AppFeed

The governors of Oregon and Washington joined forces Monday to show a unified commitment to replacing the Interstate 5 bridge. 

Democratic Govs. Kate Brown, of Oregon, and Jay Inslee, of Washington, met in Vancouver to announce the first formal steps to develop a finance plan and reevaluate previous studies of replacing the bridge.

They are allocating $44 million to the initial effort of what could eventually be a multibillion dollar bridge replacement project.

House lawmakers have introduced a temporary funding measure to thwart another government shutdown, with hopes to move the legislation to the Senate and the president's desk before federal agencies run out of money at midnight on Thursday.

The legislative measure, known as a continuing resolution, or CR, will fund the government through Dec. 20. This would mark the second continuing resolution to take effect since the fiscal year began Oct. 1.

The Oregon Court of Appeals has blocked the temporary ban on flavored cannabis vaping products.

Last month, the court issued a stay on Gov. Kate Brown’s ban on flavored tobacco vaping products. Now the court has blocked the ban on flavored vaping products that contain cannabis.

Jesse Bontecou with the Oregon Retailers of Cannabis Association said he’s encouraged.

“We want every decision regulating our industry to be evidentiary based and scientifically based," said Bontecou.

Roseburg Forest Products announced Friday it will be laying off 30 employees at its plant in the Douglas County, Oregon, town of Dillard. These layoffs follow an earlier round of about 90 layoffs in August at the same plant.  

The company’s communications director, Rebecca Taylor, said all but one of the 30 employees affected in this most recent layoff received job offers at one of Roseburg’s other plants — two additional plants in Dillard and two in nearby Riddle.  

Oregon’s population increased by more than 40,000 people over the last year — or 1%, according to an estimate out Friday from Portland State University’s Population Research Center.

Since 2010, the state has added more than 400,000 residents.

Still, this year has seen slower growth than in the recent past. Last year, Oregon’s population increased by 54,200 people. The year before that, the population grew by 64,750.

After California wine industry mogul Hugh Reimers illegally destroyed at least 140 acres of forest, meadow and stream in part to make way for new vineyards sometime last winter, according to a report from state investigators, state officials ordered the Krasilsa Pacific Farms manager to repair and mitigate the

Updated on November 18 at 4:30 p.m. ET

The House impeachment inquiry begins its second week of public hearings with the Intelligence Committee scheduled to hear testimony from nine more witnesses over three days.

The first week of Trump impeachment inquiry hearings is in the books.

If you were paying attention to the thousands of pages of closed-door testimonies, you would recognize some of the details that emerged.

But there were some new and important wrinkles from the public hearings with acting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor; George Kent, a top State Department official with oversight of Ukraine affairs; and Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, who described a plot to oust her led by President Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Hemp farming exploded after the 2018 Farm Bill passed last December. The bill decriminalized the plant at the federal level, opening the door for many U.S. farmers to grow and sell hemp.

Over the past year, licensed hemp acreage increased more than 445%, according to the advocacy and research group Vote Hemp. More than 510,000 acres of hemp were licensed in 2019, versus about 112,000 acres in 2018.

Oregon is not very good at recycling, and it’s getting worse, according to a new report. Overall recycling rates in the state have steadily declined for the last several years, even as the amount of waste generated per person in the state has grown.

Federal energy regulators released the final environmental impact findings Friday for the proposed Jordan Cove liquefied natural gas terminal and pipeline.

This is the last major permitting document that will be published before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission makes a final decision on the southern Oregon project.

For the third year running, Oregon leaders say they’ll take a crack at regulating the state’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. But with the month-long legislative session set to begin Feb. 3, just what those regulations will look like is still anybody’s guess.

What does seem clear: Any proposal will be less strict than one that failed dramatically earlier this year.