rise, my son, to the day

Don’t you keep coming round, kicking mе down

In the dirt around here whеre I lay

I crawled through hell to get to high water

‘Til my knees and my elbows were raw

Saw a man at the fire gate, I broke down before him

I cast off the last of my gods

Look at all of the followers giving their dollars

To an idol, a prophet so small

And the fire still raged, and the tidal wave came

In the morning

Rise, my son, to the day

Don’t you keep coming round, kicking me down

In the dirt around here where I lay

Rise, my son, to the day

Don’t you keep coming round, kicking me down

In the dirt around here where I lay

Home, sweet home, all ashes and fire

And the tears I cried make river salt water

Home, sweet home, all ashes and fire

And the tears I cried make river salt water

Home, sweet home, all ashes and fire

And the tears I cried make river salt water

Home, sweet home, all ashes and fire

And the tears I cried make river salt water

Rise, my son, to the day

Don’t you keep coming round, kicking me down

In the dirt around here where I lay

Rise, my son, to the day

Don’t you keep coming round, kicking me down

In the dirt around here where I lay

[Song ends]

Miller: I mentioned at the beginning the early days of the band busking and house shows, 20-something years ago now. When you think about those days, what images come to mind?

Sollee: I think the vitality of the Portland scene in that moment, how many bands we knew and all the things that were happening. It was almost like a snowball of things happening in that moment. Just a lot of friends, a lot of house shows and a lot of blurry memories. [Laughter]

Miller: For whatever reason.

Sollee: Yeah, I don’t know why.

Miller: Harvey, what do you miss? Not every good question has a good answer. [Laughter]

Sollee: The tagline for the show.

Tumbleson: It wasn’t the partying. It just felt … love. You go into this basement with like 30 to 40 people that are your best friends. And you get older and you get away from each other. I don’t know, I miss that.

Sollee: I would say the word would be like support. All of the bands really supported each other and there was never an air of competition, or “you’re playing this show and I’m not getting this show.” Everybody just wants to see everybody do good. The whole thing about, everybody rises together.

Miller: Ryan, Matt and Harvey, thank you so much, all three of you, for joining us.

Sollee: Thanks for having [us]. This is a huge thing for us. I’m a huge fan of what you do, so thank you so much.

Miller: The Portland band The Builders and The Butchers. We heard Ryan Sollee, the songwriter and lead singer, on guitar. Matt Radtke was on viola. Harvey Tumbleson on banjo. They just released their seventh album. It’s called “No Tomorrow.”

If you guys don’t mind giving us some instrumental music to go out on, that would be fantastic. They have a record-release show at The Aladdin Theatre in Portland tomorrow night with members of the Portland Cello Project.

[Instrumental music by The Builders and The Butchers playing]

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Vast expanses of the American West, including parts of Central and Eastern Oregon, share a unique ecosystem characterized by sagebrush, wildflowers and a wide array of perennial grasses. This “sagebrush sea” is one of the largest contiguous ecotypes in the U.S., but it faces increasing threats from wildfire, invasive species and development.

A new tool aims to help land managers quickly assess the health of these vast regions. Conservation groups, state and federal agencies and local leaders partnered to create digital maps that provide a broad view of where sagebrush ecosystems are thriving and where they hang in the balance.

Anya Tyson is the Oregon Sagebrush Sea Program Director for The Nature Conservancy, which helped create the maps. She joins us to share more.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Vast expanses of the American West, including parts of Central and Eastern Oregon, share a unique ecosystem characterized by sagebrush, wildflowers and a wide array of perennial grasses. It’s known as the “sagebrush sea.” It faces increasing threats from wildfire, invasive species and development.

Now, a new tool could help preserve these lands. It was created by conservation groups, public land managers and local leaders to provide a broad view of where sagebrush ecosystems are doing well and where they’re in serious trouble.

Anya Tyson is the Oregon Sagebrush Sea Program Director for The Nature Conservancy, which helped create the maps. She joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.

Anya Tyson: Thank you for having me. It’s good to be here.

Miller: What kinds of plant and animal species does the so-called “sagebrush sea” support?

Tyson: There are thousands of shrubs, wildflowers, grasses, insects, small mammals, rabbits, rodents, badgers, and getting up to the big exciting ones, beautiful pronghorn antelope, mule deer, bighorn sheep, coyotes, mountain lions, bobcats, and hundreds of bird species rely on this ecosystem. And beyond the critters and the plants, human communities really thrive in this ecosystem. Many of our rural towns in eastern Oregon are inseparable from the sagebrush sea, via ranching and recreation. And then there’s Indigenous communities and Native nations whose cultural identities have been shaped by and continue to shape the landscape.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for the scale of these landscapes?

Tyson: Across the Western U.S. and the Intermountain West, I think of this gray-green sea stretching from the Cascades all the way to the Rockies, stretching essentially from the Canadian border all the way down to Arizona and Utah. And in Oregon, about one-third of the state is characterized by this sagebrush ecosystem.

Miller: I mentioned this briefly in my intro, but it’s really worth dwelling a little bit more on this. What broadly are the challenges that this vast landscape [is] facing right now?

Tyson: The big ones are invasive annual grasses. European settlers accidentally brought these “get rich quick” species of grass that outcompete and create a lot of flammable fuel out there. And that is really a challenge. It makes less good forage for wildlife and livestock, it really changes wildfire behavior and it can create almost monocultures of itself. These grasses have very evocative names like cheatgrass and medusahead. Experts estimate almost 70% of the degradation across the sagebrush biome, that’s the primary driver.

The other big ones are native conifer species. We love our old growth junipers, they’re very important, but they are overrepresented. There were several factors that led to conifers encroaching into areas that should be grasslands and shrublands, and turning them into woodlands, and a whole host of issues that goes along with that. And both of those things interact with wildfire, changing patterns in wildfire. And a little bit of human development. With that set of four, you have the biggest threats for the biome.

Miller: So those are the threats. Let’s turn now to the tool that you and others helped create to better respond to those threats. What’s the big idea behind this new mapping tool?

Tyson: The idea is it’s supposed to make things just a little bit simpler, so we can move out of decision paralysis, and we can move and respond to threats at the pace and scale that they’re occurring. Essentially, we’ve really honed in on this, you named it in your introduction, I touched on it. This is a really big landscape. And it’s not very peopled. There’s incredible people that live out there, but there’s not a ton of them. So you cannot walk every acre out there and create a detailed plan based on a specific list. If you set out to do that, your intention would be good. But the backlog of acres that you would never get to and [that] these threats are moving across, you’d have made a choice of inaction.

Miller: I can imagine someone saying, “hey, I like the idea of a tool that makes things easier, but we need granular level detail.” You’re saying that it’s not humanly possible, given our resources, to get that kind of detail simply because of the vastness of the scale?

Tyson: We can’t do it for every acre. There are places, before you go take certain management actions, yes you absolutely need to get out on the ground and go see it. But to start the conversation with communities, with land managers, you need to start the conversation at a different speed and a different kind of elevation. And this tool helps people start the conversation and look at the big picture, and then weave in local knowledge and go down into the granular details where it’s going to make the most difference.

Miller: So what data do you have at the landscape level that you can use to inform these large-scale maps?

Tyson: The maps are built on satellite collected data that goes back to the ‘80s, which is really cool because we can look at trends over time. And this is coarse data. The models behind this, it’s based on data that is first filtered through the rangeland analysis platform, and sorts pixels in the landscape into different amounts of perennial grasses and forbs, and annual grasses and forbs, shrubs and tree cover.

Miller: Even a satellite imagery over time can tell you where there’s a preponderance of good perennial grasses and where there’s a lot of invasive annual grasses? You can tell that from a camera in the sky?

Tyson: Yes. You don’t get it right every time, but you can tell these patterns. And we know that, you can zoom in on a satellite image when you’re looking at Google Maps and see a tree. And similarly, in these grassland landscapes, you can see a sea of cheatgrass. It’s much blonder and it’s a different texture than a north-facing slope that still has perennial bunch grasses and shrubs on it. It’s a little bit blurred, it’s not perfect, and that’s where these other data sets come in. The maps are not meant to be a decision in and of themselves. But they are a starting point for discussion and it really accelerates the discussion to have that starting point.

Miller: Looking at the maps, we can see that Oregon has what’s categorized as a lot of “poor condition grassland.” Montana is full of “good condition grassland.” What’s the difference between these two states?

Tyson: Montana, you’re getting into the northern Great Plains, and you have more moisture and higher elevation. We have a more sensitive ecosystem here in the Northern Great Basin. It’s more arid and invasive annual grasses have a bigger leg up here. And often, wildfire conditions are more severe here. So it’s less that Montana has done a much better job of managing their habitats than Oregon has. Indeed, we’re just kind of a bellwether, we’re ahead of Montana. We have great opportunities still, where we have large chunks of good condition sagebrush, and we can keep it that way if we don’t chase our tail and only try to focus on where we’ve already kind of lost those important native plant dominance in the landscape.

Miller: You’re saying that we’d be chasing our tails if we focus on the places where we’ve already lost, in a sense, or where invasive grasses have beaten out native grasses. Instead, you’re saying we should focus on the places that are still working, that still look like they would have hundreds of years ago. Why? Why is it important to focus on what is hanging on, as opposed to trying to fix what we seem to have lost?

Tyson: I really appreciate you asking this question. It comes down to the simple folk wisdom of an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. We do not have the resources, human or financial, to remove annuals where they’ve become dominant and reseed in perennials, because we’re talking about millions of acres. But we do have the resources in an area that’s still in good shape to look for tiny patches of invasive annual grasses, to manage the landscape in a way that the perennial native vegetation has a leg up over the annual grasses.

So it’s just a much better use of our resources to keep areas that are in good shape [and] maintain them that way, with investment, with vigilance, than to try to resurrect an ecosystem that has thoroughly slipped, because it costs so much to physically remove or chemically remove weeds once they’re dominant and try to reestablish vegetation in these arid landscapes. This ecosystem is defined by its extremely hot summers and its extremely cold winters, and you do not succeed when you plant seeds out there every year. So that’s the really difficult thing. [If] you need to bring back native plants from scratch, you have a really difficult task ahead of you. If you instead can sustain native plants that are already in place, it is much more feasible.

Miller: When you’re making this argument right now, are you saying this to people who are actually trying to plant native grasses? Because I feel like in the past we’ve had conversations explicitly about that. I’m wondering how much of a debate there is within the arid west conservation world right now about the best way to proceed, given limited resources?

Tyson: Well, I’m really glad you’re mentioning this. It is complex. There’s still very much a place for seeding native plants. But you might want to spend those resources in the middle of an area where you’re essentially plugging a hole. Like there’s a small hole of poor condition grassland in a larger matrix of good condition shrubland…

Miller: In my head, I immediately thought about a sort of half bald head and putting plugs there, as opposed to going to the place where someone is fully bald and trying to reseed that with hair.

Tyson: Sure, yeah. I love that. [Laughs]

Miller: Maybe this just says something about the way I think about myself, as opposed to the land. But please go on.

Tyson: I’m picturing the chia pet, with different amounts of hair.

This is not a prescriptive approach where it says, “forget about this huge chunk of the state where there’s a lot of invasive annual grasses.” It’s just different tools and different expectations, and wise use of resources across those landscapes. A great example is, you might really want to use your native seeds – of which there is a limited quantity of and we’d love to see more of them – but you might want to use your limited quantity of native seeds that are very expensive in a landscape that’s in better shape where you’re plugging these small holes. And you might want to use other hardier species, that aren’t native and are more cost-effective, in an area that’s been a cheatgrass monoculture for a really long time. You still might seed both areas because you might need to stabilize forage, you might need to provide wildfire resilience and protection for nearby communities. But you are using different costs of tools, knowing your neighborhood, and knowing what’s possible and what’s a worthwhile investment, with this really pragmatic backdrop of people have been working in this ecosystem for a long time and we’re still, across the American West, losing 1.3 million acres per year.

So that’s why there is this conversation, we got to do things a little bit different. We need to focus on keeping areas that are good in good shape and adjusting our expectation in certain areas that we can’t justify spending all our resources on right now. We know it’s not working.

Miller: Anya, thanks very much.

Tyson: Thank you! Thanks for the conversation and the fun images of bald heads.

Miller: [Laughs] You’re welcome. Anya Tyson is the Oregon Sagebrush Sea Program Director for The Nature Conservancy. She’s part of a team that helped create a tool known as Ecostate Maps that can be used to preserve these fragile ecosystems.

“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.

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During Billie Little’s roughly two decades working at Thomson Reuters, she felt pride in the company, which is known for its legal database Westlaw, its media company Reuters, and its role as a major data broker.

But as masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents swarmed Minneapolis early this year and the country reeled from federal agents fatally shooting Renée Macklin Good and Alex Pretti, Little and other colleagues grew alarmed that ICE agents could be abusing Thomson Reuters investigative tools that provide vast quantities of personal data on people including license plate information.

Little, who worked in legal publishing, was part of a committee of employees that sent a letter to company management in February flagging that ICE could be using Thomson Reuters products unlawfully and asking for greater transparency about the company’s oversight of its contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and ICE. Soon after their effort was made public in the media, however, Little was fired from her role.

“Instead of addressing our concerns, our legitimate concerns — instead, they turn toward investigating me,” Little told NPR. “And I was instrumental in leading the group. So I think that clearly they were trying to chill [the] activity of workers and that should scare every worker across the country.”

Little is now suing the company, arguing that her dismissal violated a law in her home state of Oregon that bars employers from firing whistleblowers.

An unnamed Thomson Reuters spokesperson told NPR it would be inappropriate to comment on an individual employment matter but said of the lawsuit, “We strongly dispute the allegations and intend to robustly defend the case.”

Thomson Reuters, which is headquartered in Toronto, is also facing pressure from shareholders over its ICE contracts.

British Columbia General Employees’ Union, a public sector union that holds shares in the company, filed a proposal to commission an independent evaluation of the extent to which the company’s products “may contribute to adverse human rights impacts” when used by law enforcement agencies and immigration authorities.

Thomson Reuters contracts with ICE

In late January, Little was closely following news reports about U.S. citizens detained by ICE and heightened tensions in Minneapolis in the aftermath of shootings that killed Good and Pretti. She was also worried about what she heard from colleagues who work out of the Thomson Reuters office in the Twin Cities suburb of Eagan.

“People afraid to go to work, people afraid to take their kids to school, people being followed and all of that,” Little recalled.

So when a colleague shared a post on an internal employee chat that claimed Thomson Reuters was a top corporate collaborator with ICE, Little said she felt “sick to my stomach.”

“After that post, everybody was kind of like, ‘What?’ There was a lot of confusion and anger, concern,” Little told NPR. But she said management turned off the comments on the post.

Not all employees had been aware that Thomson Reuters has held tens of millions of dollars in contracts with ICE in the last several years for its data and investigative tools.

One of the key products Thomson Reuters sells to law enforcement agencies, including ICE, is called CLEAR, which aggregates billions of data points on individuals from public and proprietary records, as well as social media. CLEAR’s platform also includes images from a network of license plate readers. ICE has a nearly $5 million contract with Thomson Reuters from May 2025 for “license plate reader data to enhance investigations for potential arrest, seizure and forfeiture.”

Little’s own work at the company had nothing to do with CLEAR. But she had heard over the years that it was being used to go after human traffickers or child exploitation crimes.

“So that was all to the good. And I could feel good about that,” Little said. But she began to grow concerned that the tool was potentially being used far more widely than that by ICE to identify immigrants and protesters without criminal histories.

In an email to NPR, Thomson Reuters said its tools “support investigations into areas of national security and public safety, such as child exploitation, human trafficking, narcotics and weapons trafficking and financial crime.”

The statement continued, “We remain committed to this mission while maintaining strong safeguards that ensure our products and services are used in accordance with our contractual terms and applicable law.”

The company has previously asserted that CLEAR was not intended to be used to help deport undocumented immigrants with no criminal records.

A Thomson Reuters description of CLEAR that no longer appears on the company’s website but was archived by the WayBack Machine says it is “not designed for use for mass illegal immigration inquiries or for deporting non-criminal undocumented persons and non-citizens.”

Company documents from as recently as February that outline the terms for using CLEAR say that vehicle registration data shouldn’t be used for immigration enforcement.

But as news stories showed dramatic increases in the number of immigrants arrested without any criminal history, Little said she began to doubt the company’s line.

And protesters in Minneapolis began describing that ICE agents knew their names and home addresses, seemingly from looking up their vehicle registration information from their license plates.

Little and other colleagues worried Thomson Reuters tools were possibly being used unlawfully in Minnesota, including potentially against the company’s own employees there.

She and other employees formed a group they called the “Committee to Restore Trust,” which sent a letter to management on Feb. 20 that was signed by about 170 employees. Some 27,000 people work for the company globally.

“We are troubled by the possibility that [Thomson Reuters] products may enable activities that violate constitutional protections — including Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure, Fifth Amendment due process rights, and Fourteenth Amendment equal protection guarantees,” reads a portion of the letter that Little then included in her lawsuit. “Thomson Reuters products may be used in ways that conflict with state and local laws in sanctuary jurisdictions, as well as data protection and privacy regulations at multiple governmental levels.”

The letter asked for an all-hands meeting to discuss the company’s oversight of its ICE contracts.

“They called us brave for bringing it up to their attention,” Little recalled. But she said nothing else happened, and the committee members felt “stonewalled.”

