Sisters Folk Festival
At Smith Rock, how safe is
rope swinging?
Schedule, map and top shows to see, including headliner Dave Alvin
SPORTS, D1
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FRIDAY
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Deschutes, union reach deal after contract tweaks 2 county By Hillary Borrud The Bulletin
Deschutes County’s largest employees union will put a contract proposal before its members for a vote after union leaders and managers reached a tentative agreement Thursday night.
The agreement is a sharp change from the status of negotiations in early August. At the time, county managers were ready to ask a state mediator to intervene, after the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 75, or AFSCME, rejected the county’s latest take-it-or-
leave-it comprehensive proposal. However, it took relatively minor changes to the county’s August proposal for both sides to reach agreement Thursday: County managers simplified language describing the AFSCME employee grievance process, brought back contract language
outlining the role of an employee health benefits review committee that had been removed, and added a new provision requiring county officials to obtain a recommendation from that committee before they make changes to certain retirees’ health benefits. See AFSCME / A4
1 DAY, 10 YEARS: SEPT. 11 , 20 01-SEPT. 11 , 2011
JOBS SPEECH
Helping kids understand
Full transcript at www.bendbulletin .com/speech
Plan hinges on Social Security tax reduction By Binyamin Appelbaum New York Times News Service
WASHINGTON — The centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s job-creation plan, a proposal to further reduce Social Security taxes, is emblematic of a package of modest measures that some economists describe as helpful but not sufficient to lift the economy from its malaise. In his Thursday speech, Obama asked Congress to cut the amount that workers must contribute toward Social Security benefits, extending an existing measure, and to reduce, for the first time, the matching payments that employers are required to make. The cuts, which would deprive the government of about $240 billion in revenues next year, are the largest items in the president’s $447 billion job-creation plan, which includes payments to unemployed workers, incentives for companies that hire workers and increased federal spending on infrastructure. All of the measures will require the support of congressional Republicans. Preliminary analyses of the White House plan estimate that the tax cuts could create more than 50,000 jobs a month, a significant boost considering that employment climbed by 35,000 jobs, on average, in each of the last three months. But even if Congress passed the entire plan, the economy is likely to continue to struggle.Companies must increase payrolls by about 100,000 people every month to keep pace with population growth. See Plan / A5
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We use recycled newsprint The Bulletin An Independent Newspaper
Vol. 108, No. 252, 68 pages, 7 sections
MON-SAT
By Sheila G. Miller The Bulletin
When terrorists attacked New York City and Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001, most of today’s high school seniors were third-graders. While the events of that day still bring real pain to adults who watched them in person or on television, teaching them to students who weren’t alive or who couldn’t understand their significance isn’t always easy. Kathi Smith teaches fourth grade at Juniper Elementary. Her approach? Wait and see. See Teaching / A4
The Bulletin
The two longest-serving judges with the Deschutes County Circuit Court will be leaving the bench during the next 15 months. Judge Stephen Tiktin announced Thursday he will be retiring at the end of the year, and Judge Michael Sullivan announced he would serve out his term and not seek re-election in 2012. The careers of both men have run largely parallel. Tiktin and Sullivan both grew up in the Portland area and attended the University of Oregon Law School. They got their first legal jobs working as prosecutors for Lane County District Attorney J. Pat Horton, who until recently was working in the Deschutes County District Attorney’s Office. Gov. Neil Goldschmidt appointed both Sullivan and Tiktin to the bench, Sullivan in 1988 and Tiktin in 1989. Prior to their appointments, Sullivan had been the Jefferson County district atDeschutes torney, while Tiktin had been in County private practice in Bend. Circuit Court Sullivan said he’d previously Judges thought he wanted to serve until Stephen he was 75, the maximum age for Tiktin, top, judges in Oregon, but recently and Michael changed his mind. He said he deSullivan have cided to announce his retirement each served now to provide time for other more than 20 lawyers to consider running for years. the position. Once retired, Sullivan intends to continue working as a pro tem judge, a temporary position where a former judge can help clear a county’s backlog of cases, or fill in for a judge who is incapacitated or otherwise unavailable. Sullivan said he’ll remain fully dedicated to his job until retirement. “I am not stopping work,” he said. “With the (budget and staff) reductions we’ve had, I’m working hard and will continue to do so.” Tiktin was overseeing a trial Thursday and could not be reached for comment. Attorneys who dealt with both judges for more than 20 years said they brought different qualities to the courtroom. See Judges / A5
Hominid fossils may shake up theories on human evolution The Washington Post
INDEX Classified
For students who were too young to grasp 9/11, a tricky lesson
By Scott Hammers
By Brian Vastag
TERROR THREAT: Plot to detonate car bomb in U.S. is investigated, Page A3
Business
Photos by Pete Erickson / The Bulletin
ABOVE: Connor Neal, 10, and his classmates write letters to “great American heroes” in Debbie Valentine’s fifth-grade class at Trinity Lutheran School in Bend on Thursday. Valentine said the letters will be sent to firefighters and military service members. BELOW: A student’s letter.
judges will step down
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As the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks approaches, view nine images that capture a moment of how the anniversary was remembered each year since at bendbulletin.com/sept11. Photos from
DAY 1: Pulitzer winners
DAY 2: Flight 175 sequence
James Estrin / New York Times News Service
A gust of wind swirls across ground zero on Sept. 11, 2002, engulfing in dust services marking the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
archive
DAY 3: U.S. archives
DAY 4: The towers
Visit bendbulletin.com/sept11 each day for more images
DAY 5: Ground Zero
DAY 6: War in Afghanistan
DAY 7: War in Iraq
DAY 8: The remnants
DAY 9: How we remember
DAY 10: The day
DAY 11: Fred R. Conrad
He was built to climb, and yet he strode upright. His arms hung low like an orangutan’s. Yet with his long thumbs and curved fingers he could grasp sticks and rocks like a man. His brain was not much larger than a chimpanzee’s. Yet his widened pelvis implied his kind gave birth to children with much bigger brains. And so a fossilized adolescent named Karabo — which means “answer” in a South African dialect — is raising a lot of questions about human evolution. Researchers found his skeleton, and much of an adult female, in a cave some 25 miles north of Johannesburg in 2008 and announced the discovery in 2010. They coined a new species, Australopithecus sediba, and launched an intensive multi-national effort to study the find. In the journal Science, the team is now publishing detailed descriptions of the creatures’ heads, hands, feet, and hips. The team also date the fossils to 1.98 million years ago, smack in the middle of an era notorious for its lack of evidence of possible human relatives. The mash-up of human-like and ape-like traits are like “a stop-action snapshot of evolution in action,” said the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program, Richard Potts, who was not involved in the research. The researchers stop just short of calling the creatures an ancestor to the human lineage known as Homo. But they place A. sediba squarely in the running for that coveted title. See Fossils / A4