Take a shot for a free adoption at the Humane Society of Central Oregon

Madness of different stripe at the Human Society of Central Oregon.

Starting Saturday the shelter is running adoption specials throughout the rest of the college basketball championships.

“There’s a lot of deserving animals sitting here in our shelter waiting for a loving home and gosh we got to make it fun,” said Lynn Ouchida HSCO’s director of community partnerships.

“I’m so excited to bring this dog home,” said an excited Kristina Bergstron.

The reduced adoption fees weren’t the sole reason Bergstron was out looking for a new four legged friend.

“We were looking for a dog, a specific dog, a German Shepherd husky and we went on the site today and found Juniper. And so I came right at ten when they opened and got to meet her and did a little meet and greet with our current dog and they got along so well,” said Bergstron.

All animals under six months old are 25 percent off, and those over six months are 50 percent off.

Adopters can step up to the line for a shot at a free adoption.

Bergstron didn’t sink the jumper, but she did score getting to take Juniper home.

Jet pitched wildly, killing 1, amid cockpit warnings: NTSB

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — A business jet flying over New England violently pitched upward then downward, fatally injuring a passenger, after pilots responding to automated cockpit warnings switched off a system that helps keep the aircraft stable, U.S. transportation investigators reported Friday.

The National Transportation Safety Board didn’t reach any conclusions in its preliminary report on the main cause of the deadly March 3 accident, but it described a series of things that went wrong before and after the plane swooped out of control.

Confronted with several alerts in the cockpit of the Bombardier jet, pilots followed a checklist and turned off a switch that “trims” or adjusts the stabilizer on the plane’s tail, the report said.

The plane’s nose then swept upward, subjecting the people inside to forces about four times the force of gravity, then pointed lower before again turning upward before pilots could regain control, the report said.

Pilots told investigators they did not encounter turbulence, as the NTSB had said in an initial assessment the day after the incident.

The trim system of the Bombardier Challenger 300 twin-engine jet was the subject of a Federal Aviation Administration mandate last year that pilots conduct extra safety checks before flights.

Bombardier did not respond directly to the report’s contents, saying in a statement that it was “carefully studying” it. In a previous statement, the Canadian manufacturer said it stood behind its Challenger 300 jets and their airworthiness.

“We will continue to fully support and provide assistance to all authorities as needed,” the company said Friday.

The two pilots and three passengers were traveling from Keene, New Hampshire, to Leesburg, Virginia, before diverting to Bradley International Airport in Connecticut. One passenger, Dana Hyde, 55, of Cabin John, Maryland, was brought to a hospital where she died from blunt-force injuries.

Hyde served in government positions during the Clinton and Obama administrations and was counsel for the 9/11 Commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.

It was unclear if Hyde was belted in her seat or up and about, in the cabin of the jet owned by Conexon, based in Kansas City, Missouri. Her husband and their son, along with the pilot and co-pilot, were not injured in the incident, the report said.

A representative of Conexon, a company specializing in rural internet, declined to comment Friday.

The report indicated the pilots aborted their initial takeoff because no one removed a plastic cover from one of the exterior tubes that determine airspeed, and they took off with a rudder limiter fault alert on.

Another warning indicated autopilot stabilizer trim failure. The plane abruptly pitched upward as the pilots moved the stabilizer trim switch from primary to off while working through procedures on a checklist, the report said.

The plane violently oscillated up and down and the “stick pusher” activated, the report said, meaning the onboard computer thought the plane was in danger of an aerodynamic stall.

John Cox, a former airline pilot and now a safety consultant, said “there are definitely issues” with the pilots’ pre-flight actions, but he said they reacted correctly when they followed the checklist for responding to trim failure.

The flight crew was comprised of two experienced pilots with 5,000 and 8,000 hours of flying time, and held ratings needed to fly for an airline. But both were relatively new to the model of aircraft, earning their ratings last October.

The FAA issued its directive about Bombardier Challenger 300 jets last year after multiple instances in which the horizontal stabilizer on the aircrafts caused the nose of the plane to turn down after the pilot tried to make the aircraft climb.

Related: 1 killed when business jet encounters severe turbulence

Idaho governor signs firing squad execution bill into law

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Republican Idaho Gov. Brad Little has signed into law a bill allowing firing squads to execute death row inmates when lethal injection drugs are unavailable, making Idaho the fifth U.S. state to allow the execution method.

The new law, which takes effect in July, will give the Department of Correction up to five days after a death warrant is issued to determine whether lethal injection is available. If not, the department must carry out the execution by firing squad. Little signed the bill on Friday.