Thomson Reuters did not respond to specific questions about its interactions with employees, but told NPR, “We take employee concerns seriously and provide clear channels for colleagues to raise issues, as outlined in our Code of Conduct.”

The company’s statement also read, “We take seriously the legality and legitimacy of our products.”

Both the Minnesota Star Tribune and The New York Times wrote about the employees’ concerns in March.

Five days after the Times article was published, Little was summoned to a meeting with HR where she was told she was being investigated for violating confidentiality and data-sharing policies, according to her lawsuit. A few days later, she was fired. The lawsuit says she was told she violated the company’s code of conduct but she did not receive written findings from an investigation or an explanation of which provision the company alleges she violated.

Little’s lawsuit also says she had never previously received a negative review or been subject to discipline. The suit seeks to reverse her termination, as well as award her lost wages and compensatory damages.

“My client reported conduct that she reasonably believed was unlawful and she was fired for it, and that is expressly prohibited here in Oregon,” said Maria Witt, one of the attorneys representing Little in her lawsuit.

One former Thomson Reuters employee told NPR they voluntarily left the company over dissatisfaction over how the company responded to employee concerns over potential misuse of the company’s tools by ICE in the Twin Cities, where many employees live. They asked NPR not to use their name because they fear retaliation from Thomson Reuters.

“I feel like the company’s response in terms of supporting its employees and supporting justice has strayed so far from the path,” the former employee told NPR. “It seems like they are profiting off their own employees being terrorized at this point, which is upsetting and makes me sad.”

Concerns from advocates and shareholders

Privacy and civil liberties advocates have long been worried about the government’s ability to purchase detailed data on individuals from data brokers like Thomson Reuters without stronger guardrails.

“Right now, there are few legal safeguards in place preventing [Thomson Reuters] from selling tons of data to whoever it wants or preventing TR’s customers from using the data however they want,” Sarah Lamdan, a privacy researcher and author of the book Data Cartels, wrote in an email to NPR.

The company asserts that the type of records it provides its customers does not include the kind of information that law enforcement would traditionally need a warrant to obtain. But privacy advocates have argued that aggregation of so much data in one place provides details law enforcement would not be able to obtain otherwise unless they had a warrant.

“If you consolidate enough data about a person, you can infer all sorts of very personal information about them that would require a warrant to obtain through normal intelligence, investigation, and interrogation practices,” Lamdan wrote to NPR.

Furthermore, reporting by technology outlet 404 Media has found that CLEAR is being integrated into other Palantir and Motorola tools used by ICE.

Activists who observe and record federal immigration enforcement operations have filed lawsuits alleging that federal agents have violated their First Amendment rights, including by attempting to intimidate them by taking down their license plate information or using it to identify them.

Emma Pullman, the head of shareholder engagement at the British Columbia General Employees’ Union, told NPR that her union has been engaging with Thomson Reuters about its ICE contracts since 2020.

“The questions that Billie Little was asking of her employer weren’t all that different from the questions that we, as a long term shareholder, have been asking of her employer,” Pullman told NPR.

She said the issue has become even more urgent as there are allegations of ICE agents violating people’s rights, which she said has changed the investment risk profile for Thomson Reuters and warrants “renewed scrutiny, more due diligence and more disclosure.”

Thomson Reuters’ board of directors has come out in opposition to the shareholder proposal.

The unnamed spokesperson told NPR in a statement that such an assessment would be “duplicative and an inefficient use of resources” because an independent consultancy completed the company’s second human rights impact assessment in 2025 and the company plans to publish key findings on its website later this year.

But Pullman said that 2025 assessment was completed before ICE’s escalation in Minnesota in early 2026 and before employees at the company raised concerns. Furthermore, she said her union was dissatisfied with the level of information the company disclosed in 2022 when it did its first human rights impact assessment. “This isn’t duplicative,” Pullman said of her union’s shareholder proposal. “This is due diligence.”

As for Billie Little, she told NPR that anyone would be intimidated to take on such a big company. But she said she feels a moral and ethical obligation to bring her lawsuit, and that it is bigger than what happened to her individually.

“This is about the issues of protecting our privacy, our law enforcement agencies abiding by the Constitution and protecting our civil liberties,” she said.

As of last week, Oregon had reported 20 measles cases since the start of 2026. Measles was declared eradicated in the U.S. in 2000, but falling vaccination rates have driven outbreaks in more than half of U.S. states so far this year. Health officials warn that community transmission in Oregon is beginning to grow and have asked for the public’s help in curbing the spread.

Dean Sidelinger is a health officer and state epidemiologist for the Oregon Health Authority. He joins us with more details about where the outbreak stands and how people can stay safe.

“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.

With ballots for Oregon’s primary election scheduled to go out next week, civic organizations are working to get out the vote. Imagine Black, based in Portland, aims to engage voters through community events, rather than mailers or door-to-door canvassing. The nonprofit is holding a basketball benefit next month with community leaders and elected officials ahead of primary Election Day, May 19.

Joy Alise Davis is the executive director of Imagine Black. She joins us to talk about voter burnout in Portland’s Black communities and how her organization hopes to make voting exciting again.

“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.

Luiz Bertassoni is the director of the Precision Biofabrication Hub, which he helped launch in 2022, and a professor of oncology at OHSU. Since last year, he and his team have received more than $9 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health to advance the potential of these so-called organ-on-a-chip devices in the fight against cancer. The latest grants target an aggressive form of prostate cancer that spreads to bones and a cancer of the bone that spreads to lungs. Bertassoni joins us to talk about this new technology and the promise he thinks it holds for the roughly 40% of adults in the U.S. who will likely develop cancer at some point in their lives.

“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.

Jill Lepore is a Harvard professor and contributing writer to the New Yorker. Her books include “The Secret History of Wonder Woman,” “New York Burning,” “These Truths: A History of the United States,” and her latest, “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution” – an instant New York Times bestseller.

This year is the semi-quincentennial of the United States of America and, as Lepore points out, also the anniversary of constitutionalism.

There’s no better guide through American history than Jill Lepore, and it is a delight to spend an hour in civics class led by someone who readily references Mel Brooks and AI in a discussion about the Constitution. Lepore is interviewed by OPB’s Geoff Norcross, host of “All Things Considered.” They discuss Lepore’s Amendments Project, which catalogues all the amendments that have been proposed throughout history, and explore why it is so difficult to amend the Constitution and the story of how some of the amendments we do have (there are 27, including the 10 in the Bill of Rights) came to be. They talk about originalism and the pessimism of the framers, who believed that any man would be a tyrant if given power, and set up the checks and balances in our Constitution to give the legislature, the court, and the people – with the vote – the power to oust a tyrant.

A few notes to listeners just for clarity:

It’s mentioned “what is Congress doing right now,” this was during the November 2025 government shut down.

Jill is not in the room with the audience; Jill was unable to join us in Portland due to a last-minute travel issue (related to the shut down, frankly), but very gamely came in on video while Geoff Norcross and the audience were in the theater.

Bio:

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. As a wide-ranging and prolific essayist, and winner of the PEN prize for the Art of the Essay, Lepore writes about American history, law, literature, and politics. She is the author of many award-winning books, including the international bestseller, “These Truths: A History of the United States” (2018). Her newest book is “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution,” which was published this September.

As one of the local hosts of OPB’s “All Things Considered,” Geoff Norcross shares local and regional stories to audiences of NPR’s flagship newsmagazine. Previously, Geoff was the host of OPB’s “Morning Edition” for 15 years. He was part of the team that built the program into one of the most listened-to presentations of “Morning Edition” in the country.

Dazed by the sun and tired by more than a dozen hours of travel by bus, the woman from Tehran, Iran’s capital, crossed into eastern Turkey.

Her first stop? Somewhere with Wi-Fi.

“I only want to make a video call and go back [to Iran.] That is it,” she told NPR.

For the last month, she has been making the hours-long drive to Iran’s border with Turkey every three days in order to use the internet for a few hours to contact her son, who is studying at a university in western Turkey.

Like most Iranians interviewed for this story, she requested total anonymity because she fears arrest and her assets being seized in Iran for speaking to foreign media.

Since the beginning of the war more than a month ago, Iran’s government has blocked its citizens from accessing the global internet, leaving only a few phone lines and select, government-approved “white SIM” phone cards functioning. Now, nearly 90 million Iranians find themselves isolated from basic information about what is happening amid daily U.S. and Israeli strikes on the country.

NPR has been interviewing Iranians transiting through eastern Turkey, along the country’s border with Iran. Iranians crossing the Turkish land border — arriving by train, and speaking from Van’s many restaurants, hotels and lowkey tea shops catering to Iranian visitors — told NPR about how they are trying to skirt Iran’s internet controls.

“The only voice is the voice of the Iranian regime now, because they have cut the internet. They have shot our voices and cut our tongues,” a second Iranian woman told NPR, while traveling in eastern Turkey.

Some can afford to buy precious minutes of Wi-Fi or phone time from a black market of Starlink bandwidth and phone SIM cards, but many Iranians say the connections are glitchy, unable to load most web pages and social media sites.

And so, for Iranians with the means to travel, there is one other option for internet: to travel to another country.

“When we can access internet, we can talk for ourselves,” said the woman.

Creating internet “chokepoints”

For the last decade and a half, Iran’s government has been quietly restructuring the country’s internet infrastructure to enable the regime to shut off the internet for all but a select few people.

The preparations began after mass anti-government protests in 2009, say cybersecurity researchers and human rights advocacy groups, protests during which social media sites, especially Twitter, helped demonstrators organize.

“This is true a highly centralized architecture,” says Hesam Nourooz Pour, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen. “Unlike the global internet, which is relatively decentralized, Iran routes international traffic through a small number of the state-controlled gateways operated by the telecommunication infrastructure company. I see these gateways function as chokepoints, because nearly all incoming and outgoing international traffic passes through them.”

Iran also started creating an internal internet, called the National Information Network, or NIN, on which government-approved sites and the country’s banking and financial services could run, even when connectivity to the global internet was cut off. (Iranians still receive SMS text messages from the government since SMS is cellular network-based and not dependent on the internet, which the NIN is part of).

Authorities have also issued some phone SIM cards to government-affiliated Iranians which still can connect to the global internet, because they are exempt from a rigorous filtering system Iran created, modeled after China’s internet censorship technology.

Abbas Milani, a professor of Iranian history at Stanford University, says his friends in Iran are now paying exorbitant prices to buy just minutes of Starlink connections and so-called “white SIMs” — elite, government-approved phone cards from which some Iranians are illegally selling bytes of bandwidth.

"It is extremely dangerous even to buy [Wi-Fi] because the regime has declared that this is a counterrevolutionary activity," Milani says.

Iranian authorities have been arresting hundreds of people for using the internet. A law enforcement officer in Yazd province, in central Iran, told Iranian media that six people had been arrested in late March for using Starlink equipment. That same month, Iranian authorities said they had arrested 466 people for using the internet to hurt national security.

Some Iranians say they have deputized friends who are traveling internationally to send messages out.

“22 days have passed since the war (and the complete internet blackout in Iran). This episode was recorded and edited in mid-February,” wrote Ershad, a popular Iranian podcast host, in a caption for a YouTube video he uploaded last month. “In order to publish [the episode], I came to my hometown of Marivan, the zero point of the border,” he continued, naming a town on Iran’s border with Iraq. From there, he says he could access Iraqi phone data networks to post his episode.

The hosts behind a second popular Persian-language podcast called Haagirvaagir, and hosted from Iran, released a long-delayed episode in late March, writing, “we are sending [the episode] out of Iran border on a memory card with difficulty and despair at the chance of it being uploaded.”

A “war crime” to shut off the internet

The internet outage has been so absolute that Iranians say they cannot receive warnings about where the next American and Israeli strikes will land. Many people have been unable to communicate with family members outside of the country to let them know they are alive.

“It is only after we have left Iran, that I have been connected and I am reading [the international news] and I am finding out which places have been hit and what has exactly happened [in Iran],” an Iranian woman vacationing for a long weekend in Turkey with her children told NPR.

Milani calls the internet blackout a war crime because it leaves tens of millions of Iranians unable to avoid Israel or the U.S. bombing them. The internet shutdown has also decimated Iranian small businesses, which used WhatsApp and Instagram to reach customers. Milani says the regime is willing to bear this cost.

“Education has been stopped. All our communication has been stopped,” said an Iranian business owner, who said he had traveled to Turkey for just two days to check his WhatsApp messages and the international news. His own business, providing online training to other small businesses, had been frozen due to the internet outage. “Nearly 80% of the businesses we worked with are going to go bankrupt, I think, in the next year … We cannot do any work if we are not connected back to internet.”

“They feel — and I think they’re right — that this is the most existential threat they have. That’s why they have gone berserk,” says Milani of the Islamic Republic of Iran. “They’re willing to pay any price, including bringing the entire global economy to a crisis, if that’s the price the world has to pay for their survival.”

Four Iranians told NPR that they were receiving regular SMS text messages from government authorities, reminding them that speaking to foreign media or leaking information to foreign agents was punishable by arrest and property confiscation.

“They cut off the internet for us, but they have their own,” one Iranian living in Tehran wrote NPR. “They cut off our money, water, electricity, and everything else for us, but they have their own [internet] and SMS [text services].”

Will Chyrsanthos wanted something striking for his entryway bathroom. So last year, while doing home renovations, he imported a sky-blue concrete sink from Bulgaria. The ramp sink ended up costing him an extra $250 because of tariffs.

When U.S Customs launched its online portal Monday to start the process of refunding $166 billion in tariff revenue, Chyrsanthos logged in to get the money back.

But he soon found out the portal wasn’t for most individual customers. Instead, the refunds would go to whoever directly paid Customs as the importer of record, often a U.S. company. For Chyrsanthos and millions of other American consumers, if they want a tariff refund, they will have to rely on the goodwill of companies to pass those refunds along, or on class action lawsuits to force a return.

Chyrsanthos was pessimistic — but then he got a bit of news. The shipping company DHL, which he’d used to import his expensive sink, announced it would provide refunds for customers who had paid tariff fees to them directly.

“Now that’s unexpected and wonderful,” Chyrsanthos says.

FedEx and UPS also promised similar refunds for customers. For these shipping companies, it’s an option because there is a clear paper trail of how much each client paid — and now is owed.

But what about all of the other products Chyrsanthos bought for his Massachusetts home renovation? He has no such paper trail. The extra cost was baked into the final price of each item he bought, rather than listed as a separate fee on a shipping bill. He suspects the total price increase was in the thousands.

“I have zero hope for recouping any of that,” Chyrsanthos says.

Retail companies are facing the same problem: They don’t know how much of a tariff burden they passed on to each customer. And that is perhaps the biggest barrier stopping retailers from sharing whatever refunds they are able to claim from the government.

“It’s nearly impossible to determine how much individual consumers paid,” says Terence Lau, dean of Syracuse University College of Law.

That’s because a product, like a TV, often has parts from multiple countries, and each was hit with different tariff rates. Those rates changed over time by presidential decree, which makes calculating a customer’s actual cost even more difficult. Plus, the retailer likely absorbed some of that tariff expense. The tariff burden was also shared up and down the supply chain, between vendors, distributors and finally customers.

“By time it gets down to the consumers, the whole tariff has been diluted,” says Robert Shapiro, an international trade lawyer and partner at the law firm Thompson Coburn.

Rebecca Melsky co-founded Princess Awesome, a clothing company that sells clothes for girls that include traditionally boy-coded images, like dresses with solar systems on them or lounge pants with pictures of dragons. She says she has no way to automatically determine how much each customer paid in tariffs, and calculating it individually for each transaction would be “incredibly laborious.”

Plus, Melsky says her company has already spent significant time dealing with tariffs. “That doesn’t count in dollars, but time is worth money,” Melsky says.

To cope with tariffs, she raised prices and put up an online tariff tip jar for donations. Today, as a kind of refund, she is considering giving $10 in store credit to customers who contributed to the jar.

Other retailers are also looking for other ways to pass recouped money along to customers without dealing with the headache of full refunds. Costco’s CFO Gary Millerchip said on a recent earnings call that the company could pass along the returned tariff dollars as lower prices.

Several class action lawsuits have been filed against large companies, arguing that since they shared the tariff cost with consumers, they should also share the tariff relief.

Edwin Martinez, an engineer, paid specific tariff charges for online purchases of electronic components, like power connectors and pressure sensors. Now he’s a little annoyed, knowing he likely won’t get a refund.

“I paid this extra tax, man,” Martinez says. “Can I just have my money back?”

When Jamie and Chris Thompson got married, they created a big, blended family.

Chris had three children from a previous marriage. Jamie had a son. Together, they had two more kids. The youngest, Colby, had bright blue eyes and chubby cheeks. Jamie Thompson called him the “little ham of the family.”

But in 2010, a babysitter became so frustrated with his crying that she shook and slammed him, Jamie Thompson recalls.

This left Colby, then 8 months, with a traumatic brain injury that nearly killed him.

Now 16, he can’t use his body and can’t communicate. He has severe scoliosis, chronic lung disease, cerebral palsy and is fed via tube, and is dependent on a ventilator to breathe at all times. He requires round-the-clock care.

For years, Jamie Thompson has been his caregiver, to the point that she sleeps in a recliner next to him in the living room.

“I’m employee of the month, Colby would tell you, even though he can’t,” she said. “I show up every day. I never have a sick day, I’m always here.”

When it comes to support from the state, Thompson, like many parents providing care to disabled children, falls into a gap.

