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Posted: 10/09/2014 9:18 pm EDT Updated: 10/09/2014 11:59 pm EDT CYLVIA HAYES Share 111 Tweet 29 Email 7 Comment 0 The fiancée of Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber (D) admitted on Thursday that she accepted $5,000 nearly two decades ago in exchange for marrying an Ethiopian man to help him obtain residency in the U.S. Cylvia Hayes, who got engaged to Kitzhaber over the summer, used the money to pay for a laptop and school expenses,

A group of horseback riders drew stares, honks and a few handshakes and high-fives along Redwood Road Thursday, hooves clattering on pavement in a protest ride of federal land management policies. The Utah trek of the Grass March Cowboy Express hit Salt Lake City and continued east up Parleys Canyon, with Tooele County Commission Chairman Bruce Clegg and Utah Rep. Ken Ivory, R-West Jordan, riding in tandem. With them they carried a mail pouch sporting a letter demanding the resignation of a BLM field office manager who ordered grazing reductions in Battle Mountain, Nevada, and petitions from rural Utah counties...

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PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN 6) — Oregon First Lady Cylvia Hayes admitted she had a third marriage to an Ethiopian man to help him get his citizenship, and said Gov. John Kitzhaber had no idea about this event in her life until Wednesday afternoon. At a press conference Thursday, Hayes, 46, apologized to “John, the person I love above all others.” She said she needs to take some “personal time to reflect and look at my relationship with John.” Kitzhaber, 67, and Hayes announced their engagement earlier this summer. A Willamette Week story questions whether the marriage to the Ethiopian man...

Oregon First Lady Cylvia Hayes regularly speaks about her hardscrabble background—a childhood in poverty, her struggle to get through school, and her two marriages before meeting Gov. John Kitzhaber, to whom she is now engaged. On Wednesday, WW published a story about the private consulting work Hayes, 47, has performed while first lady. In the story, we reported Hayes had actually been married and divorced three times. That’s a small detail that might seem otherwise unremarkable. In 1997, King County, Wash., marriage records show, Hayes married a teenage Ethiopian immigrant 11 years younger than her. Obtaining residency or citizenship for...

As a U.S. senator, Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., makes $174,000 a year. So imagine his surprise a few months ago, when he learned the Cover Oregon health insurance exchange had enrolled him in the Oregon Health Plan, which covers only the poorest of the poor. Chalk up another embarrassing glitch for Cover Oregon, which remains a troubled work-in-progress after months of triage and more than $300 million in taxpayer money. A few months ago, Merkley opened the mail at his east Portland home to find he’d been enrolled in the Medicaid-funded Oregon Health Plan. The Oregon Democrat already had signed up...

A terminally ill 29-year-old woman has chosen November 1 as the day she will die. Shortly after her wedding in 2013, Brittany Maynard of Portland, Ore., began experiencing debilitating headaches. While on vacation with her husband in January, Brittany was diagnosed with grade II Astrocytoma, a severe brain tumor. Doctors told her she had 10 years left to live. “I have to tell you,” she says in the video, “when you’re 29 years old, being told you have that kind of timeline still feels like being told you’re going to die tomorrow.” Following the original diagnosis, doctors said her cancer...

PORTLAND — Matt Price sells 100 different kinds of edibles, tinctures, buds and other marijuana offerings to the patients who frequent Cannabliss, the medical dispensary he opened up in a historic brick building that once served as a fire station. Unlike in Washington, Price’s medical-marijuana business is licensed by the state, and all the pot he sells is subject to mandatory testing and labeling. The 28-year-old entrepreneur says he’s now ready for his next step — an expansion into recreational marijuana if Oregon voters pass a measure this fall that would legalize pot sales to anyone 21 years of age...

Everytown for Gun Safety -- the gun control group funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg -- is running ads in favor of Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber and attempting to unseat state Sen. Bruce Starr, R-Hillsboro. The group on Tuesday reported spending just over $56,000 on ads lauding Kitzhaber on gun issues, including a TV ad featuring the brother-in-law of Steve Forsyth, one of the two people killed in the 2012 shootings at Clackamas Town Center. The group has also reported spending $22,000 in support of Democrat Chuck Riley in his race against Starr, who opposed a bill that would have expanded...

Marijuana legalization advocates in Oregon have launched a $2 million-plus ad campaign starring a 33-year police veteran. The new ad, embedded below, features Pete Tutmark, a former patrol sergeant and sheriff’s deputy. Tutmark criticizes what he calls a “broken” system that diverts resources from important crime-solving to drug arrests and urges his fellow Oregonians to vote yes on measure 91 this fall, which would legalize and regulate recreational marijuana use. “Last year in Oregon, there were 13,000 citations and arrests for marijuana,” he says in the ad. “That takes time, time better spent solving murders, rape cases, finding missing children....