“While I am signing this bill, it is important to point out that fulfilling justice can and must be done by minimizing stress on corrections personnel,” Little wrote in a transmittal letter after signing the bill, as reported by the Idaho Statesman. “For the people on death row, a jury convicted them of their crimes, and they were lawfully sentenced to death. It is the responsibility of the state of Idaho to follow the law and ensure that lawful criminal sentences are carried out.”

The news outlet said that a corrections department spokesperson did not immediately respond to its request for comment Friday evening.

States have faced difficulties obtaining drugs required for longstanding lethal injection programs. Pharmaceutical companies increasingly have barred executioners from using their drugs, saying they were meant to save lives, not take them.

Idaho will join Mississippi, Utah, Oklahoma and South Carolina as the states that authorize death by firing squad, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. South Carolina’s law is on hold pending the outcome of a legal challenge.

The last inmate to be executed by firing squad in the U.S. was Ronnie Lee Gardner. He was executed at Utah State Prison on June 18, 2010, for killing an attorney during a courthouse escape attempt. Utah is the only state to have used firing squads in the past 50 years, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Leo Morales, executive director of the ACLU of Idaho, called the firing squad an “archaic and particularly gruesome execution method” in a statement quoted by the Idaho Statesman. Morales criticized the law as “a step backward,” as public support for the death penalty reached an all-time low.

“Instead of trying to reinstate the death penalty with a gruesome execution method, Idaho lawmakers should have kept the firing squad in the dust bin of history, where it belongs,” he said.

Pennsylvania chocolate factory explodes; 5 dead, 6 missing

WEST READING, Pa. (AP) — An explosion at a chocolate factory in Pennsylvania on Friday killed five people and left six people missing, authorities said.

The Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency confirmed the increase in the number of fatalities Saturday morning after the blast just before 5 p.m. Friday at the R.M. Palmer Co. plant in the borough of West Reading.

Chief of Police Wayne Holben said the blast destroyed one building and damaged a neighboring building.

“It’s pretty leveled,” Mayor Samantha Kaag said of the explosion site. “The building in the front, with the church and the apartments, the explosion was so big that it moved that building four feet forward.”

The cause of the blast in the community about 60 miles (96 kilometers) northwest of Philadelphia was under investigation, Holden told reporters. Authorities are investigating the possibility that a gas leak may have been responsible, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency said.

Eight people were taken to Reading Hospital Friday evening, Tower Health spokeswoman Jessica Bezler said.

Two people were admitted in fair condition and five were being treated and would be released, she said in an email. One patient was transferred to another facility, but Bezler provided no further details.

Kaag said people were asked to move back about a block in each direction from the site of the explosion but no evacuations were ordered.

Dean Murray, the borough manager of West Reading Borough, said some residents were displaced from the damaged apartment building.

Kagg said borough officials were not in immediate contact with officials from R.M. Palmer, which Murray described as “a staple of the borough.”

The company’s website says it has been making “chocolate novelties” since 1948 and now has 850 employees at its West Reading headquarters.

Intel co-founder, philanthropist Gordon Moore dies at 94

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Gordon Moore, the Intel Corp. co-founder who set the breakneck pace of progress in the digital age with a simple 1965 prediction of how quickly engineers would boost the capacity of computer chips, has died. He was 94.

Moore died Friday at his home in Hawaii, according to Intel and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Moore, who held a Ph.D. in chemistry and physics, made his famous observation — now known as “Moore’s Law” — three years before he helped start Intel in 1968. It appeared among a number of articles about the future written for the now-defunct Electronics magazine by experts in various fields.

The prediction, which Moore said he plotted out on graph paper based on what had been happening with chips at the time, said the capacity and complexity of integrated circuits would double every year.

Strictly speaking, Moore’s observation referred to the doubling of transistors on a semiconductor. But over the years, it has been applied to hard drives, computer monitors and other electronic devices, holding that roughly every 18 months a new generation of products makes their predecessors obsolete.

It became a standard for the tech industry’s progress and innovation.

“It’s the human spirit. It’s what made Silicon Valley,” Carver Mead, a retired California Institute of Technology computer scientist who coined the term “Moore’s Law” in the early 1970s, said in 2005. “It’s the real thing.”

Moore later became known for his philanthropy when he and his wife established the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which focuses on environmental conservation, science, patient care and projects in the San Francisco Bay area. It has donated more than $5.1 billion to charitable causes since its founding in 2000.

“Those of us who have met and worked with Gordon will forever be inspired by his wisdom, humility and generosity,” foundation president Harvey Fineberg said in a statement.

Intel Chairman Frank Yeary called Moore a brilliant scientist and a leading American entrepreneur.

“It is impossible to imagine the world we live in today, with computing so essential to our lives, without the contributions of Gordon Moore,” he said.