Washington compensates parents providing care to disabled children on Medicaid if they are over 18, but not if they’re minors. Other relatives can get paid for taking care of children, just not parents. Professional nursing and personal care are covered, but families say labor shortages make these services often difficult to find.

This has forced some parents to quit their jobs to care for their children full-time without pay. Some fear that such little support will leave them with no other choice than to institutionalize their children.

In response, families have brought a potential class-action lawsuit against the state in federal court for not ensuring that children with developmental disabilities on Medicaid get the nursing and care services they qualify for.

“It’s really frustrating to know that the state of Washington has been taking advantage of us, all of our families, to take care of our kiddos for free, and there’s not a damn thing anybody can do about it,” Thompson said.

Legislation to potentially pay parental caregivers made some progress in the Legislature in 2024 and 2025 but went nowhere this year. The idea has bipartisan support as a way to overcome the caregiving workforce shortage but has faltered amid budget concerns.

“We’re just going through the judiciary to do what they tried to do through the Legislature already,” said Greg Albert, an attorney for the plaintiffs bringing the litigation.

The state attorney general’s office deferred comment to the lawsuit’s defendant, the state Health Care Authority. A spokesperson for the agency, which administers Medicaid, declined to comment as the litigation is pending.

But in court filings, the state has defended its actions, arguing the plaintiffs have “received services appropriate to their factual and medical situations.”

The Health Care Authority “is complying with applicable law and continues to work with the plaintiffs to ensure the provision of services,” the state wrote in court papers. “HCA has not denied any services or failed to make efforts to find additional services.”

‘You have to find a way’

Outside care for families with disabled children falls into two buckets.

Private duty nursing gives a home-based alternative to institutional care for children with complex needs, like ventilators, tracheostomies or feeding tubes.

Personal care is for outside help to aid in the daily tasks of living, like bathing, dressing, eating and managing medication, among other things.

The children whose families brought the suit qualify for a combination of private duty nursing and personal care, or both. They include a 3-year-old who has spent much of his life in the hospital and skilled care facilities because no private duty nursing services were available to enable him to live at home. Another plaintiff qualifies for 112 hours per week of private duty nursing but has been getting less than 40 hours for over a year.

The state has countered in court filings by arguing that the “alleged harm, if any, arises out of conditions of which the plaintiffs had knowledge and to which they voluntarily subjected themselves.”

The lawsuit claims roughly 100 people in Washington under age 21 who are eligible for private duty nursing services are not receiving them at the level they’re approved for. It counts about 4,700 people in the same boat for personal care aid. A state study in 2023 estimated 1.4 million personal care hours went unused by children in these circumstances.

The plaintiffs are asking a judge to allow them to represent those roughly 4,800 children in the class-action case.

Some states, the study noted, pay parents for caregiving for their own children. Many made the move during the COVID-19 pandemic, which deepened the caregiving workforce shortage, but Washington didn’t. Other states have been sued for similar issues.

The lawsuit claims the state is violating multiple federal laws by not providing the care for the allotted hours. The families say the state’s inability to build the workforce is leaving children waiting months to be discharged from hospitals or forcing them from their homes into institutional care.

“Part of it is that they just don’t pay enough to be able to find nurses to go do that,” Albert said. “But the way the federal government looks at it is that’s not good enough. You have to find a way to do it.”

In 2016, a federal judge ordered the state to provide in-home nursing as authorized, in response to a lawsuit from the families of infants and toddlers.

The latest lawsuit, filed in federal court in Tacoma in February, argues the problem persists a decade later.

The litigation isn’t trying to bring a specific outcome. The families just want a judge to order the state to do whatever necessary to fulfill the caregiving needs the families say it isn’t meeting. They aren’t seeking monetary damages.

Albert hopes by June to see a judge rule on a preliminary injunction, potentially ordering the state to take steps to improve the system.

‘It’s really taxing’

Starting around 2012, the Thompsons hired a couple nurses to care for Colby. At the time, he qualified for 10 hours a day of skilled nursing. But after a couple years, both nurses had to step away from the family to care for their own families.

For years after that, the replacement nurses they brought in were hit or miss, Thompson said. The last nurse they had was in 2018.

Since then, the family hasn’t had any outside nursing help, Thompson said. Colby now is eligible for 16 hours of private duty nursing per day.

His mother is still open to having a trained nurse help out, but recognizes she is Colby’s best caregiver. Thompson said if she could change history, she still “wouldn’t ever change being his provider.”

“I have family and friends who think it’s all very sad because I’m just stuck here, but to me, it’s not being stuck,” Thompson said. “It’s frustrating that this is his right to have help. But we’ve just, with everything in our situation, we’ve had to learn to adapt and change our lifestyle so many times.”

Katie Scheid’s daughter, Millie, qualifies for 185 hours of personal care per month due to her severe cerebral palsy diagnosis. Scheid quit her job in 2021 to care for Millie.

Like Thompson, Scheid isn’t a named plaintiff in the lawsuit, but their experiences are representative of those who brought the case.

Scheid is her daughter’s primary caregiver, but she isn’t alone. Her parents care for Millie and are compensated. But they’re getting older, and so it’s getting more difficult to meet Millie’s needs.

“It’s really taxing on the whole family,” Scheid said.

She has long been frustrated that the state won’t pay parental caregivers like herself.

“That cost is apparently just too much for the state to pay,” she said, “even though those are hours they already promised, hours they already determined were needed.”

Washington State Standard is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501(c)(3) public charity.

This republished story is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit opb.org/partnerships.

Scoot Henderson scored 31 points and the Portland Trail Blazers took advantage after a scary injury to Spurs star Victor Wembanyama, rallying for a 106-103 victory over San Antonio on Tuesday night to even their Western Conference playoff series at one game apiece.

Wembanyama was diagnosed with a concussion after he tumbled face-first when he was fouled by Jrue Holiday and his jaw slammed into the floor. He did not return after the injury in the second quarter and entered the NBA’s concussion protocol, which raises the possibility the versatile 7-foot-4 center could miss multiple games.

The second-seeded Spurs looked like they could win without Wemby, building a 14-point lead early in the fourth quarter before their offense stagnated.

Portland held San Antonio without a field goal for the final 3:37 as the Blazers closed the game on an 11-2 run. Robert Williams III converted an alley-oop dunk with 12 seconds left for a 104-101 lead after Deni Avdija muscled through the paint and fed him the ball.

“As a team, as a unit, I think that was our goal — to be aggressive,” Henderson said. “Hit everybody that comes through the paint, box out and play fast. I think that was all of our success and that kind of opened the floor for all of us.”

Holiday had 16 points and nine assists, Avdija scored 14 and Williams finished with 11.

Stephon Castle led the Spurs with 18 points and De’Aaron Fox added 17. Devin Vassell, who finished with 16 points and 12 rebounds, missed a 3-pointer with 2 seconds remaining.

Game 3 is Friday at Portland.

After scoring 35 points in the Spurs’ Game 1 win, Wembanyama had five points, four rebounds, one blocked shot and one assist in 12 minutes.

Under league guidelines, a player in the concussion protocol must have at least 48 hours of inactivity and recovery and then hit several benchmarks without symptoms before being cleared to play. A player must undergo neurological testing and receive a final clearance from a team doctor in consultation with the league’s concussion protocol director.

The Spurs had won 76 straight playoff games when leading by 14 points or more in the fourth quarter. The last time they lost under those circumstances was on May 19, 2003 against Dallas.

San Antonio built that big lead with a 13-0 run to start the fourth. Backup center Luke Kornet, who replaced Wembanyama, punctuated that burst with a reverse slam for a three-point play.

Kornet finished with 10 points and nine rebounds.

Henderson shot 11 of 17 from the field and 5 of 9 on 3-pointers.

“(Henderson) has been shooting the ball really well,” Vassell said. “Got to be more physical with him. No catch-and-shoots, no easy off-the-dribble pullups. I think he made ... I don’t know how many he made today. We’re going to make it a lot harder for him because he’s feeling way too comfortable.”

A 2024 report by March of Dimes, a nonprofit focused on maternal and infant health, found that over 35% of counties in the U.S. are considered maternity care deserts, and labor and delivery units are being stretched thin, especially in rural areas.

Lincoln was finding that patients weren’t given enough time with their healthcare providers to dive into all questions about the complexities of the labor and delivery process, and often turned to resources like TikTok and Instagram to hear from other mothers and get their questions answered.

Her work as an obstetrician and gynecologist, and her ability to distill complex topics on reproductive and maternal care led Lincoln to write “The Birth Book: An OB-GYN’s Guide to Demystifying Labor and Delivery.” She joins us to discuss the book, which covers the labor and delivery experience from prenatal visits to postpartum care.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Five years ago, we talked with Jennifer Lincoln. She is an OB-GYN at a hospital in Portland. You can also find her on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube combating misinformation about sexual health. In 2021, she turned that down-to-earth communication style into a book called “Let’s Talk About Down There: An OB-GYN Answers All Your Burning Questions… without Making You Feel Embarrassed For Asking.” She has just released her second book. It’s called “The Birth Book: An OB-GYN’s Guide to Demystifying Labor and Delivery.” Jennifer Lincoln joins us now to talk about it. Welcome back to the show.

Jennifer Lincoln: Thanks so much for having me.

Miller: So there are a lot of different healthcare professionals whose jobs are directly related to pregnancy and birth. What is yours like as an OB hospitalist?

Lincoln: I am a board certified OB-GYN. And as an OB hospitalist, I work solely on labor and delivery. So that means we’re caring for pregnant patients who are coming in to have their babies, or for triage visits for folks who are transferred in from other hospitals. We’re also helping the other doctors if they have emergencies, assisting with their C-sections, and we also work with the high-risk OB-GYNs, helping to manage their high-risk patients when they’re not in the hospital. So that means no two days are the same, which is great.

Miller: It also means, I didn’t hear you say prenatal visits in there, correct?

Lincoln: Correct. We are just in the hospital. So I gave that part of my practice up, which is unfortunate, but the benefit of our model is that we are always there. We’re physically present, and we’re also really the specialists in emergency management because we see those things every day, every night. And what’s nice is the doctors who are in the office, they don’t have to run out and see a patient in triage and run back and get all backed up. So I think it’s a really nice model of care, especially when it comes to the safety aspect of things.

Miller: How did this current job lead you to write this book?

Lincoln: I saw patients coming in who just did not know what was about to happen to them, and I think it really came down to three gaps that I noticed. The first is that the healthcare system is not set up to really educate people on how to have a baby. What I mean is not that the doctors and midwives aren’t trying and desperately want to, but when you have a visit that is set up, it’s 15 minutes, and by the time you actually get through the rooming and the blood pressure and giving the urine sample, you might see your provider for a couple of minutes. So you don’t have time to ask questions. Layer that on top of you’re coming into this not really knowing how your body works, because we’re not really taught in school. If anything, you’re taught how not to have a baby, not how to do it. So that’s the first gap.

The second gap is really related to access that I would see my patients experience. We know that 30% of counties in the U.S. are considered maternal care deserts where there’s no OB-GYN, midwife, labor and delivery, or birth center. 50% of American counties have no OB-GYN, and it’s only getting worse. There’s just data out last week that showed from 2010 to 2021, the percentage of Americans who live within 30 minutes of a labor and delivery went from 90% to 60%. Now, I don’t think my book is going to open up labor and delivery units, but it will give people the language for things to look out for and to know what happens once they come in.

Miller: I was really surprised by something you write near the beginning. You say, yours is the first ever book focused solely on the birth experience, written by an OB-GYN. Is the crucial distinction here is that there are other books, but they include pregnancy as opposed to solely focusing on birth?

Lincoln: Correct. And there are other great books out there that are just like you described, that include, you know, from the beginning to the end process. I wanted a book that just focused on the birth part. I think you see it’s almost 300 pages just – and I’m doing air quotes – just talking about that. To really do it justice, you need to go into real specifics. Because what I see is patients who come in for an induction of labor or for a C-section, and nobody’s ever mentioned the many things that may happen. And that’s what they want to know. They don’t want just glossing over the high level things. So, I wanted to write a book that just focused on that, and from somebody who that’s what I do every day. And I see on social media and elsewhere content that’s out there from people who are not doing these things. And it’s really confusing for patients and for readers to know what’s accurate, who can I trust? So I hope I become that trusted source for them.

Miller: The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology reported in 2024 that childbirth related PTSD affects between 3% and 6% of mothers. What do you think is behind those numbers? What’s responsible for that really high rate of a serious reported mental health problem, following birth?

Lincoln: Yeah, and I think that statistic is interesting. That is a formal diagnosis. The numbers are even higher when you just think about birth trauma. And I say ‘just’ to mean that it’s not a formal diagnosis of PTSD. But it’s still terrible, where some studies show one in three or one in two people who have a baby experience that. I think what happens, and we see this time and again especially as an OB hospitalist, is that somebody can have what will appear to be a medically traumatic birth, such as an emergency C-section or a hemorrhage. But if they feel that it happened with them and not to them, and they were heard the entire time, we’ll see them afterwards. And they’re like, “you know, it was chaotic, but I felt like I was safe. I knew what was going on. I was taken care of.”

The people who fall into those statistics and the ones I mentioned. They didn’t feel heard. They didn’t feel like they got informed consent. They just felt out of control and didn’t even know the questions they should ask. Even if it was what might appear to be a medically uncomplicated birth, we’re seeing psychological trauma in people who felt like they weren’t part of the process.

Miller: So let’s go to one of the early parts that you talk about in your book. What questions do you recommend that people ask prospective doctors or midwives, if they are fortunate enough to have a choice about who will likely deliver their baby?

Lincoln: I have many questions that I included in checklists in my book that you can also get on my website. Because I want you to think of these questions to ask. Some of them, I think, are very obvious like, do you take my insurance? What hospitals do you deliver at that’s close to where I am? But I also think important questions are, what’s your philosophy on birth? What’s your philosophy on how often you do cervical exams?

For folks not listening or who haven’t had a baby, that’s a really great question because that helps you see whether this person believes that these things should happen in a very “this is how we do it it doesn’t matter how you’re feeling,” versus “I see this as a team sport and I’m going to be there for you and I’m going to give you my expertise and my advice. But at the end of the day, you have that autonomy.” So I think it’s really important to feel that out and see if you even have the choice, which not everybody does, unfortunately.

Miller: So what do you recommend for people in more rural areas or with fewer options about who they can select?

Lincoln: You might be somewhere in rural Oregon and there’s the OB-GYN or the family practice doc, and that’s it. And that is why, obviously, I’m here to talk about my book. But I think it is an important resource because even if that is the only person, and maybe you’re like, “I don’t know how this is going to go.” But if you walk in there saying, “You know, I know that not everybody should just automatically be induced by their due date. So, I was wondering if we could talk about this,” it changes the power differential a little bit. It just shows that you can, I don’t want to say push back in that way, but you can just have your voice heard a bit more even in a scenario where it might not feel super ideal. You can feel that you are able to say what’s important to you and have a higher likelihood of getting it.

Miller: Although it does take something. It takes some sense that you’re going to be listened to, that you’ll be taken seriously, to say that sentence you just said. “I know that I don’t necessarily need to be induced on my due date.” How do you recommend people even say a sentence like that?

Lincoln: I’m so glad you’re bringing this up because it is very different for someone like me, right? I’m a white physician and I’m English speaking and I’m not worried about my immigration status or what have you. So I know that I can say these things and not be worried. Whereas somebody else who might not be in those same positions is worried they’re going to be labeled as difficult or they’re going to be treated a certain way. And I do address that in my book and I say that there are some strategies, where you can phrase it or you can have somebody else ask those questions.

So you can have a partner or a friend who sort of becomes that person who can ask the questions in the room. You can have a doula, which I think, in addition to what we know, how beneficial they are for labor, really what they can do is be that spokesperson for you. And there’s a way you can say, if somebody’s saying you need a C-section, it’s very different to say “Well, I just know all you want to do is do C-sections” versus “Can you help me understand why? Can you give me more information? Do we have time to talk about this?” Because when it is more collaborative and team-based, everybody’s going to feel a little bit better about it. But it’s a very real thing that you bring up for sure.

Miller: As a hospital-based OB-GYN, part of your practice, and you mentioned this earlier, includes patients who’ve been transferred to the hospital after trying say, to do a home birth or laboring at a birthing center. I’m curious how that experience affects the way you think about non-hospital births. You don’t see the ones that went well. They don’t come to you, by definition. There are plenty of births outside of hospitals that are smooth. Those aren’t the ones that you end up dealing with. How does that not color the way you think about non-hospital births?

Lincoln: Oh, it sure did. When I was a resident, I did my OB-GYN residency at OHSU. We only saw the ones that came in. And being the academic center, we saw, sometimes, really terrible things. So I left residency thinking home birth is where safe birth goes to die. And I had a lot of ideas about it.

Miller: And you were vocal about that?

Lincoln: Well, yeah. I kind of was like, “why would you do this? Why would you do this to your baby?” And then guess what, I actually did this thing for a little while, and started to realize that there’s more than one way to do it. And you understand why people choose homebirth. So we were talking about how that person might only have that one OB-GYN in that rural area. Well, the other option might be a home birth by a certified midwife, and that feels much better.

So I have completely changed my view and the data supports it too. We know that homebirth for low-risk people can be very safe and actually has a lot of benefits that the hospital doesn’t have. So I think we really need to change the narrative on how to birth safely. In my book, I start off with where you can have your baby and with whom. And I really think home birth can be done safely and done in a safe way with the appropriate screening, transfer plans, those sorts of things.

