Local News

You've just arrived at work, interested in coffee more than conversation, and a coworker enters, setting her purse down – BOOM! A gun explodes, bullet flies, nearly hitting you - Where are you? The sheriff's office, where everyone is armed? A rural factory where busting-off a few rounds after work isn't uncommon? No, you're a nurse at St. Charles Medical Center and this actually happened a little over one month ago. No one was injured and the incident went unpublicized, but the nurse with the concealed handgun is no longer employed at the hospital. Everyone knows why.
She brought a ballistic umbrella in case of rain.

A solitary moment.As a rule, backcountry skiers don't tend to make a lot of noise. Aside
from the occasional powder whoop, they tend to tread pretty lightly.
The
same principle holds true away from the slopes where backcountry
enthusiasts tend to keep a low political profile. But a new proposal
from a group of backcountry skiers is causing a stir in the outdoor
recreation community and could shake up the way the Forest Service
manages one of the most popular winter recreation zones near Bend.
What
some backcountry users want - there is no formal backcountry skiers
group in Central Oregon - is for the Forest Service to re-draw
snowmobile boundaries around Tumalo Mountain, moving the sleds entirely
off the butte.
Backcountry skiers are accustomed to working for
their turns, but this is a different kind of uphill battle that pits
backcountry skiers against well organized motorized users and their
supporters, which include, somewhat surprisingly, a number of cross
country skiers who benefit from the snowmobilers grooming efforts.
Skiers are also up against a historical "anything-goes" attitude about
winter recreation from the Forest Service, which much prefers "shared"
recreation opportunities for all user groups than to shut out one group
entirely, as would be the case on Tumalo.

Indians killed Danish Khawaja's father.
The 12-year-old Pakistani boy with big brown eyes lost his dad to militants from India who fought for the controversial plot of land called Kashmir.
Like many Kashmiris, Danish's father was a jihadist in the India-Pakistan conflict. And like many children in the region, Danish could easily join a jihadist group to strike back at those who killed his father. Instead, he chooses to become a doctor.
"I want to help people," Danish told me between classes on a muggy May
morning in Muzaffarabad, the capital city of Azad Jammu Kashmir.
Danish
is just one of hundreds of students supported by Kashmir Family Aid,
the Bend-based nonprofit organization that I direct founded in 2005 by
longtime Bend resident Sam Carpenter.
We assist children in
Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province and in Azad Kashmir, where the
October 2005 earthquake, according to CNN and Newsday reports, killed
at least 73,000, left 3 million homeless and destroyed more than 1,000
hospitals and 8,000 of the region's 11,000 primary and secondary
schools.
Our primary goal is to counter poverty and terrorism
while promoting women's rights by providing secular education to
quake-affected children. No politics. No religion.