One thousand, four hundred and six days after he screamed "God is great" while police officers dragged him into a waiting van, a young Somali American was sentenced to 30 years in prison for plotting to detonate a bomb.

GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) — Water use and other actions by the marijuana industry in the Emerald Triangle of Northern California and Southern Oregon are threatening salmon already in danger of extinction, federal biologists said Tuesday. Concerns about the impact of pot farming were raised by the NOAA Fisheries Service in its final recovery plan for coho salmon in the region. The full plan was to be posted on the agency's website. A copy obtained in advance calls for determining then decreasing the amount of water that pot growers illegally withdraw from creeks where young fish struggle to survive. Pot...

Courtroom sketches at link. A federal judge on Wednesday sentenced Mohamed Osman Mohamud to 30 years in prison for his attempt to set off a bomb at the November 2010 holiday-tree lighting ceremony in downtown Portland. Just before the sentence was announced by Senior U.S. District Judge Garr M. King at 11:25 a.m., Mohamud stood and apologized to the court. "The things I said and did were terrible," he said. "I want to apologize to everyone, to the community." He also apologized to the Muslim community, saying he wants people to know that Islam does not preach hate. Mohamud, now...

A bakery owner in Oregon broke down in tears while discussing the fallout of her and her husband’s decision not to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple on the basis of their Christian beliefs. Earlier this year, the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries found “substantial evidence” that Aaron and Melissa Klein, owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa, discriminated against the lesbian couple. Oregon bakery owners face a $150,000 discrimination fine for not baking a wedding cake for lesbians. They now face a fine in excess of $150,000. (snip) The ordeal started in February 2013, when Rachel Cryer...

4 Memphis police officers were recently suspended after they tipped over a portable toilet that had someone inside of it. 31-year-old Joseph Hampton was allegedly being chased by police when he ducked into a construction site and hid in one of the toilets.

(CNSNews.com) - House Speaker John Boehner (R.-Ohio) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) joined forces early Wednesday evening as the House passed a continuing resolution that will fund the government after the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, and that will permit funding for Planned Parenthood (the nation's largest abortion provider), the entirety of Obamacare, and an amendment requested by President Barack Obama "to train and equip appropriately vetted elements of the Syrian opposition." The bill passed 319 to 108 with four members not voting. But there were not enough Republican members to pass the bill without...

Rod Coronado, a convicted eco-terrorist, is the leader of the controversial “Yellowstone Wolf Patrol,” a new environmental group that plans to shadow legal Montana wolf hunters during the state’s fall and winter wolf season and document the hunts with a video camera. Coronado, a resident of Michigan, is a radical environmentalist who “sank whaling ships nearly 30 years ago in Iceland and later went to prison after torching a Michigan State University lab in 1992 for conducting research for the fur industry” according to The Buffalo News of Buffalo, NY. He also serves as a spokesman for the radical, militant...

Background: Per one of the links in the story at source, 3 generations of a family drowned at Hagg Lake, which is about 5 miles west of Hillsboro, on August 25th. The OP source is a follow up article, excerpted below: Michael Medill posted eight homemade signs Saturday at Henry Hagg Lake to get the attention of swimmers and law enforcement. "I actually went up there hoping I would get arrested," Medill, 66, said Sunday. After Dillon Pilorget, reporter for the Forest Grove Leader and The Oregonian, and other reporters left the lake Saturday, Medill said police told him he...

A Republican Senate candidate in Oregon is bucking the GOP by embracing gay marriage in a new campaign ad. The ad, from the campaign of Dr. Monica Wehby who is challenging incumbent Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley, prominently features a gay couple — Ben West, of Portland, who filed a lawsuit in 2013 with partner Paul Rummell to overturn Oregon’s same sex-marriage ban that went into effect in 2004. The majority of the Republican Party has opposed gay marriage, making Wehby a maverick in her party.

An illegal immigrant who killed two children in a hit-and-run accident is not only avoiding deportation from the United States, she won’t receive any prison time at all. Cinthya Garcia-Cisneros, an illegal immigrant, recently had her immigration case dismissed, despite the fact that she was convicted of two felonies for a hit-and-run that resulted in the tragic deaths of two young girls. On top of the fact that her case was dismissed—although the reason for dismissal and the judge’s name have not been released—Garcia-Cisneros received no prison time for her conviction, an example of how the immigration laws in the...