I’m lucky now where I practice. We do see transfers, and I’ve seen some transfers that go so well. It feels like this healing moment where you can see the patient’s like “oh my gosh, we came into the hospital. We needed something. We were treated with respect. And now we’re not going to be so worried the next time if we need to seek medical care, even unrelated to obstetric care.”

Miller: The first time we talked it was about your first book, but also about the social media videos. That you were making a name for yourself with, with millions of followers. Did doing that work, social media videos, maybe 30 second videos… Did it influence the way you communicate, even in interviews like this? Or the way you decided to write a book?

Lincoln: Oh, 100%. I feel like everything that’s in my book, I have been asked at some point in some way. And so much of what I included, I don’t think I would have even thought to address had I not been in social media. So, I get questions of, “is this safe? Have you heard about this?” So yes, I feel like I’m teaching on social media, but I’m learning and I’m seeing what’s out there, what people are really worried about. And it’s actually been really fun. When I walk into a room, and somebody’s there in triage and they ask a question, I kind of get a feel of like, “oh, you looked this up on TikTok, didn’t you?” And then they look at me and I say, “show me the video that made you worried.”

We’ll watch it and then we’ll communicate and we’ll talk about it. And it just breaks through so much of the, what’s really going on, what you are worried about, what you think is not safe? How can we have a conversation? Yeah, I have learned a lot in my DMs. And it’s been really fun. And it also teaches me that we have to communicate and go to places where people are, in a way that they understand, in a language where they feel like they are heard. So, I hope that in this book and in my social media people feel like they’re listening to somebody with training, but also, I could be your friend. It feels like we’re having a conversation at a coffee shop. It shouldn’t feel like there’s any shame or judgment.

Miller: When you talk to other colleagues, other MDs, do you get the sense that they’re as comfortable as you are, in what you just outlined? A patient says something. You have an inkling that they learned this or got this information from social media and then you ask them to watch the video and you’ll watch a TikTok with them. How standard do you think that is? That comfort level with experiencing social media together and either corroborating or complicating the information someone’s getting from social media?

Lincoln: The younger they are, the easier it seems.

Miller: The younger the doctor is?

Lincoln: You know, the younger attendees and the residents, oh yes. So I think it’s changing, but I think what you’re alluding to is that there are definitely still some people out there who think it’s ridiculous that people are on social media educating. Or don’t understand why a patient has gone to TikTok or YouTube and hasn’t called the office. Which I think really shows a lack of understanding about all the barriers and how people learn. So [they] get angry or just [say] “Why would you question me?”

I work with amazing people and I feel like, in the city especially, it’s very different from other places in the country where maybe that power differential feels a little more combative. So I hope that we’re working to change that. But yeah, sometimes it can be a little bit funny when I say, “Oh yeah, she probably saw that on TikTok. So here’s the video.”

Miller: We asked folks on Facebook if they felt prepared for the experience of pregnancy and giving birth and what information, if any, they wished they’d had. Valerie Griffiths Brown wrote, “I wish I’d been allowed to attend a birth in person at least once. Same with a death. Reading books and watching videos only went so far.” This seems logistically challenging.

Lincoln: Seems that the paperwork would be a nightmare, and the HIPAA, yeah.

Miller: What do you think about this idea?

Lincoln: Well, it’s so true because historically, birth would happen at home. You would be around it. I think the same about how we feed babies. We are so isolated and the first time you might see a birth or feed a baby is when you’re doing it yourself. She outlines it perfectly. How are we supposed to know how to do this when we’ve never seen it? And yes, videos and things can only take you so far. But being as prepared as you can, that’d be a pretty cool, interesting spectator sport model of, here’s your childbirth class, come on in. But I like it.

Miller: Could you read an excerpt from the book? This is from part of your description of when you were doing your OB-GYN training, and it is a short section that you call, “Why Words Matter.”

Lincoln:

“I remember being an OB-GYN resident and standing outside a postpartum patient’s room one day. I was presenting her case to my team before we would all go into the room to see her. ‘Miss X is post-op day one from a crash C-section.’ ‘A what?’ interrupted my attending, who was one of my favorites and she loved teaching us, but who was also known for her high expectations. ‘A crash C-section. I got the baby out in less than a minute.’ ‘And would you want to hear that the birth of your baby was a crash event, Dr. Lincoln?’ she gently but pointedly suggested. ‘No,’ I replied, while I thought, is it not enough that I saved this baby’s life? Now I need to worry about how I say it? ‘Let’s say emergent instead, shall we?’ suggested my attending. ‘Okay, she is post-op, day one, from an emergency C-section.’

Guess what? She was totally right. Words matter even if, in my exhausted state, I didn’t realize it. I’ve only come to understand this, the longer I practice and the more time I spend on social media, hearing from people who feel that words used in their care hurt them or dehumanize them in their experience. So thank you, Doctor O’Reilly, for all you’ve taught me and many other learners.”

And I hope she’s listening today [laughs].

Miller: One of the striking things about that passage is that it felt like there’s something helpful for a patient in reading that. But it really seems like the heart of the audience, for that excerpt, is fellow doctors, fellow healthcare professionals. Are they a part of your intended audience?

Lincoln: Oh, I’m so glad you asked this question. They were not the intended audience when I started writing this book. But as I went through it and as I was reading through research, and there’s pages of references, I was realizing, wait a minute, why was I taught this way? Or why have I always been saying this when it’s actually this? And I realized that we were trained a certain way. We carry those things on and that isn’t always evidence-based. And patients see this and they know this.

So whatI’m saying is that I ended up also writing this book for other providers, whether it’s how we reframe how we do fetal monitoring or allowing people to eat in labor and those kinds of things, and the language that we use. So I really do want this book to be also for the people who are helping the people have the babies. Because we have had, in the field of OB-GYN historically, a huge role to play in why people don’t trust us. And that also means that we have a role to play and we can fix it and make it better.

Miller: I want to read another comment we got from Facebook. Christy Anderson Stewart wrote, in response to ‘what do you wish you’d heard more about and knew more about?’ She wrote, “The recovery. People tell you to slow down, rest, and recover. But if you don’t have the support system, it’s almost impossible. Your body needs so much time. Whatever you think you need, double it.” I wonder if you could read us one more section of the book. This is near the end. It’s funny, but is still a serious list that you’ve created to summarize the postpartum experience?

Lincoln: Yeah, it’s called “Having a Baby is So Fun.”

Miller: I should just say it gets graphic. But nothing that, I think, listeners cannot handle.

Lincoln: I believe in this audience. I do. All right.

“So you get to grow your baby for 10 months. Sorry, 40 weeks is 10 not nine months. Please don’t shoot the messenger. Squeeze a watermelon out of your vagina or have major abdominal surgery while awake, to birth said watermelon. See your baby and think, wow, will they always look like that? On second thought, of course they look more like dad, naturally. That’s really fair. Immediately be the source of nutrition for a new human who knows literally nothing about feeding other than that he must eat now. And even though the nipple is in his mouth, he is freaking out. And evolution, why is this the best we’ve done?

Wear your own diaper to remind you just how much of an adult you really aren’t, in this moment. If you’ve had a C-section, have people cheer for you when you, one, stand up, two, don’t vomit, and three, finally fart. Have your nipples on display when anyone tries to come visit, like your grandfather, the cafeteria guy, or the 12-year-old med student, all by watching your partner with his useless nipples sleep on the couch that he tells everyone isn’t that comfortable. Applaud yourself for not choosing violence for the previous one I just mentioned.

Fill out more paperwork than any sleep-deprived human should ever be legally allowed to do. Be asked about birth control as if you’ll ever have sex again. Spoiler, you probably will. Get discharged with your new human to drive on roads where everyone is clearly maniacal and out to get you, and enter your home. Feel that no one has ever done this before and survived it all. But you will, just one hour at a time.”

Miller: Before we say goodbye, I do want to ask you about a powerful section of the book, near the end, which is about stillbirth. How did you approach that section?

Lincoln: I wrote a bit of it, and then the power of social media. A woman who’d experienced a stillbirth, named Anna, reached out to me. And it turns out she works for a nonprofit called Push for Empowered Pregnancy. She reviewed that section and I added so many more questions because of things she brought up. I’ve never experienced stillbirth myself, but to have her review it, and I really wanted to go into all the detail that I could. Because when it happens, you don’t have time to fall apart, Google, and not know where to go. So I hope no one ever has to read that section but we know that it happens. About 1 in 150 births in the country. It’s actually more updated data than what I have there. I wanted people to have a place that they could go where you could help somebody through. And I’m just so appreciative for Anna’s insight on that section.

Miller: Jennifer Lincoln, thanks very much.

Lincoln: Thanks for having me.

Miller: Jennifer Lincoln is an OB-GYN hospitalist based in Portland and the author of “The Birth Book: An OB-GYN’s Guide to Demystifying Labor and Delivery.”

“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.

These rate hikes are on top of others in recent years — since 2020, PGE’s residential rates have gone up nearly 60%.

Usually, rate increases arise in November, but due to the Fairness & Affordability in Residential Energy Act, passed last year, utilities can no longer increase rates during the winter months, when utility costs are often at their peak.

However, this April rate hike has hit at another challenging time for consumers, with gas prices in Oregon soaring due to the war in Iran.

We’ll hear details about these increases from Kristen Sheeran, the Vice President of Policy and Sustainability for PGE, and Bob Jenks, the executive director of the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Two of Oregon’s largest electrical utilities increased their rates for residential customers at the beginning of this month. Pacific Power’s rates went up by nearly 3%. Portland General Electric raised their rates by 5%. But these are on top of much larger recent hikes. When you combine the increases, PGE’s residential customers are paying nearly 60% more over just six years. Kristin Sheeran is the vice president of policy and sustainability for PGE. Bob Jenks is the executive director of the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board. They both join us now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.

Bob Jenks: Thank you.

Kristin Sheeran: Thank you.

Miller: Kristin first. My understanding is that rate increase requests, these packets that you send to PUC are hundreds of pages long. But can you give us the short version of this year’s explanation? What are the different factors that drove the rate increase request this year?

Sheeran: Sure, happy to, and thanks for having us. This is an important conversation. We know that energy bills are really important to every household and business that we serve. And that’s why we’re doing everything we can to keep costs as low as we can for our customers by keeping our own operating costs low and making careful investments in our system. Specifically to the rate increase on April 1st, roughly half of that increase was due to an increase in market prices for electricity in the region. We generate a lot of our own power at Portland General. But we also buy power on the market and through contract to meet our customer demands. So, being in the market, purchasing power is critical to ensuring reliable electrical service. What we’ve seen in recent years is power costs have nearly tripled in the region. That’s primarily due to supply and demand imbalances around electricity. So that accounted for roughly about half of the increase on April 1st.

The remainder of the increase that our customers saw go into effect on April 1st reflected some investments in our distribution system; basically, the poles, the wires, and the technology that makes sure that we can deliver power to homes and businesses. It reflected some storm costs related to the restoration and recovery work we did around the January 2024 ice storm. And it also reflected an increase in the amount of money we have to collect from customers that goes to low income assistance programs. That’s a result of Oregon House Bill 3792, which basically doubled the statewide collection for energy assistance from $20 million to $40 million, basically backfilling for what the federal government had reduced, in terms of energy assistance for our most vulnerable customers.

Miller: Okay, so infrastructure, a state change by lawmakers about the low income energy assistance program, storm connected expenses from two years ago. But as you said, the first and biggest reason that you brought up there, was the increase in the price of electricity, for the electrons that you have to buy as opposed to the ones that you’re creating. You said that’s supply and demand. But what do you mean by that? Why is it that the price of wholesale electricity that you’re buying, as a utility, has gone up threefold in recent years?

Sheeran: If you look across our region, I think you’re seeing a lot of dynamics come into play over the last five or so years. So one, you have a region here in the West that is committed to decarbonization. As a result of that, you’ve seen some baseload resources like coal plants coming offline. While the region is rapidly trying to build to replace that capacity in the system, with renewables and batteries, there is somewhat of a supply and demand imbalance. As the region itself is growing and as the grid is modernizing across our region, you’re seeing needed investments in transmission, as well as an increase in need for generating capacity across the region, to meet rising energy demands for customers and for businesses.

Miller: Bob, can you remind us the basics of what you do? What is the Citizens’ Utility Board?

Jenks: We’re an advocate for residential utility customers. So when you mentioned, their rate case filing can be hundreds and hundreds of pages. Our job is to go and look at those hundreds and hundreds of pages, and the exhibits and supporting documents, ask lots of questions and look for places to challenge these, and see if the rates that they’re asking for really are deserved or not.

Miller: So the Public Utility Commission, they’re the ones who actually make the final decision as a regulator. But you are people with expertise standing in the corner for residential customers, the rest of us who don’t have the expertise. You can look through the hundreds of pages and say to the PUC, here’s where we think the utilities got it wrong, for example?

Jenks: Yeah. If you look at the Commission as sort of the judge of a rate case, we’re sort of the defense attorney on behalf of the ratepayer.

Miller: PGE’s residential rates, as I mentioned, have gone up nearly 60% in six years. So the 5% increase this year you could look at and say, it’s not huge. But it’s when you combine it with all the others, that it really starts to seem like a shocking number. It’s grown way faster than overall inflation. But just to be clear, can the PUC consider the total combined increases for ratepayers over a period of time? Or can they only look at this year’s case and this year’s increase request?

Jenks: We think they have to look at the context, which is the larger environment. And they have to find ways to sort of push back to get utilities to manage their costs well. The rates are going up way faster than the rate of inflation. Some of that is things like market costs. Some of that is also what the utility’s doing. I mean, PGE, if you look at their most recent five year capital investment plan that they submit to investors, it’s $7.9 billion. Three years ago, the five year capital plan was $4 billion. It’s increased by 79% in three years, and that’s the money that they’re spending in the future. But all of that is then going to come into rates. So my concern is that what we’ve seen over the last five years reflects lower capital spending than what we’re going to see over the next five years.

My rate today is just under 25 cents a kilowatt hour. When I take my usage on my most recent bill, my usage is just slightly under 25 cents per kilowatt hour. We’re going to be at 30 cents per kilowatt hour and above pretty quickly, based on these spending plans. And that really worries me because we’re seeing too many people shut off. Rates that are unaffordable don’t do customers any good at all.

Miller: Kristin Sheeran, so what Bob is talking about there is looking at the capital expenditure plans going forward. He’s saying it looks like we’re gonna have much bigger increases in the years to come as well. What are the reasons for the projected capital spending increases in the coming years?

Sheeran: There are certainly significant capital needs for the grid as we look to the future. First of all, the grid that serves our customers today was primarily built more than a generation ago, to serve a very different economy and a very different type of energy system than what we have today. So there’s modernization, sort of bread and butter, replacing lines, poles, equipment. Wildfire has emerged as one of the fastest growing components of our customer cost. That’s obviously to deal with the escalating wildfire risks that we see in our region. [It’s] absolutely necessary to maintain the safety and well-being of our customers and the communities we serve.

We’re also seeing significant growth. But importantly, while we’re looking at these increased capital needs on our system, we’re also deploying strategies to keep customer costs as low as possible. So when we talk about infrastructure growth on our system, we have a philosophy now that growth has to pay for growth. And thanks to the work that the Citizens’ Utility Board and other advocates did two legislative sessions ago with the passage of the Power Act, we now have tools at our disposal to make sure that as we are building out infrastructure to support large energy users like data centers, we can allocate the cost of that growth to that user group.

For example, we have a filing right now at the PUC which would increase rates, if adopted, for data centers, by 20%. By shifting costs off of our small business and residential customers, residential customers could see a decrease of about 2%, if that particular proposal was adopted. As we look to the future where more of that growth may be associated with those large energy users, we would see more and more of those infrastructure costs being allocated to those large users.

Miller: How much is that happening now? Why not already say if data centers or other heavy industrial users are, by far, responsible for a bigger – I don’t know about the overall energy use – but in terms of the percentage change. Data centers, their demand is growing way faster than residential demand. So are you already taking that into account as you make these prices? Are you already saying, “hey data centers, we’re gonna give you a bigger piece of our overall cost increases, because you are demanding more and more every year?”

Sheeran: Well, because of the way that rates are set and regulated by law, we weren’t able to do that for data centers, as a specific class of customers, until the Power Act was passed a couple of years ago. And that’s what makes that legislation so important. It basically cleared the path for the Public Utility Commission to work with utilities and work with CUB to establish a different set of rate-making tools for data centers as a whole that could allow them to shoulder more of the growth that they are directly bringing to the system.

Miller: Are you thinking this is eventually, or in the coming years, going to lead to a decrease in residential electricity costs or a slowing down of what seems like an inexorable increase?

Sheeran: I don’t have a crystal ball. I think we’re probably in an environment where we’re talking about a slowing down of future residential rate increases. But I think this is an important point of the growth debate. When you have a system like the grid that is very capital intensive, when you can spread those capital investments out over a larger customer base over more kilowatt hours served, then that has a decreasing effect on customer rates. If, through the Power Act and other tools that may be developed over time at the Commission in the state, we can shift more of the cost to growth to those who are causing the growth, then we have a much fairer way of financing the capital investments on the system and taking some of those capital expenses off the backs of our residential and small business customers.

Miller: Bob, in the last six years when PGE’s residential customers have seen a nearly 60% increase in their rates, PGE shareholders have seen a nearly 50% increase in the stock price. How do you think about these two numbers?

