Evening News

President Obama announced last night that he plans to make immigration reform a top priority during his first year in office. KBOO’s Jenka Soderberg spoke with local immigrant rights activist Francisco Lopez about what this pledge could mean for Oregon’s immigrant community: Read more

Oregonians may soon see their Electricity Bills rising, and it won’t just be because the cost of producing electricity is going up.  Oregon’s two biggest electricity producers are safeguarding their profits by trying to raise electric bills.  Pacific Power’s parent company... Read more

Close to 400 people descended on the state capitol in Salem on Wednesday to lobby their legislators and demonstrate on the capitol steps for healthcare reform. They want lawmakers to pass a series of bills that would pave the way for universal coverage in Oregon within f... Read more

The Obama Department of Justice has put forth a claim of “Sovereign Immunity” in a motion to dismiss in the domestic spying case of Jewell v. NSA. The lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing the National Security Agency for spying on tens of thousands of... Read more

Defense secretary Robert Gates is calling for a rapid increase in spending on attack drone planes for use in Iraq, Afghanistan and Eastern Pakistan. This plan has raised the ire of many in the peace community due to the drone’s inconsistent results and bad record of civili... Read more

A number of local anti-war veteran groups have called on the Portland City Council to declare the city a ‘sanctuary’ for war resisters. The group is currently collecting signatures for a petition to submit to the City Council, which has not yet taken any action on the ‘San... Read more

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The U.S. House of Representatives passes the “Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act” on Thursday, bringing Congress a step closer to federal Food and Drug Administration regulation of tobacco products.  This week, a federal tobacco tax hike of 62-cents per pack... Read more

There was ahearing in Salem on Friday on a new bill that would regulate how children in foster care can be prescribed drugs like ritalin [RIT-a-lin] and prozac. Representatives Tina Kotek [KO-tek] of Portland and Carolyn Tomei [toe-MAY] of Salem are co-sponsoring the bil... Read more

half the world’s seven thousand languages are under severe threat of extinction, and along with them the cultures they represent. Every two weeks, the last fluent speaker of a native language dies, when this happens, their language dies with them and is lost forever.   Wit... Read more