Homebuilding revival? • E1
INSIDE: Your guide to the Deschutes Dash JULY 13, 2012
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Thousands fall victim to utility payment swindle
State wants foster youths to know about tuition waiver
2012 DESCHUTES FISH RUNS
By Lauren Dake By Scott Bauer
The Bulletin
The Associated Press
SALEM — Until recently, Haley Wahnetah could not picture a happy future for herself. The best-case scenario, the 18-year-old thought, was landing a job at a fast-food restaurant. But now, the Madras resident and mother of a 2-year-old son is enrolled at Mount Hood Community College and envisions a different life. “I graduated from high school. … I registered for college. And I feel like my life is better now than it’s ever been in the past 18 years,” she said. Wahnetah grew up in foster homes, bouncing among more than five homes while her mother battled addiction. When she was growing up, nobody talked to her about college. She didn’t see herself becoming a drug and alcohol counselor, as she does now. Even if she did graduate from high school, which at times seemed questionable, how would a teenage mom with no parental support afford tuition? During the 2011 legislative session, lawmakers approved a bill that will waive foster students’ college tuition. This fall is the first regular school term students can take advantage of the waiver. Although the Oregon Department of Human Services doesn’t know how many foster students in the state graduate from high school each year, it anticipates 1,714 foster students will be eligible this fall and expects more than 670 students will take advantage of the waiver. There is concern, however, that not enough foster students in high school know about the waiver. See College / A5
MADISON, Wis. — As much as President Barack Obama wants your vote, he’s not actually offering to pay your monthly bills. But thousands of Americans have been persuaded otherwise, falling victim to a fast-moving scam that claims to be part of an Obama administration program to help pay utility bills in the midst of a scorching summer. The scheme spread quickly across the nation in recent weeks with help from victims who unwittingly shared it on social media sites before realizing they had been conned out of personal information such as Social Security, credit card and checking account numbers. “No one knows who is behind this,” said Katherine Hutt, spokeswoman for the Council of Better Business Bureaus in Arlington, Va. “We’re pretty concerned. It seems to have really taken off.” People from all corners of the country report being duped, from New Jersey to California, Wisconsin to Florida and all parts in between. See Scam / A5
Correction In a story headlined “Local firefighters back from big blazes,” which appeared Saturday, July 7, on page A1, the number of Prineville firefighters who died in the Storm King Fire in 1994 was incorrect. Fourteen firefighters were killed, nine from Prineville. The Bulletin regrets the error.
TOP NEWS SYRIA: 100 reportedly killed in massacre, A3 PENN STATE: Report charges cover-up, A3 TODAY’S WEATHER Sunny High 91, Low 54 Page C6
Photos by Ryan Brennecke / The Bulletin
Megan Hill, Portland General Electric’s native fish studies team leader, inserts a radio transmitter Wednesday morning into the first sockeye salmon from the upper basin to return to the Pelton Round Butte dam complex. The transmitter will enable monitoring of the fish’s movements above the dam.
More sockeye, fewer chinook • A big disparity in the sizes of the two salmon runs on the Deschutes is partly due to differences in the two species, fisheries officials say By Dylan J. Darling The Bulletin
W
hile the run of spring chinook on the Deschutes River was well below expectations this year, a record run of sockeye salmon is now finishing its swim into the Columbia River. The reasons for the difference in run size are many and are based in the differences of the fish themselves, said Cindy LeFleur, Columbia River policy coordinator for the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife. The different species of salmon go to different parts of the oceans and Inside have different life • Two of the first histories. 23 spring run “They are all chinook to swim different critters,” above Pelton she said. Round Butte dam Spring run complex have chinook spend died. A5 three or four years in the ocean before returning to spawn while sockeye salmon spend a year or two, said Rod French, district fisheries biologist for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife in The Dalles. Most of the Columbia River sockeye go to the Okanogan River, which runs from Canada into the Columbia in Washington, from which they look for small streams to spawn in immediately after they arrive. Spring run chinook salmon fan into other tributaries of the Columbia, looking for larger rivers to hold in for a couple of months and then spawn. See Salmon / A5
Organ broker traded ‘in human misery’ By David Glovin Bloomberg News
Jeremy Puckett, a fisheries technician with the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife, checks for a tag in a spring chinook after it was collected from a fish trap at the base of the Pelton Round Butte dam complex Wednesday.
Seconds before the anesthesia kicked in at the start of a 2008 surgery in a Minnesota hospital, Elahn Quick said he was no longer certain he wanted to sell his kidney. By then, it was too late. “Before I finished the conversation, I was gone,” Quick testified Wednesday in federal court in Trenton, N.J. In the first criminal organ-trafficking case in the United States, Quick took the witness stand at the sentencing of Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, a Brooklyn man who pleaded guilty to brokering black-market sales of human kidneys to three Americans. After hearing Quick’s account of how Rosenbaum paid him $25,000 for a kidney, U.S. District Judge Anne Thompson sentenced Rosenbaum to 21⁄2 years in prison. “It’s a kind of trading in human misery,” Thompson said of the black-market kidney trade. Rosenbaum “charged a fee” for kidneys while using “a complicated web of transactions” to finance his trade, she said. “He corrupted himself.” See Kidney / A4
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CHECKPOINT CHARLIE
A battle of visions at a Cold War hot spot By Micheal Birnbaum The Washington Post
BERLIN — Here at Checkpoint Charlie, where Soviet and American tanks once aimed at each other separated by 30 yards, Cold War tensions are still running high. An international group of scholars, backed by Berlin’s center-left city government, wants to build a Cold War museum on a rubble-strewn plot of land here, saying that one
of the best-known sites of confrontation between the capitalist West and the communist East should not be abandoned to tourist touts and vendors selling Red Army hats. But a group of conservative politicians, seared by memories of the divided city, says the plans for the museum are overly sympathetic to the communists. They want a museum elsewhere in the city that they say celebrates freedom.
In the meantime, the empty land at Checkpoint Charlie has been covered over with food stands offering “Checkpoint Curry” and “Organic Power Food.” About 700,000 tourists visit every year, according to city authorities, snapping photographs with actors dressed as Soviet and American troops and walking through an eccentric private museum that was built by a man who helped East Berliners escape to the West.
With fewer and fewer traces of Berlin’s division left every year, supporters of the Cold War museum say, it’s time to take a scholarly approach to the story of a major geopolitical conflict that had some of its most dramatic clashes in this city. “It’s a scandal to have hot dog stands and people in fake uniforms,” said Konrad Jarausch, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who
was born in Germany and is leading the museum effort. “What the city needs is a museum on the same level of some of the museums that deal with the Third Reich.” The Cold War “is full of crises and confrontations and spies, but the ending is quite positive, which is that people are sensible with each other,” Jarausch said. “You can actually resolve conflicts, and you don’t need World War III.” See Checkpoint / A4