Jenks: I think there’s a connection between the two. The way a utility makes money is making those capital investments and they earn a rate of return on the investment. And that pushes their stock price up. So when I said that their five year capital investment plan went from $4.3 billion to $7.6 billion, that increases the profits that the shareholders are going to make. That increases their stock price. But that also, when those investments get made, and then come into rates, they push up rates. So I think there’s a direct connection between these investments that they’re making, these massive and massive and billions of dollars of investments, and the rate increases that customers have been experiencing and the stock price.

Miller: Kristin, how do you think about this, about the increasing rates that residential customers have to pay, some of them at this point who cannot afford those increasing rates, and the really healthy returns over this period for shareholders?

Sheeran: Again, as I said, we’re managing customer rates as carefully as we can, committed to keeping rates as low as possible for our customers through a variety of strategies. The reality is, investor-owned utilities… Our model does deploy capital to provide grid infrastructure and electricity service to customers. Generally, investor-owned utilities can access that capital and deploy that capital in our communities at lower cost than other entities like the state, for example, could.

So a financially healthy utility is a utility that is poised to make the right investments that our state needs to serve our customers reliably and with increasingly clean electricity and meet the state’s needs for economic growth. Since 2020, PGE’s reinvested earnings have enabled over $800 million of investments in Oregon, directly benefiting our customers and helping to support Oregon’s economy. So it’s a virtuous cycle where a financially healthy utility is important to the economic well-being of both our customers and the state.

Miller: What would happen if a significant number of Oregonians, both residential customers and industrial customers, became much more energy efficient and used less of your electricity? It seems like it would be good, in that scenario, for the world as a whole. We’d be burning less fossil fuel, even though we haven’t decarbonized that much yet in terms of our electrical grid. That’s the hope, but natural gas still makes CO2. But what would that mean in terms of the price you charge? I guess I’ve been a little bit forever mystified by what seemed like opposing goals: Using less energy overall, but how that plays into your business model?

Sheeran: Energy efficiency, right, is one of the most cost effective resources that a utility has out there to meet their customers’ energy demands. This region historically, and Oregon in particular, has invested heavily in energy efficiency, out ahead of other regions and utility peers in the country, in terms of bringing energy efficiency investments and lowering the amount of electricity that customers use on average. As a result – and Bob sometimes has these numbers closer to the top of his head than I do – it has helped keep electricity rates in our region lower than in other regions of the country.

Miller: Rates or overall bills? That’s the part I guess that I’m wondering about. Like if people are buying fewer electrons from you, but a lot of your fixed costs remain the same, don’t you just have to increase rates, as people use less electricity?

Sheeran: As people use less electricity, we don’t need to generate or procure, in the market, as much electricity to meet that demand. With modern technologies like demand response, in addition to more traditional energy conservation measures where we can have two-way information flows between our customers and our businesses and the utility, we can signal what are the best times of day to utilize electricity that puts less demand on the grid. That then lowers the amount of power costs that we face. All of those kinds of system investments, which are part of building a modern grid, are critically important in helping our customers, first of all, directly manage their own energy bills through the amount of electricity they’re consuming. But it also lowers costs system wide, for all of our customers, because it decreases the amount of generation investments we have to make.

Miller: Bob, what are you paying the most attention to over the next couple of years?

Jenks: I think your question on energy efficiency is an important one. And one of the issues with that is we’re really seeing a two-tiered electric system. There’s folks like me, and probably you, that have relatively efficient heating at our home. And a 5% raise in bills isn’t that unmanageable. But then you’ve got a lot of folks, mostly poor folks who live in manufactured housing that’s older or rental housing still with resistance heat, And suddenly people are seeing $300, $400, and $500 bills in the winter. It’s the folks who can least afford it are doing that. And they’re not people who can put in a heat pump. They’re not folks who can take advantage of energy efficiency measures because they’re dependent on a landlord, or they’ve got manufactured housing that’s pre-1990s. So one of the things that I’m watching is whether we can find a way to start to break through. If we really want to deal with the level of disconnections and shutoffs, we’ve got to fundamentally change people’s HVAC systems in their homes, and get people into modern, efficient heating for their homes. Because it’s winter heating costs that are in the hundreds of dollars a month that, in my mind, are driving the disconnections. And that’s the real harm that we’re seeing from these electric increases.

Miller: Bob Jenks and Kristin Sheeran, thanks very much.

Sheeran: Thank you.

Jenks: Thank you.

Miller: Bob Jenks is the Executive Director of the Citizens Utility Board. Kristin Sheeran is Vice President of Policy and Sustainability at PGE.

“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.

The Portland Trail Blazers will face off against the Phoenix Suns tonight in the NBA play-in tournament, which kicks off today. The Blazers ended the NBA regular season on Sunday with a 42-40 record and are the number 8 seed in the Western Conference.

If they beat the Suns, the Blazers would make it to the NBA playoffs for the first time in five years. But even if the Blazers lose tonight, they could still punch their ticket to the playoffs with a victory over the winner of the Los Angeles Clippers and Golden State Warriors play-in game.

Mike Richman is the host of the “Locked on Blazers” podcast. He joins us to preview tonight’s game and recap the major developments of the Blazers’ season.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The Portland Trail Blazers will play their first postseason game in five years tonight. They’ll take on the Phoenix Suns in Phoenix in the NBA play-in tournament. The winner heads to the playoffs. The loser could still punch their ticket to the playoffs with a victory in the next play-in game. Mike Richman is the host of the daily “Locked On Blazers” podcast. He joins us to preview tonight’s game and to look back at an eventful season. Mike, welcome back to the show.

Mike Richman: Thanks for having me.

Miller: What does it mean to the team that they are finally playing in the postseason after a five-year drought?

Richman: It’s the culmination of a long road to be relevant. They’ve taken the better part of four plus seasons to get back to being a team that is consistently competitive. And while I don’t think this year was a triumph in being a really high-level basketball team, they are certainly much closer now than they have been at any point since 2021.

Miller: I want to hear more about tonight’s game, but just to get briefly into how they got here. Arguably the biggest positive story of the season was Deni Avdija. Can you give us a sense for how well he’s done this year?

Richman: Yeah, he’s put together probably one of the 10, maybe higher, best individual seasons in franchise history. He’s been really, really good. The first Trail Blazer to make an All-Star team since Damian Lillard, back in 2022. He’s taken on more responsibility, in terms of having the ball in his hand and all those things, without a real drop in his ability, his efficiency. He’s a great playmaker, he’s a really good scorer, he’s a relentless physical driver, and he’s put them into another tier, in terms of hope. Because all of a sudden you have this 25 year old All-Star, which, when you are a young team that’s rebuilding, it’s kind of what you’re searching for. Obviously you now need more than that. But he’s a huge building block and has solidified himself as such, this season.

Miller: Did you see this coming?

Richman: The short answer is no. It’s not very good for radio, but no. He was good at the end of last year, even very good at the end of last year. But March and April, in the NBA, is what is often referred to as silly season, because it is the time of year where teams just stop trying. It may be a larger problem for the sport, tackled by another podcast at some other point – another radio show at some other point. When a player is just so good in March and April, it’s just hard to know if that will extrapolate to, say, the 82-game sample of the regular season.

And not only did he play probably at a level higher than he did at the end of last season, he also got more responsibility because the Blazers had injuries, particularly to point guards. So Dani kind of shifted into this role where he’s got to dribble and pass and set up his teammates and run the offense. So a shift in responsibility, shift in the amount of ask, the amount of what was put on his plate, and he has been excellent.

Miller: Who or what do you see as the other bright spots from this season?

Richman: I would say Donovan Clingan, Blazers’ second year center, has emerged as a legitimate NBA starter. He was good as a rookie. He was very impressive. But he didn’t play a ton and it was unclear whether someone of his size, 7’2”, although I think they announced him in the stadium now as 7’3”. He grew an inch over the summer.

Miller: We all did.

Richman: Yeah, I don’t, at least not that direction. 7’3”, 300 pounds, like, can you play 28-30 minutes a night for the interminably long seven-month NBA season? And he’s proven that he can take on a bigger role. He’s been a very bright spot.

I think Toumani Camara’s emergence has been a bright spot, and they’ve got some nice contributions from veteran players like Jrue Holiday, who missed a bunch of time with injury. But when he has played, it’s been very helpful. And Robert Williams III, the backup center who has missed a bunch of time over the last four seasons with injuries, has been healthy this year and really, really helpful.

Miller: All right, so let’s turn to tonight. How did the Blazers do against the Suns in their regular season matchups?

Richman: They went one and two, and so they lost twice and their one win was a very odd game, in which the Suns had very few players available. They played twice back in February and the Blazers won the second of those two matchups. And they won another game in November. But in the NBA, things that happen in November, by the time you get to the spring, we’ve just moved into another world. So I don’t see those as predictive. But certainly the Suns have gotten the better of the Blazers in their meetings thus far this season.

Miller: How do you think they match up in April?

Richman: Pretty favorably, honestly. Dave, you’ll know from my past appearances on your show is that I’m generally a bit of a pessimist when it comes to the Portland Trail Blazers.

Miller: You’re the daily Eeyore podcaster for the Blazers.

Richman: That’s right. I come here, check in every day with me, and I’ll tell you how it’s not going great. But I feel more confident about this team than I have in a really long time and in this specific game, I think they match up well. I think they probably have the best player, which is maybe a reductive way to analyze it. But sometimes in basketball, in a single game, do you have the best dude, it’s a fairly good predictor. I like the Blazers’ chances. I think they’re a little bit bigger. I think they have about equal levels of depth of talent. Obviously, a one-off game can be a little bit flukey, but I like their chances in a way that I haven’t felt confident about them

probably since like 2019.

Miller: Every team, every season, has to navigate some number of injuries. It’s a long season, as you mentioned, and a really physical sport. But it did seem like the Blazers were more banged up than average over the course of the season. How are they doing right now just in terms of personnel?

Richman: Dave, tonight may be the first time all year that they have had every available player suit up and be ready to go. This might be quite literally their healthiest game of the season. It won’t be their last game of the season no matter what happens. But it is one of their last games of the season and they’re as healthy as they’ve ever been. Jerami Grant is listed as questionable. He’s missed the last seven games with a calf injury. He is the only one on the injury report, other than Damian Lillard, who is presumed out until next year, while he recovers from an Achilles injury. So at long last, they’ve got their crew going into their biggest game of the year.

Miller: Let me give you a chance to be less positive. Let’s say that the Blazers make it to the playoffs. Then what?

Richman: Now this is my sweet spot. They’re going to play a team that’s a lot better than them and their season will end quickly. If they win tonight, they’ll play the ascendant San Antonio Spurs, who might have the best player in the world in Victor Wembanyama. They are a 60 win team, and the Blazers will be on the road to begin that series. That is a very, very, very tough hill to climb. And if they lose tonight and they were to advance with a win Friday, they would play the defending NBA champion, Oklahoma City Thunder, who have maybe the best player in the world in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and have even more wins, the best record in the NBA and are just an absolute machine. So, it gets really tough from here. But I think this is more about taking steps, and to make the playoffs would be an important step. And when they get thrashed next week in the playoffs, that will be what we’ll call a learning experience.

Miller: Speaking of the future though, the new majority stake owner in the team, Tom Dundon, gave a flurry of interviews a few weeks ago, after the sale finally officially went through. What stood out to you in what you heard?

Richman: He is a man who is deeply aware of his standing in a public negotiation with a variety of political arms. And he is not even remotely sentimental in his approach to being the owner of a basketball team. He doesn’t have a lot of warmth to him. When he was asked why he purchased the team, he said, “Because they called me and said one was available.” He won’t commit outright and say that he’ll keep the team here. He won’t. He’s is someone who seems to be just in business mode. You know, he’s bought something for billions of dollars, so I get it. But it isn’t super endearing in your first impressions.

Miller: Mike, always good to talk to you. Thanks very much.

Richman: Thanks for having me.

Miller: Mike Richman is the host of the “Locked On Blazers” podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in to Think Out Loud on OPB and KLCC. I’m Dave Miller.

“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.

“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.

Paul Bikis, the director of the film, noticed the threads through all of their stories and created a feature-length film showcasing Hancock, Doellning and Soens. “Adapted” premieres in Bend on April 23 and in Portland on April 30. “Think Out Loud” spoke with Soens ahead of her Paralympic debut in Milan-Cortina earlier this year. We’re joined by Bikis, Hancock and Doelling to talk about the new film.

“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.

Portland’s Bureau of Emergency Communications has drastically improved its 9-1-1 call times and medical response.

Just a few years ago,the agency was short staffed and response times were far below national standards. But the efforts the Bureau has made have yielded dramatic results: it recently earned accreditation by the International Academy of Emergency Dispatch, which put it in the top 10 percent of dispatch agencies in the world.

We talk with Steve Mawdsley, the interim director of the Bureau of Emergency Communications, and call dispatcher Hannah Kimbell to hear about the improvements they’ve made, and what it’s like to be the first call in an emergency.

“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.

On a recent 80-degree day at Rock Creek Park, an urban national park in the heart of Washington D.C., a dozen children as young as four sank their hands into the creek mud, discovered crayfish hiding beneath rocks, and picked grass out of their hair.

Brown, 55, runs ForestKids, a nature immersion program with the goal of helping kids connect to nature. But she’s been obsessed with environmentalism since the early 2000s when it was a “weird fringe thing.”

“‘Oh my gosh, you’re a tree hugger. You’re probably one of those tree huggers,’” Brown recalled hearing from others. “It was meant as a bad word.”

Now, she said, the word brings “pride.”

Next to Brown, 9-year-old Orla McClennen wears a hat with palm trees and a Joshua Tree National Park T-shirt. She doesn’t know if she’s ever heard the word tree-hugger, but her favorite part of Brown’s program so far was walking across a “big, fat tree” to get to the other side of the creek.

“I mean they give us oxygen, which is pretty like, you really need it,” Orla said.

Today, “tree-hugger” usually describes environmentalists and advocates for the preservation of woodlands – but the word has a much longer history.

In this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we trace the word tree-hugger from a legend in the 1700s to modern-day environmentalism in 2026.

The term was born in the Himalayas

The original tree-huggers did not actually hug trees.

In 1973, the Chipko movement in India coined the term “tree-hugger,” according to Ramachandra Guha, an environmental historian. Chipko means “to hug” or “to stick to something” in Hindi.

At the time, rural villagers in the Himalayas were fighting “commercial exploitation” of hornbeam trees, Guha said, which were a cornerstone of the local economy. The trees also prevented devastating landslides and floods, so locals made sure to cut them down sustainably, he said. But before the first protest, the Indian government owned the rights to the forest and allowed an international company to use the trees to make tennis racquets.

Guha, who wrote the book Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism, said the original movement was not just about the villagers’ love of nature, “it was an assertion of their economic and social rights.”

“They also invoked an idiom of class solidarity. They said, ‘we need these trees and these forests for our survival,’” Guha said.

The rural villagers were inspired by Gandhian nonviolent social action and threatened to hug the trees to protect them. Guha said the fact that around 300 men, women and children were threatening to take action was enough for the government to back off. Later, photographs were taken of women hugging trees, which many people associate with the movement, but Guha said those were staged after the fact. Women, however, did take center stage in the movement as the main activists, Guha said.

From 1973 to around 1980, there were dozens of peaceful rallies against clear-felling, Guha said. And eventually, in response to the movement, the government banned cutting down trees in the area.

Guha compared the moment in Indian history to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which spurred a nationwide reckoning over pesticide use in the US. Both were a “wake up call” that “invoke[d] both social justice and environmental sustainability,” Guha said.

“The tree hugger was part of a wider community,” he said. “It’s not an individual act of heroism.”

The Chipko movement is connected to the earlier Bishnoi people in northwest India, according to Vandana Shiva, a prominent environmentalist and author. In 1730, members of the Bishnoi faith in Khejarli died to protect the sacred Khejri trees, a flowering tree native to Western Asia and India, according to Shiva’s book Oneness vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom.

In Shiva’s telling, the ruler of Jodhpur, a city located in the Thar Desert in northwest India and a popular tourist spot, needed firewood for the construction of his new palace. When the soldiers arrived in the forest, they first found a woman, Amrita Devi, and her young daughters who offered their heads in exchange for saving the trees. When the story spread throughout other Bishnoi villages, 363 people also sacrificed their lives for the trees. The king heard about the killings, and he issued a royal decree making the cutting of the trees illegal, a precedent that still exists today.

Guha said there is no historical evidence to back the Bishnoi legend other than the story being a “popular myth.” But to honor the legacy of the Bishnoi’s sacrifice, the government of India designated Sept. 11 as National Forest Martyrs Day in 2013.

“A way to be dismissive”: Tree-huggers in the U.S.

In the United States, the term “tree-hugger” appeared in writing as early as the 1960s, even before the Chipko movement brought the term into the mainstream.

In Chicago, a group of conservationists tried to stop the creation of a highway that would go through Jackson Park, now a 551.5-acre park on the shore of Lake Michigan. An Associated Press article captured the moment in September 1965, boasting the headline, “Saws Buzz Around Tree-Huggers.” The beginning of the article reads: “The battle was between the tree-huggers and the city. The city won.”

The word was not used more widely in American politics until the 1990s, according to Jay Turner, a professor of environmental studies at Wellesley College. And at the time, it had an overwhelmingly negative connotation.

