0913 OR Columbia fishing closed
Beginning today, all recreational and non-tribal commercial fishing in the Columbia River will be suspended.
Oregon and Washington fish managers ordered the closure based on low salmon and steelhead counts at Bonneville Dam.
The ban--which includes coho, fall chinook and steelhead--extends from Buoy 10 at the river's mouth upriver to the U.S. 395 bridge near Pasco.
Runs of all three species are lagging pre-season forecasts, with fall chinook facing the lowest counts since 2007.
Nevertheless, managers left open the possibility of renewed sport fishing if numbers improve.
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0913 US ICE expands detention
The number of children detained by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has expanded from two thousand, four hundred in May 2017 to twelve thousand, eight hundred this month, according to a report in the New York Times.
The increase is not caused by more children entering the country, but by the new Trump Administration policy of refusing to release children to live with families and other sponsors.
The huge increase is causing a strain in the widespread system of detention.
In the infamous desert tent children’s prison near Tornillo, Texas, the number of beds is to increase from four hundred to three thousand, eight hundred, according to Texas Monthly journalist Bob Moore.
The new policy includes a demand that each member of any family that accepts a refugee child must submit to fingerprinting, so that they can all be checked against lists for deportation.
As a result, shelter loading capacity has gone from an average of thirty percent in years past to over ninety percent now. Meanwhile, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Ronald Vitiello has attended a conference held by the anti-immigrant hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform.
Vitiello attended the gathering on the fifth of September, and was interviewed there by conservative radio host Tom Roten.
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0913 US Census Bureau: 45 Million Below Poverty Level
The Census Bureau today released its annual report on income levels, poverty, and health insurance coverage in the U-S.
According to the report, about fourteen percent of the U-S population lives at or below the poverty level.
That’s essentially unchanged from the 2016 level.
Critics complain that this measure is misleading because it’s unrealistic.
The poverty threshold for a single person under the age of sixty-five living anywhere in the US is Twelve Thousand, Seven Hundred Fifty Two dollars per year.
Yet that’s less than half what it would take for someone living on their own to support themselves in many major cities.
According to the Living Wage Calculator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a living wage for a single person living alone in Portland would is at least Twenty-Eight Thousand, Five Hundred Seventy-Nine dollars per year.
The Census Bureau also reported that Twenty-Eight Point Five million people were uninsured in the United States in 2017, a slight increase from 2016.
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