“Debates over logging, early concerns about energy and climate change, they were all beginning to gain momentum,” Turner said of the 1990s. “This label ‘tree hugger’ really got mobilized as a way to be dismissive.”

Former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was briefly labeled a tree-hugger by conservatives in his party just before a presidential run in the early 2010s, after co-starring in an advertisement with Rep. Nancy Pelosi about the need to find common ground on climate change policy.

Gingrich quickly shrugged off the name, Turner said – but throughout the ’90s and early 2000s, it appeared to be “pushed on” environmentalists. They pushed back, he said, because they believed their work in public health and good stewardship “all just [got] wiped away when you throw out the term tree-hugger.”

Roger Gottlieb, a professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, said in a human-centered culture, it’s easy for people to make fun of a connection with something that’s not human. But for him, trees can bring all people together.

Gottlieb requires his students to find one tree on campus and visit it a few times a week. Each time they visit, they write a short journal entry.

“I had one kid who started off saying, ‘This is stupid.’ And then three weeks in it was, ‘Oh, I’ve given my tree name: His name is George,’” Gottlieb said. “The last entry was, ‘George doesn’t look too good today.’

“What did he become? A tree-hugger.”

Tree-huggers in the new era

Gen Z has embraced the word “tree-hugger,” said Leah Thomas, a 31-year-old environmental author and founder of the Intersectional Environmentalist.

To her, it’s associated with ecofeminism, a political movement emphasizing historical associations between the plight of women and the ecological revolution. Thomas immediately associates the word with Julia Butterfly Hill, who lived in a 1,000-year-old California redwood tree for 738 days between 1997 and 1999.

“I love the term so much,” Thomas said. “I love calling myself a tree-hugger. There’s nothing better than hugging trees.”

Back in Rock Creek Park, the appreciation for trees was visible in every corner. Kamila Agi-Mejias enjoyed a shady spot in her lawn chair between two American elms with her daughter and husband. Yin Torrico took a quick pit-stop in the middle of his around 50 mile bike ride to rest his bike against an oak tree and fill up his water bottle. Across from Torrico’s tree, Katy Ward laid on a picnic blanket underneath another American elm reading. In a large grassy area next to Ward, even a group of frisbee players took notice of the trees to avoid them as they flung an orange disc through the air.

By the creek, Brown and her gaggle of campers explored fallen tree leaves – but the trees alone did not keep their attention for long. Soon, they were back to the creek.

“CRAYFISH!” one camper screamed with his hands plunged in the water.

The shrieks of excitement echoed through the trees.

Correction: An early version of this story incorrecty said the Chipko movement is connected to northwest Indiana. It is connected to northwest India.

Three ships came under fire in the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday, putting the possibility of any peace talks in jeopardy, after a senior Iranian official said that President Trump’s last-minute ceasefire extension “means nothing.”

The first ship was attacked and damaged by Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, the British military’s United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) said, though no injuries were reported.

“The Master of a Container Ship reported that the vessel was approached by 1 IRGC gun boat,” according to UKMTO.

No warning was given, but it “then fired upon the vessel which has caused heavy damage to the bridge,” the center said in a report.

Iran’s semiofficial Tasnim News Agency confirmed the incident, saying the container ship had “ignored repeated warnings.”

The UKMTO did not immediately say who was responsible for the attack on the second cargo vessel, only that there was no damage or injuries.

Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency also reported Iran’s Navy had attacked a third ship, the Euphoria. Iranian media reported that the Iranian navy had “seized” the two other vessels, which it identified as the MSC Francesca and the “Epaminodes,” likely referring to the Epaminondas.

The attacks come after President Trump indefinitely extended the ceasefire with Iran at the 11th hour, ahead of its expiration. Trump said he was doing so at the request of mediating country Pakistan and it would give Tehran time to present a “unified proposal.”

That’s after a U.S. delegation had been slated to travel to Islamabad for a second round of peace talks, a plan that dissolved after Iran said it would not be attending.

Mahdi Mohammadi, an adviser to Iran’s main negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, posted on X: “Trump’s ceasefire extension means nothing, the losing side cannot dictate terms.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi said earlier that “blockading Iranian ports is an act of war and thus a violation of the ceasefire.” He added that the U.S. seizure of an Iranian ship on Sunday was “an even greater violation.”

Here are more developments on day 54 of the Middle East war:

Iran’s economy | U.K.-France conference | International reaction | Fuel struggles | Points of contention

Trump says Iran flailing economically

Despite Iran’s refusal to attend negotiations this week, Trump says the country is in dire economic straits.

“Iran is collapsing financially! They want the Strait of Hormuz opened immediately- Starving for cash! Losing 500 Million Dollars a day. Military and Police complaining that they are not getting paid. SOS!!!,” he posted on Truth Social late Tuesday.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent posted on X on Tuesday that under Trump’s orders the U.S. Navy will continue the blockade of Iran’s ports.

“In a matter of days, Kharg Island storage will be full and the fragile Iranian oil wells will be shut in. Constraining Iran’s maritime trade directly targets the regime’s primary revenue lifelines,” he said.

He also said his office would continue to “systematically degrade Tehran’s ability to generate, move, and repatriate funds.”

Conference seeks solution to Strait standoff

The United Kingdom and France are hosting a two-day conference starting Wednesday aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz. One of the challenges is to remove undersea mines Iran is believed to have planted there.

Military planners from more than 30 countries are meeting at a Royal Air Force base north of London to put together a multinational mission to safeguard the Strait of Hormuz amid global concerns over oil and energy prices.

A poll in the U.K. shows 1 in 10 people are already stockpiling fuel.

British defense officials have previously floated the idea of deploying autonomous mine-hunting systems from motherships sent to the Gulf. But they caution that whatever plan they come up with at this two-day conference will only take effect after what they call a sustained ceasefire between Iran and the U.S.

International reaction

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres cautiously welcomed Trump’s announcement of a ceasefire extension.

“This is an important step toward de-escalation and creating critical space for diplomacy and confidence-building between Iran and the United States,” he said in a statement shared by his spokesperson.

“We encourage all parties to build on this momentum, refrain from actions that could undermine the cease-fire, and engage constructively in negotiations to reach a sustainable and lasting resolution.”

China warned that the Middle East is at a “critical stage.”

“The paramount priority remains to make every effort to prevent a resumption of hostilities,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun told a news briefing Wednesday.

Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said in an online statement: “Daily U-turns, whether the Strait of Hormuz is open or closed, are reckless. Transit through the Strait must remain free of charge.”

She said the EU was widening sanctions on Tehran, adding “none of us want to see a nuclear-armed Iran.”

High jet fuel prices squeeze airlines

Meanwhile, the war and strait blockade are continuing to rattle global markets and push up costs, with the airline industry particularly hard hit.

On Tuesday, German airline Lufthansa said that because the price of jet-fuel had doubled since the start of the war, it was cutting 20,000 flights through October in an attempt to save fuel.

United Airlines has also been impacted, with Reuters news agency reporting the Chicago-based carrier had forecast second-quarter and full-year profits below Wall Street estimates.

Meanwhile, the Department of Transportation says it is taking “a look” at Spirit Airlines at the request of Trump. Spirit filed for bankruptcy protection in August for the second time in less than a year.

Now soaring fuel costs tied to the Iran war are adding more uncertainty about the carrier’s ability to keep operating. It’s not the only one:last week a trade association for low-cost carriers sent a letter to Congress asking for temporary tax relief.

What are the major sticking points?

For officials in Washington, the main points of contention remain control over the Strait of Hormuz and the future of Iran’s nuclear program.

The Trump administration has said it wants commercial shipping through the strategic waterway to be fully restored. Around 20% of the world’s crude oil and natural gas typically passes through the strait.

After the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, Iran began to exert control over the Strait of Hormuz. It has prevented most commercial ships from transiting and has collected steep tolls from some of the few that did.

Vice President Vance said the first round of ceasefire talks held over a week ago broke down because Iran would not commit to forgoing a nuclear weapon.

“The simple fact is that we need to see an affirmative commitment that they will not seek a nuclear weapon, and they will not seek the tools that would enable them to quickly achieve a nuclear weapon,” Vance said.

For Tehran, the key demands for extending the ceasefire include an end to the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports and guarantees that the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah will not resume.

Israel and Lebanon agreed on a 10-day ceasefire last week, pausing fighting between Israel’s military and the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Israel and Lebanon are due to hold fresh talks in Washington on Thursday.

Lauren Frayer in Glasgow, Scotland, Joel Rose in Washington, Jane Arraf in Amman, Jordan, and Kate Bartlett in Johannesburg contributed to reporting.

As time runs out before the midterm elections, Virginia took a step on Tuesday to counter and possibly surpass President Trump’s national effort to redraw congressional voting maps in favor of the GOP.

Voters narrowly approved a Democratic-backed constitutional amendment to sideline the state’s redistricting commission and let lawmakers directly implement a new map. The Virginia delegation to the U.S. House is currently six Democrats and four Republicans and could go to 10-to-1 under the new map.

The move still faces court challenges but could put Democrats ahead in tilting House seats their way — for now.

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Florida lawmakers might be up next. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has called on them to meet next week and consider redistricting that could favor Republicans picking up more seats.

The debate in Virginia sounded a lot like it did in other states. Opponents said it would make the state’s delegation in the House favor Democrats much more heavily than the proportion of Democratic and Republican voters in the state. Proponents argued that it’s not about what’s going on in the state but about the moves Trump has prompted across the country in Republican-led states.

Redistricting divides up votes and Trump pushed for an edge this fall

Redistricting is when states redraw district lines, which usually happens at the start of a decade when the U.S. census count determines how many seats each state has in the House of Representatives. Gerrymandering is when politicians purposely group voters to benefit one party or another.

Currently, Republicans have control of the U.S. House with just a few seats more than Democrats. But the party in control of the White House usually loses seats in the midterms.

Trump has pushed for mid-decade redistricting and prompted Republicans in Texas to draw a new map that could help them win five seats held now by Democrats. Democrats in California led a redistricting plan — with voter approval similar to Virginia — that counters Texas with five additional Democratic-leaning districts.

North Carolina and Missouri lawmakers redistricted one seat in each state toward Republicans. In an already-scheduled redrawing, Ohio created two more seats that slightly lean toward the GOP. All of those changes could give Republicans nine more seats.

With the move by Virginia, Democrats have gained an edge in 10 seats across the country: Five in California, four in Virginia and one court-ordered change in Utah.

Republican lawmakers in the redistricting debate have said maintaining a hold on the House is important for Trump’s agenda and keeping Democrats from launching investigations of his administration or, as Trump has said, impeaching him.

Ultimately, the race for the House will depend on how people vote and whether parties can hold onto the seats they already have, as well as win any new ones. A big wave one way or the other would make redistricting less important.

Most of the states that were able or willing to redistrict have made their move

When Trump started his redistricting effort, it seemed Republicans had more opportunities to remake the maps than Democrats because, among other reasons, they control more state legislatures.

But Republicans in Kansas and Indiana did not answer Trump’s call. In Indiana, Republicans voted against redistricting despite Trump’s threats to support opponents against them in the primaries.

And Democratic efforts to redistrict in Maryland have been blocked by Democrats in the state Senate, where there hasn’t been enough support to bring it to a vote.

With primaries for Congress underway around the country, Florida might have the last word. Republican Gov. DeSantis has called lawmakers back to the Capitol next week, and redistricting is one of the items on the agenda.

But after Democrats made gains in a couple of recent special elections in Florida, it’s unclear if Republicans in the state will want to risk making their current seats more competitive by reaching for more. That can happen as a party tries to divide voters up in new ways.

There’s one other factor on the horizon, though. The U.S. Supreme Court is considering a case that could end up weakening the federal Voting Rights Act. If that makes it harder to mount court challenges against racial gerrymandering — redistricting that undermines the voting power of minority communities — a couple more GOP-led states could try to fast-track voting map changes before the election.

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s government said it was beefing up security at tourist sites after a man opened fire on tourists at pyramids outside of Mexico City less than two months before the FIFA World Cup.

The Monday shooting, carried out by a lone gunman on top of one of the Teotihuacan pyramids — a UNESCO Heritage Site and one of Mexico’s most frequented tourist attractions — killed one Canadian tourist and injured a dozen more.

It also set off a flurry of questions the next morning by reporters to Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum about what security protocols her government was taking ahead of the sports competition, which Mexico will jointly host with the United States and Canada over the summer.

About an hour from Mexico City, Teotihuacan was slated to be a key site for visitors during the festivities. Just days before the shooting, local lawmakers even pushed forward an initiative to revive a nighttime interactive light show projected on the pyramids for World Cup visitors, which was previous suspended at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The unexpected act of violence comes as Sheinbaum’s government has gone to great lengths to project an image of safety ahead of the soccer competition, following a surge of cartel violence February in the World Cup host city of Guadalajara.

“Events like this only further magnify the negative images that Mexico has on security issues, undermining the narrative that President Sheinbaum is trying to build that Mexico is a safe country,” said Mexican security analyst David Saucedo.

‘An isolated incident’

On Tuesday, Sheinbaum acknowledged that the archaeological site lacked security filters to prevent the attack in part, she said, because the shooting “was an isolated incident” that hasn’t occurred before in such a public space.

While Mexico suffers from cartel violence, especially in strategic and rural areas, mass shootings in public spaces are rare in Mexico compared to the U.S., where it is much easier to legally obtain a gun.

She noted that the shooter appeared to be motivated by “outside influences,” particularly the 1999 Columbine massacre in Colorado.

“Our obligation as a government is to take the appropriate measures to ensure that a situation like this does not happen again. But clearly, we all know — Mexicans know — that this is something that had not previously taken place,” Sheinbaum said Tuesday morning.

Mexican Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch, the face of the government’s crackdown on cartels, said on Tuesday that security forces had been ordered to “immediately strengthen security” at archaeological sites and major tourist destinations across the country.

He said the government will increase the presence of Mexican National Guard, boost security checks at key sites and fortify surveillance systems to “identify and prevent any threats” against citizens and visitors.

Security concerns ahead of World Cup

The announcement was an effort by Mexican authorities to assuage ongoing concerns about violence in Mexico ahead of the tournament.

Sheinbaum’s government has touted security successes under her leadership. Homicides have dipped sharply since she taken office to the lowest levels in a decade, government figures show. The government has also taken out a number of top capos and highlighted a dip in fentanyl seizures at the U.S.-Mexico border.

But they have hit hurdles in recent months, namely a burst a violence in Guadalajara in February, triggered by the killing of Mexico’s most powerful cartel boss. The bloodshed was met with a wave of concern by people in and outside of Mexico. Sheinbaum vowed there would be “no risk” for fans coming to the tournament and FIFA president Gianni Infantino said he had “full confidence” in Mexico as a host country. Sheinbaum later met with FIFA representatives to assess security for the World Cup matches to be played in Mexico.

Mexico’s government doubled down on security measures, which include deploying 100,000 security forces across the country, particularly concentrated in the country’s three host cities, Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey. Officials said it would deploy more than 2,000 military vehicles, as well as dozens of air crafts and drones, and establish security perimeters around areas like stadiums and airports in key cities.

“As you can see, we are very prepared for the World Cup,” Sheinbaum said in early March.

Despite the rare nature of the Monday shooting at the pyramids, the extreme act of violence reignited scrutiny by some about the government’s capacity to prevent violence during the soccer tournament, and once again boosted pressures on the government.

FIFA was approached for comment about the pyramid shooting, but the soccer body typically does not address security issues and incidents that happen away from tournament venues.

Saucedo, the security analyst, said that pressures to concentrate security in host cities and tourist areas like Teotihuacan may come at the expense of other more crime-torn areas in greater need of police and military.

“Events like the one that took place yesterday in Teotihuacan clearly show that public safety agencies are overwhelmed,” he said.

Firefighters Max Li and Owen Fortey worked in silence as they checked each other’s harnesses and flight gear, using hand taps and the thumbs up gesture to move through a safety checklist before they hopped into a helicopter parked in a clearing of the Deschutes National Forest.

After a few dry runs on the ground, the pair was ready to practice rappeling up to 250 feet down a rope to fight wildfires that are impossible to reach any other way.

“The beautiful thing about helicopters is we can get our folks next to a fire – very pinpoint accuracy, very close – so they can get on the fire quickly,” said Adam Kahler, national rappel specialist with the U.S. Forest Service.

Li and Fortey were two of the 250 U.S. Forest Service wildland firefighters from across the country who traveled to Bend last week to attend the annual national rappel re-certification for the U.S. Forest Service Helicopter Rappel Program. It’s the main training for returning rappeller crewmembers this year and a requirement of the job. The training returned to Bend for the third year in a row.

A critical resource

The highly skilled wildland firefighters are likely to be in great demand this year as a concerning fire season draws near.

With little snow and rain to speak of this winter, forecasters predict above normal activity for the looming fire season. State, regional and local governments in the Pacific Northwest have already taken preventative measures to address the heightened risk, months ahead of mid-May, the typical start to fire season.

According to the Western Fire Chiefs Association website, fire seasons are getting longer, in part due to climate change. And last year was the busiest for U.S. Forest Service rappel crews across the country.

Technological advances have increased safety for some aspects of fighting fire, but “these jobs have to be done by people,” said Stanton Florea, public information officer with U.S. Forest Service Fire and Aviation Management.

Rappel crews are specially trained wildland firefighters who drop into active fires in hard-to-reach areas of the backcountry with all the needed gear and rations. They respond to all types of incidents but are typically deployed to small fires often started by lightning strikes, said Kahler.

About 320 people work across twelve rappel or helitack crews across the western United States. They’re located in Washington, California, Montana and Idaho. Oregon has four crews that form a diagonal line of coverage from the southwest to the northeast.

That diagonal tracks along a common storm path where “lightning bursts” are likely to occur.

“Typically here in Oregon, Rogue-Siskiyou will take lightning. In the afternoon it’ll track over the Cascades, through Central Oregon and then pass over the Snake River in northeast Oregon–all in one day,” Kahler said.

The rappel crews could be more critical than ever this summer.

Snow cover across the state was a mere 13% of the average in March, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center with the University of Colorado Boulder.

By June, the National Weather Service models predict risk will rise “above normal for significant wildland fire potential,” said Marc Russell, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

That includes all areas of Oregon and Washington east of the Cascade Mountain range crest, he said.

Training to deploy

After a morning of land-based practice, crews sat and rested in the shade. It was a welcome change to the mid-spring snowstorm that blew into Central Oregon earlier in the week. Then, the energy shifted.

A white board appeared in the middle of the temporary communication center. Instructors listed names in groups of four to five trainees, marking when they would go up for live rappel evaluations. They needed three successful rappels to re-certify in the smaller helicopters and two in the large capacity helicopters.

One hundred and seventy-five flights launched over the course of the rappeller training week and trainers scheduled dozens of flights the day that OPB was there, in groups of three or four.

As the names went on the board, rappellers checked their standing. Some were wearing green flight suits that they zipped up in preparation.

After a morning of relative quiet, waiting helicopters turned on their engines and a wall of noise reverberated through the forest as the ships took off, circled, dropped and returned.

Each trainee carried 300 feet of rope and a red “belly bag” that held nearly all the essentials a firefighter would need in the backcountry for 48 hours, such as food, water, a fire shelter, a radio, map and other tools.

Once airborne, the spotters opened the helicopter doors and the trainees dropped the heavy rope bags from the side of the ship.

Most trainees stepped onto the aircraft skids two at a time as the helicopter hovered and lowered themselves backwards and upside down with acrobatic ease. They began sliding down, backside first until their heavy boots fell away from the skids and they righted themselves with legs locked together, aimed towards the ground and sliding down at a slight diagonal.

The entire maneuver took about a minute or less.

The pull to return

Andrew Saphier, 43, works with the Central Oregon Rappellers. He’s been on the crew for five years. He successfully re-certified at the week-long training.

He had been a wildland firefighter for five years when he learned about rappel crews.

“I thought that was the coolest job in fire(fighting) and it turns out it was right,” Saphier said.

Now, after half a decade as a rappeller, he said he doesn’t think about rappelling too much and credits the rigor of the rappel training. What was once extremely stressful is now akin to moving on autopilot, he said.

Once a firefighting crew rappels and successfully knocks down a fire, they have to get out of the backcountry, which often means hiking many miles with about 100 pounds of tools and gear on their backs.

Yet despite the physical and mental demands of the job, Saphier and hundreds of other rappellers nationwide return year after year. Most firefighter rappellers work about seven to eight years before bowing out, Florea said.

“Flying around a helicopter is cool and everything,” he said, “but the places we get to be and the people I get to share those experiences with is what keeps me coming back.”

Good morning, Northwest.

Oregon may be in for a busy fire season after a warm, dry winter.

OPB’s Kathryn Styer Martínez visited rappel training in Central Oregon, where the U.S. Forest Service trains some of its most highly skilled firefighters to drop into hard-to-reach areas. Her report starts today’s newsletter.

In other news, the Portland Trail Blazers evened their first-round playoff series last night with a win over the San Antonio Spurs, whose star player left the game with a concussion.

Here’s your First Look at Wednesday’s news.

— Bradley W. Parks

Firefighting rappel crews sharpen their skills in Central Oregon forests

Last week, 250 wildland firefighters from across the country traveled to Bend to attend the annual national rappel recertification for the U.S. Forest Service Helicopter Rappel Program.

It’s the main training for returning rappeller crewmembers this year and a requirement of the job. Rappel crews are specially trained wildland firefighters who drop into active fires in hard-to-reach areas of the backcountry. They respond to all types of incidents but are typically deployed to small fires often started by lightning strikes.

The highly skilled wildland firefighters are likely to be in great demand this year as a concerning fire season draws near. (Kathryn Styer Martínez)

Learn More

3 things to know

• NW Natural says it’s paying back nearly 200 households after inadvertently cutting off their gas service late last year due to an internal mistake. (Monica Samayoa)
• An overnight-only shelter in Portland’s Pearl District will close. The Northrup Shelter and others like it are a key element of Mayor Keith Wilson’s plan to end unsheltered homelessness. (Alex Zielinski)
• A little-known federal government agency that kills wild animals at the request of ranchers and farmers accidentally killed two federally protected wolves in Southern Oregon last summer. (Alejandro Figueroa)

Northwest headlines

• Christine Drazan holds sizable lead in GOP race for Oregon governor, new poll suggests (Dirk VanderHart)
• After almost 2-year lapse, Oregon counties get nearly $100 million from Secure Rural Schools (Alex Baumhardt)
• Bandon zoo owner pleads guilty to 47 animal neglect, drug and weapons charges (Justin Higginbottom)
• Trail Blazers rally for 106-103 win over Spurs to even series after Wembanyama exits with injury (Raul Dominguez)

Listen in on OPB’s daily conversation

“Think Out Loud” airs at noon and 8 p.m. weekdays on OPB Radio, opb.org and the OPB News app. Today’s planned topics (subject to change):

• OHSU researcher’s work offers glimpse into future of cancer detection, possible new treatments
• Health officials warn Oregon measles outbreak is growing

Why do we have allergies?

That itchy, sneezy, scratchy feeling in your eyes, nose and throat is a sign that allergy season is here.

Despite land animals living with pollen for hundreds of millions of years, it can still make us miserable.

What gives?

This OPB throwback from 2018 looks into a simple question with a complicated answer: Why do we have allergies? (MacGregor Campbell)

Learn More

Subscribe to OPB’s First Look to receive Northwest news in your inbox six days a week.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s annual wolf population report, published Friday, offered the first disclosure of the accidental gray wolf killings.

It’s only mentioned in a single sentence in the 12-page report.

The report reveals Wildlife Services – a program under the federal U.S. Department of Agriculture – was supposed to be removing coyotes when it instead killed the wolves. At least one of the wolves was a collared male that had traveled from Northern California to Oregon.

A lot of details are still unclear.

Wildlife conservation groups are skeptical that a federal agency whose focus is to kill wild animals could have made such a mistake.

“It’s utterly unacceptable that a federal employee or contractor would not have enough basic wildlife identification knowledge to know the difference between a wolf and a coyote,” said Bethany Cotton, the conservation director at Cascadia Wildlands, an Oregon-based conservation nonprofit. “They’re significantly different in size and physical appearance.”

Wolves, especially males, are significantly larger than coyotes, weighing around 70-100 pounds, whereas coyotes only weigh at roughly 25-50 pounds.

Tanya Espinosa, a public affairs specialist at the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, confirmed that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office of law enforcement is actively conducting an investigation. Espinosa declined to share more details about the investigation or whether it relates to the wolves killed in Southern Oregon.

A spokesperson with U.S. Fish and Wildlife declined to comment.

Michelle Dennehy, a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, told OPB that CA102, a collared 2-year-old male wolf that had dispersed from the Beyem Seyo pack in Northern California, was killed July 31, 2025.

Last summer, CA102 killed at least two calves and injured one, all in Klamath County, according to ODFW wolf-livestock investigation records.

Because gray wolves in the western two-thirds of Oregon are protected under the federal Endangered Species Act, it’s up to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to manage and investigate conflicts between wolves, livestock and wolf mortalities, Dennehy said.

“When there is a human-caused wolf mortality in areas of the state where wolves are federally protected, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Law Enforcement are the lead and handle the investigation including release of information,” Dennehy said in an email.

Killing an animal listed as an endangered species is both a federal and state crime.

Wildlife Services has long been a controversial and often secretive program under the umbrella of the USDA. The agency kills hundreds of thousands of wild animals a year across the nation.

In Oregon, Wildlife Services killed or removed 155,958 wild animals in 2023, according to the latest publicly available data. Coyotes are, by far, the animals Wildlife Services most frequently killed in the state, and across much of the Western U.S.

Conservation groups have long criticized the agency for killing wild animals without presenting enough evidence that the animal posed a risk or threat to livestock, crops or people.

Some investigations have found the agency has in the past accidentally killed federally protected wild animals, or killed native animals that hadn’t injured or posed any risk to livestock.

Cascadia Wildlands’ Cotton said it’s also a basic tenet of the North American wildlife management model that someone should know what they’re pointing at before they shoot.

“You need to be 100% sure before you use a weapon that is fatal, that you know what your target is,” Cotton said. “And in this instance, either this person was incredibly poorly trained or was OK with shooting a federally protected species.”

Wildlife Services has often used a range of methods to capture or kill the animals, including foothold traps, neck snares, cyanide poisoning and shooting them from helicopters.

Wildlife conservation groups have called some of those methods cruel and unnecessary.

“There have been, for many years, reports and controversy about how this program operates and how unaccountable it is to the public,” Cotton said. “Including internal government audits that have demonstrated that they can’t track how they’ve spent federal funds.”

Despite a record number of wolf deaths in 2025, Oregon’s gray wolf population has continued to grow, reaching 230 last year, a 13% increase from 2024, according to the ODFW annual wolf report. A total of 42 wolf deaths were recorded in 2025. ODFW killed 20 wolves in Eastern Oregon in response to livestock-wolf conflicts. Gray wolves on that side of the state are not federally protected.

In Western Oregon, gray wolves have yet to reach species recovery goals, and so remain protected. It’s unclear if the second killed wolf was a female CA102 was pairing with.

“If that’s the case, then we lost the potential for a new pack in Western Oregon because they would have likely then denned in the spring and would be having puppies right about now,” Cotton said. “It’s a huge loss.”

Cotton also questions why it has taken so long to carry out an investigation and why so little information has been revealed.

The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission – a volunteer advisory board appointed by the governor and oversees the ODFW – is scheduled to meet Thursday and Friday, and will discuss the wolf report.

Portland Mayor Keith Wilson plans to close one of his largest — and most contentious — overnight-only shelters in the face of a massive budget shortfall.

The city plans to terminate its lease in the Pearl District building where the 200-bed Northrup Shelter operates, according to city spokesperson Cody Bowman. He did not say when exactly the shelter will close.

Bowman said the closure is just “one cost saving option the city is currently pursuing in response to budget constraints in the coming fiscal year.”

This is just the latest news of a shelter closing due to government budget challenges.

Northrup is the second of Wilson’s new overnight shelters that will close this year. Last month, the city announced it will close 100 shelter beds this summer due to low usage and funding constraints. That includes an overnight shelter in the Centennial neighborhood.

City leaders must fill a $172 million budget gap before the new fiscal year begins in July. Wilson released a budget proposal Monday that included a 30% reduction in the city’s shelter budget, but did not indicate if those cuts would close shelters. Northrup Shelter appears to be the first on the chopping block. But it may not be the last.

Portland mayor proposes cutting jobs and city programs to balance budget

Bowman, with Wilson’s office, said more decisions about shelter program cuts will come as the budget process continues.

The Northrup Shelter, located at Northwest Northrup Street and Northwest 15th Avenue, is operated by the Salvation Army and offers beds for up to 200 people each night. Since opening last September, it’s been a source of frustration for some neighbors, many of whom packed an auditorium last summer to oppose the shelter’s opening. Those critics have continued to argue that the building made their community less safe and clean — and that it doesn’t offer needed services to people staying there.

Last month, the owner of an apartment building near the shelter sued the city and Salvation Army, alleging the shelter has diminished the building’s market value.

The Northrup Shelter is a key piece of Wilson’s strategy to end homelessness — a plan that relied on quickly opening new overnight-only shelters across Portland to accommodate up to 1,500 people. Several people experiencing homelessness have told OPB they preferred staying at Northrup compared to other area shelters and consider it to be cleaner. The shelter is rarely at capacity. The most recent city data shows that Northrup filled 62% of its beds in February.

Wilson said the closure wasn’t based on any issues with the shelter.

“The Northrup facility is our highest cost facility,” Wilson said at a Tuesday press conference. “And in the kind of cut exercise we’re in, we have to focus on the highest cost parts of our system.”

It’s not clear what this closure will mean for those who rely on the nightly space and Salvation Army staff who work at the shelter. Leaders at the organization are worried.

“While we respect the city’s need to make difficult decisions due to budget constraints, we remain deeply concerned for the well-being of our unhoused neighbors,” said Jonathan Harvey, commander of the cascade division of the Salvation Army.

Neighborhood association leaders are heartened by the news.

“This is the first time where the city has seen something not working the way it was thought it would work — instead of doubling down they said we should redirect — that is so welcome,” said Todd Zarnitz, president of the Northwest District Association, a neighborhood district that lies west of the Pearl District.

Zarnitz led much of the early neighborhood opposition to the shelter last year and remains critical of its handling. He received a call from Wilson’s office Monday night with news that the shelter was closing “very soon.”

Councilor Eric Zimmerman, who represents District 4, said “it’s time” for the shelter’s closure.

“Northrup Shelter is an example of what happens when a shelter plops down in the idle of a residential neighborhood without enough cleanup services and neighborhood enhancement,” he said.

Fellow District 4 Councilor Mitch Green said the news feels “inevitable” due to the city’s budget constraints. He believes money previously spent on overnight shelters would better be spent on “upstream solutions,” like storage for people living outside and day shelters.

Portland’s isn’t the only local government planning to close shelters to balance its budget. Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson has proposed closing 600 beds in county-run shelters in her budget plan for the next fiscal year.

Some low-income Oregonians were without gas to heat their homes for more than two months, for nonpayment of as little as $54, according to a watchdog’s review of the company’s data.

NW Natural, which serves nearly 2 million people across the Pacific Northwest, said the 198 customers were disconnected due to “an unfortunate error in implementation … despite being eligible for the temporary moratorium that we voluntarily set in response to the federal government shutdown.”

NW Natural found the mistake at the end of January when it submitted data on disconnections due to nonpayment.

“This mistake was ours, and it was a mistake,” NW Natural senior director of communications David Roy said in a statement. “We made every customer whole as soon as we were aware of the issue.”

A federal shutdown

Many customers were disconnected in the midst of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, which lasted 43 days. That shutdown left federal workers unpaid, and many people who rely on federal assistance programs to afford food or pay energy bills faced lapses in support.

Payments were delayed for people enrolled in the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, which helped more than 114,000 lower-income Oregon households pay energy bills the previous year.

In 2024, Oregon received $41.7 million in LIHEAP funding for those Oregonians. These funds are most in demand during the coldest months of the year, November through March, as people use LIHEAP to afford more energy to heat their homes.

In early November 2025, with no end to the federal shutdown in sight, more than a dozen Oregon lawmakers sent a letter to the Oregon Public Utility Commission, the state entity that regulates utilities, to request utilities halt disconnections for households impacted by the federal government shutdown. NW Natural was one of the six companies that said they would halt shutoffs through the end of the year for income-qualified customers.

But quarterly disconnection data reports showed the company did shut power off to nearly 200 of those customers for nonpayment.

“I honestly at the time thought it must just be a reporting error,” Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board equity analyst Sarah Wochele said.

One household was disconnected for 79 days over a $112.89 unpaid bill. Another was without natural gas service for 78 days over a $54 unpaid bill, she said.

“We often say in this space that being unable to afford your energy bills is really the canary in the coal mine for eviction, for losing your housing,” she said.

After Oregon CUB reached out to the utility through a state regulatory process, Wochele said, NW Natural acknowledged the mistake.

According to Roy, the company acted fast as soon as it was made aware of the issue.

He said the company restored gas service to a “vast majority” of customers one or two days after they were disconnected, and it refunded reconnection fees by February after hearing from Oregon CUB. Some customers had already paid their balances and been reconnected by then. Roy said the company also provided an additional $150 bill credit to all affected customers and extended payment plans to help them pay off balances.

“We absolutely share CUB’s concerns about our customers, including/especially our low-income customers. That’s why we offer multiple programs and payment options and lead the region for active enrollment in our low-income bill assistance program at 71% of all those eligible,” Roy said in an emailed statement.

Watchdog pushes for penalties

Oregon CUB is calling for the utility to offer more financial support to the customers whose service it cut.

The utility watchdog is also asking regulators to issue a $10,000 penalty or fine for each impacted household for the NW Natural’s “errors and mismanagement.” That would total nearly $2 million.

“At the end of the day, this is serious mismanagement by NW Natural and that needs to be accounted for,” Wochele said.

But NW Natural’s Roy said the company did what it could to make things right for affected customers when it found out about the error.

“For CUB to insinuate otherwise completely ignores our proven track record, as well as the fact that we identified the error, corrected it and then reimbursed the small number of customers impacted – all voluntarily and as quickly as possible,” Roy said.

Higher disconnection rates across utilities

Last year, more Oregonians saw their gas or electricity cut off than any other year since the state started tracking disconnections.

In 2025, 71,190 customers were disconnected by Oregon’s largest utilities, according to Oregon CUB.

• NW Natural: 12,363
• Pacific Power: 23,224
• PGE: 33,764
• Idaho Power: 558
• Cascade Natural Gas: 418
• Avista Gas: 863.

That’s about 1,500 more households than 2024.

• NW Natural: 9,162
• Pacific Power: 22,491
• PGE: 35,324
• Idaho Power: 563
• Cascade Natural Gas: 794
• Avista Gas: 1,346.

Pakistan had planned to host a second round of talks, but the White House put on hold Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad as Iran rebuffed efforts to restart negotiations.

Iran has not yet responded to Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension. Both countries have warned that, without a deal, they were prepared to resume fighting.

Pakistan scrambles to get US and Iran to negotiate

Pakistani leaders, including Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, worked intensively to get both sides to agree to a second round of ceasefire talks, according to two officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Sharif later thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request, saying the ceasefire extension would allow ongoing diplomatic efforts to proceed.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei told Iran’s state TV there has been “no final decision” on whether to agree to more talks because of “unacceptable actions” by the U.S., apparently referring to the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports.

In a Truth Social post announcing the ceasefire extension, Trump said the U.S. would continue the blockade.

As Vance put on hold a return trip to Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner were expected in Washington on Tuesday afternoon for consultations about how to proceed, said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations.

The official cautioned that Trump could change his mind on negotiating with Iran at any time, and declined to predict what would happen. The official said Trump has options short of restarting airstrikes.

Both sides remain dug in rhetorically

Before announcing the ceasefire extension, Trump had warned that “lots of bombs” will “start going off” if there’s no agreement before the Wednesday deadline, while Iran’s chief negotiator said that Tehran has “new cards on the battlefield” that haven’t yet been revealed.

A senior commander in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps threatened to destroy the region’s oil industry if war with the U.S. resumes. “If southern neighbors allow the enemy to use their facilities to attack Iran, they should say goodbye to oil production in the Middle East region,” Gen. Majid Mousavi told an Iranian news site.

Strait of Hormuz control key to negotiations

Iran’s envoy to the United Nations said Tuesday that Tehran has “received some sign” that the U.S. is ready to stop its blockade of Iranian ports.

Ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani said ending the blockade remains a condition for Iran to rejoin peace talks. When that happens, he said, “I think the next round of the negotiations will take place.”

The U.S. imposed the blockade to pressure Tehran into ending its stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, a key shipping lane through which 20% of the world’s natural gas and crude oil transits in peacetime.

Iran’s grip on the strait has sent oil prices soaring. Brent crude, the international standard, was trading at close to $95 per barrel on Tuesday, up more than 30% from Feb. 28, the day that Israel and the U.S. attacked Iran to start the war.

Before the war began, the Strait of Hormuz had been fully open to international shipping. Trump has demanded that vessels again be allowed to transit unimpeded.

Over the weekend, Iran said that it had received new proposals from Washington, but also suggested that a wide gap remains between the sides. Issues that derailed the previous round of negotiations included Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, its regional proxies and the strait.

The US says its forces board sanctioned oil tanker

On Tuesday, the U.S. said its forces boarded an oil tanker previously sanctioned for smuggling Iranian crude oil in Asia. The Pentagon said in a social media post that U.S. forces boarded the M/T Tifani “without incident.”

The U.S. military did not say where the vessel had been boarded, though ship-tracking data showed the Tifani in the Indian Ocean between Sri Lanka and Indonesia on Tuesday. The Pentagon statement added that “international waters are not a refuge for sanctioned vessels.”

The U.S. military on Sunday seized an Iranian container ship, the first interception under the blockade. Iran’s joint military command called the armed boarding an act of piracy and a violation of the ceasefire.

Pakistan hopeful talks will proceed

Pakistani officials have expressed confidence that Iran will also send a delegation to resume the talks — the highest-level negotiations between the U.S. and Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The first round April 11 and 12 ended without an agreement.

Pakistan said Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar met Tuesday separately with the U.S. and China’s top diplomats in Islamabad. China is a key trading partner of Iran.

Security has been tightened across Islamabad, where authorities have deployed thousands of personnel and increased patrols along routes leading to the airport.

Talks between Israel and Lebanon are to resume

In Lebanon, the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah said in a statement it had fired rockets and drones at Israeli forces for the first time since 10-day truce took effect last Friday “in response to the blatant and documented violations” by Israel.

Those violations, it said, included “attacks on civilians and the destruction of their homes and villages in southern Lebanon.”

The Israeli army said it responded by striking the group’s rocket launcher. Israeli officials have said they intend to maintain a buffer zone in southern Lebanon — an area that includes dozens of villages whose residents have not been allowed to return.

Historic diplomatic talks between Israel and Lebanon are to resume on Thursday in Washington, an Israeli, a Lebanese and a U.S. official said. All three spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the behind-the-scenes negotiations.

The Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors met last week for the first direct diplomatic talks in decades. Israel says the talks are aimed at disarming Hezbollah and reaching a peace agreement with Lebanon.

Fighting between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah broke out two days after the U.S. and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran to start the war. In Lebanon, the fighting has killed more than 2,290 people.

Since the war started, at least 3,375 people have been killed in Iran, according to authorities. Additionally, 23 people have died in Israel and more than a dozen in Gulf Arab states. Fifteen Israeli soldiers in Lebanon and 13 U.S. service members throughout the region have been killed.

___

Gambrell reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Lee from Washington. Associated Press writers Michelle L. Price, Aamer Madhani and Darlene Superville in Washington; Samy Magdy in Cairo; David Rising and Huizhong Wu in Bangkok; Julia Frankel in New York; Bill Barrow in Atlanta, Edith M. Lederer and Farnoush Amiri at the United Nations; Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia, and Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City contributed to this report.

A proposed constitutional amendment backed by Democratic officials would bypass the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission to allow use of new congressional districts approved by state lawmakers in this year’s midterm elections.

The referendum, which needs a simple majority to pass, tests Democrats’ ability to push back against President Donald Trump, who started the gerrymandering competition between states after successfully urging Texas Republicans to redraw congressional districts in their favor last year. Virginia is the second state, after California last fall, to put the question to voters.

It also tests voters’ willingness to accept districts gerrymandered for political advantage — coming just six years after Virginia voters approved an amendment meant to diminish such partisan gamesmanship by shifting redistricting away from the legislature.

Though polling places have closed, ballots mailed by Tuesday can still be counted if they arrive in the next few days. But even if the referendum is successful, the public vote may not be the final word. The state Supreme Court is considering whether the redistricting plan is illegal in a case that could make the referendum results meaningless.

Virginia Democrats are following California’s lead

Congressional redistricting typically is done once a decade after each U.S. census. But Trump urged Texas Republicans to redistrict ahead of the November elections in hopes of winning several additional seats and maintaining the GOP’s narrow House majority in the face of political headwinds that typically favor the party that is out of power during midterms.

The Texas gambit led to a burst of redistricting nationwide. So far, Republicans believe they can win up to nine more House seats in newly redrawn districts in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio.

Democrats think they can win up to five more seats in California, where voters approved a mid-decade redistricting effort last November, and one more seat under new court-imposed districts in Utah. Democrats hope to offset the rest of that gap in Virginia, where they decisively flipped 13 seats in the state House and won back the governor’s office last year.

Voters focus on fairness, with different perspectives

The stream of voters was steady Tuesday at a recreation center in the Old Town area of Alexandria, Virginia.

Matt Wallace, 31, said he votes regularly but this election has additional emphasis.

“I think the redistricting issue across the country is unfortunate, that we’ve had to resort to temporary redistricting in order to sort of alter our elections across the country,” he said. Wallace said he voted for the Democratic redistricting amendment ”to help balance the scales a bit until things get back to normal.”

Katie Reusch, 35, said she thought the amendment was necessary to respond to the Republicans’ redrawing of congressional districts in Texas last year: “You can’t just say we’re in power so we’re changing things so we stay in power,” she said.

But Joanna Miller, 29, said she voted against the redistricting measure, “because I want my vote to count in a fair way.” Miller said she was more concerned about representation in Virginia than trying to offset actions in other states.

“I want my vote and my representation to matter this fall,” she said.

That concern is particularly acute among conservative voters in the state’s rural areas, many of which would be drawn into congressional districts that will be dominated by Democratic-leaning cities and suburbs.

Ruth Ann McCartney, voting in the town of South Hill, a few miles north of the North Carolina border, said she cast her ballot against the amendment.

“I look at it more, not really in terms of Republican versus Democrat,” she said. “I look at it more as we don’t have the population as northern Virginia. And as a rural area, we just need to be heard.”

Political parties made a big push in Virginia

Leaders of both major parties see Tuesday’s vote as crucial to their chances to win a House majority in the fall. Trump weighed in via social media Tuesday morning, telling Virginians to “vote ‘no’ to save your country!”

Former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, rallied with opponents of the measure Monday night, calling the redistricting plan “dishonest” and “brazenly deceptive.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters at the Capitol earlier in the day that a vote to approve the redraw “will serve as a check and balance on this out-of-control Trump administration.”

A committee supporting the Democratic redistricting effort had raised more than $64 million — three times as much as the roughly $20 million raised by opponents, according to finance reports filed less than two weeks before the election.

The back-and-forth battle over congressional districts is expected to continue in Florida, where the Republican-led legislature is scheduled to convene April 28 for a special session that could result in a more favorable map for Republicans.

A lobster-like district could aid Democratic efforts

In Virginia, Democrats currently hold six of the 11 U.S. House seats under districts that were imposed by the state Supreme Court in 2021 after a bipartisan commission failed to agree on a map based on the latest census data.

The new plan could help Democrats win as many as 10 seats. Five are anchored in Democratic-heavy northern Virginia, including one shaped like a lobster that stretches into Republican-leaning rural areas.

Revisions to four other districts across Richmond, southern Virginia and Hampton Roads dilute the voting power of conservative blocs in those areas. And a reshaped district in parts of western Virginia lumps together three Democratic-leaning college towns to offset other Republican voters.

The Virginia redistricting plan is “pushing back against what other states have done in trying to stack the deck for Donald Trump in those congressional elections,” Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger said during an online rally last week.

Ads for the “yes to redistricting” campaign featuring former President Barack Obama have flooded the airwaves.

Opponents have distributed campaign materials citing past statements from Obama and Spanberger criticizing gerrymandering, but those were before Trump pushed Republican states to redraw their congressional maps in advance of this year’s midterms.

Democrats “were all against gerrymandering before they were for it,” Virginia Republican Party Chairman Jeff Ryer said.

Virginia court weighs whether lawmakers acted illegally

Virginia lawmakers endorsed a constitutional amendment allowing their mid-decade redistricting last fall, then passed it again in January as part of a two-step process that requires an intervening election for an amendment to be placed on the ballot. The measure allows lawmakers to redistrict until returning the task to a bipartisan commission after the 2030 census.

In February, they passed a new U.S. House map to take effect pending the outcome of the redistricting referendum. Republicans have filed multiple legal challenges against the effort.

A Tazewell County judge ruled that the redistricting push was illegal for several reasons. Circuit Court Judge Jack Hurley Jr. said lawmakers failed to follow their own rules for adding the redistricting amendment to a special session.

He ruled that their initial vote failed to occur before the public began casting ballots in last year’s general election and thus didn’t count toward the two-step process. He also ruled that the state failed to publish the amendment three months before that election, as required by law.

If the state Supreme Court agrees with the lower court, the results from Tuesday’s vote could be rendered moot.

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Associated Press writers Allen G. Breed in South Hill, Virginia, Gary Fields in Alexandria, Virginia, and Lisa Mascaro in Washington contributed to this report.

The owner of a roadside zoo in Coos County has pleaded guilty to dozens of charges after police raided his business last year.

Brian Tenney, owner of West Coast Game Park Safari in Bandon, has pleaded guilty to 47 charges, including 43 counts of animal neglect, following a multi-agency raid on the roadside zoo last year.

Prosecutors have agreed to drop more than 300 additional charges against Tenney. They are recommending a sentence of 90 months in prison, a ban on owning or living with pets and reimbursement to cover the cost of caring for animals seized from the property.

“We’re urging the court to impose the full sentence,” said Cydnee Bence, an attorney for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

She said she hopes the judgment will send a message to those who exploit animals. “There are real consequences for the pain they caused,” she said.

Tenney’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture cited the zoo dozens of times for violations of the Animal Welfare Act. Inspectors reported malnourished animals, filthy enclosures and missing death records.

During the search last spring, police also found drugs, dozens of weapons and over a million dollars in cash. Tenney has also pleaded guilty to delivery of methamphetamine, racketeering and unlawful possession of a machine gun.

“The best part of this is the fact that all of the animals were confiscated and the success stories that we get to see from the sanctuaries where many of the animals now reside,” Bence said.

An isolated chimpanzee named George, who lived at the zoo for more than a decade, is now socializing with other primates at Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest in Washington. He celebrated his 22nd birthday earlier this month with plates of fresh fruit.

The jaguar Louie now lives at The Wildcat Sanctuary in Minnesota and is sponsored by the Willamette Valley Jaguars, a professional basketball team that plays in The Basketball League.

Tenney’s sentencing is scheduled for July.

Justin Higginbottom is a reporter with Jefferson Public Radio. This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.

It is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit our journalism partnerships page.

The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted Tuesday on federal fraud charges alleging it improperly raised millions of dollars to pay informants to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said.

The Justice Department alleges the civil rights group defrauded donors by using their money to fund the very extremism it claimed to be fighting, with payments of at least $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to people affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, the National Socialist Party of America and other extremist groups.

“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” Blanche said.

The civil rights group faces charges including wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering in the case brought by the Justice Department in Alabama, where the organization is based.

The indictment came shortly after SPLC revealed the existence of a criminal investigation into its program to pay informants to infiltrate extremist groups and gather information on their activities. The group said the program was used to monitor threats of violence and the information was often shared with local and federal law enforcement.

SPLC CEO Bryan Fair said the organization “will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work.”

Blanche said the money was passed from the center through two different bank accounts before being loaded onto prepaid cards to give to the members of the extremist groups, which also included the National Socialist Movement and the Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club. The group never disclosed to donors details of the informant program, he said.

“They’re required to under the laws associated with a nonprofit to have certain transparency and honesty in what they’re telling donors they’re going to spend money on and what their mission statement is and what they’re raising money doing,” he said.

The indictment includes details on at least nine unnamed informants were paid by the SPLC through a secret program that prosecutors say began in the 1980s. Within the SPLC, they were known as field sources or “the Fs,” according to the indictment. One informant was paid more than $1 million between 2014 and 2023 while affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance, the indictment said. Another was the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America.

The SPLC said the program was kept quiet to protect the safety of informants.

“When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,” Fair said. “There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”

The center has been targeted by Republicans

The SPLC, which is based in Montgomery, Alabama, was founded in 1971 and used civil litigation to fight white supremacist groups. The nonprofit has become a popular target among Republicans who see it as overly leftist and partisan.

The investigation could add to concerns that Trump’s Republican administration is using the Justice Department to go after conservative opponents and his critics. It follows a number of other investigations into Trump foes that have raised questions about whether the law enforcement agency has been turned into a political weapon.

The SPLC has faced intense criticism from conservatives, who have accused it of unfairly maligning right-wing organizations as extremist groups because of their viewpoints. The center regularly condemns Trump’s rhetoric and policies around voting rights, immigration and other issues.

The center came under fresh scrutiny after the assassination last year of conservative activist Charlie Kirk brought renewed attention to its characterization of the group that Kirk founded and led. The center included a section on that group, Turning Point USA, in a report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024” that described the group as “A Case Study of the Hard Right in 2024.”

FBI Director Kash Patel said last year that the agency was severing its relationship with the center, which had long provided law enforcement with research on hate crime and domestic extremism. Patel said the center had been turned into a “partisan smear machine,” and he accused it of defaming “mainstream Americans” with its “hate map” that documents alleged anti-government and hate groups inside the United States.

House Republicans hosted a hearing centered on the SPLC in December, saying it coordinated efforts with President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration “to target Christian and conservative Americans and deprive them of their constitutional rights to free speech and free association.”

A majority of the three-judge panel from the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals said the Florida-run facility wasn’t under federal control and didn’t need to comply with federal law requiring an environmental impact review.

“Florida, not federal, officials constructed the facility,” a majority of the judges wrote. “They control the land and ‘entirely’ built the facility at state expense.”

At the time of U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams’ preliminary injunction, Florida had received no federal reimbursement, the appellate majority wrote. Williams concluded that a reimbursement decision already had been made.

The appeals court paused Williams’ order just days after she issued it last August, pending a hearing. The hearing was held earlier this month in Miami.

Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity, two of the environmental groups that had brought the lawsuit, said they would continue fighting as the case returns to the district court for further litigation.

“This fight is far from over,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades. “Alligator Alcatraz was hastily erected in one of the most fragile ecosystems in the country without the most basic environmental review, at immense human and ecological cost.”

State officials opened the Everglades detention center last summer to support President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. Earlier this month, a lawyer for two people detained there said in court papers that guards severely beat and pepper-sprayed detainees.

In a dissent to the appellate panel’s ruling, Judge Nancy Abudu wrote that immigration is a federal responsibility, and just because Florida built an immigration detention facility, it doesn’t allow the federal government to abdicate its authority.

“The facility would not, and could not, have been built and used as an immigration detention center without the federal defendants’ request,” Abudu said. “The evidence of federal control perhaps is most apparent when we acknowledge that immigration remains uniquely and exclusively within the federal government’s domain.”

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Follow Mike Schneider on the social platform Bluesky: @mikeysid.bsky.social.