In his book “Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary,” author David Brock called him “the most important thinker and doer in the story of silicon electronics.”

Moore was born in San Francisco on Jan. 3, 1929, and grew up in the tiny nearby coastal town of Pescadero. As a boy, he took a liking to chemistry sets. He attended San Jose State University, then transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, where he graduated with a degree in chemistry.

After getting his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1954, he worked briefly as a researcher at Johns Hopkins University.

His entry into microchips began when he went to work for William Shockley, who in 1956 shared the Nobel Prize for physics for his work inventing the transistor. Less than two years later, Moore and seven colleagues left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory after growing tired of its namesake’s management practices.

The defection by the “traitorous eight,” as the group came to be called, planted the seeds for Silicon Valley’s renegade culture, in which engineers who disagreed with their colleagues didn’t hesitate to become competitors.

The Shockley defectors in 1957 created Fairchild Semiconductor, which became one of the first companies to manufacture the integrated circuit, a refinement of the transistor.

Fairchild supplied the chips that went into the first computers that astronauts used aboard spacecraft.

In 1968, Moore and Robert Noyce, one of the eight engineers who left Shockley, again struck out on their own. With $500,000 of their own money and the backing of venture capitalist Arthur Rock, they founded Intel, a name based on joining the words “integrated” and “electronics.”

Moore became Intel’s chief executive in 1975. His tenure as CEO ended in 1987, thought he remained chairman for another 10 years. He was chairman emeritus from 1997 to 2006.

He received the National Medal of Technology from President George H.W. Bush in 1990 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush in 2002.

Despite his wealth and acclaim, Moore remained known for his modesty. In 2005, he referred to Moore’s Law as “a lucky guess that got a lot more publicity than it deserved.”

He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Betty, sons Kenneth and Steven, and four grandchildren.

▶️ Bend Cracker Barrel closes after four years

The Cracker Barrel restaurant in Bend has closed down, citing businesses struggles from the COVID-19 pandemic as one of the factors. It’s one of three Oregon locations closing.

A sign on the doors and the window of the north Bend location reads “This Location Is Now Closed.”

The company provided a statement to Central Oregon Daily News.

“As a standard course of business, we continually evaluate the performance of our stores, using various criteria to ensure we are meeting the needs of our guests and our business,” the company said in a statement. “With that, we are saddened that we have been unable to overcome the impact the pandemic had on our business and have made the difficult decision to close the Bend location. The decision to close a store is never one we take lightly, and our focus right now is in assisting our impacted employees during this transition.

RELATED: ‘Justy’s’ no more: Popular Bend eatery changes its name

RELATED: Is Bend getting a second Chick-fil-A?

“We extend our sincere thanks to our employees who worked so hard to keep our fireplace glowing and to the guests who have dined with us, celebrated with us, and made us part of their community. We look forward to reconnecting with them at other times at nearby Cracker Barrels in the future,” the company continues.

The restaurant opened in February 2019. At the time, the company said it was hoping to fill 175 full-time and part-time jobs. But the company confirms the closure will affect 29 employees, including 15 full-time.

Portland news outlets also report that the two Cracker Barrel locations in the Rose City are also closing. That leaves Medford as the only location in Oregon with a Cracker Barrel.

In addition to its food, Cracker Barrel is known for the pioneer-feel memorabilia inside its restaurants as well as its store that often will feature books, clothing, home decor and more — often paying homage to the region the restaurant is located in.

RELATED: Nothing Bundt Cakes coming to Central Oregon

RELATED: Fire on the Mountain bringing new hot wings joint to Bend

▶️ Bend low-income e-bike rebate lottery applications open

The City of Bend opened applications Monday to provide a $2,000 instant rebate for up to 75 qualifying, low-income households toward the purchase of an e-bike. The money was made available through a $150,000 mobility grant from Pacific Power last fall.

Applications can be found at this link or at www.commuteoptions.org/ebikes

To qualify, applicants must make 80% of the area median income or less. That’s $50,350/year for a single-person household, $57,550/year for a two-person household or $71,900/year for a four-person household. They must also be Pacific Power customers. 

RELATED: Oregon EV rebate program to be suspended May 1

RELATED: Bend-La Pine adding electric school bus to the fleet

The rebates will be awarded through a lottery process. The lotteries will happen April 17, May 1 and May 15. 

Applications will be open through May 12. It’s suggested that people apply early because if they are not selected through the first or second drawing, the city says those applications will be moved forward to the next drawing.

If a person wins the lottery, they will be able to visit a participating retailer and the $2,000 will automatically be taken off the purchase price at the point of sale. The rebate can also be used towards bike safety equipment.

▶️ Public Land Stewards seek volunteers for China Hat area cleanup

The Central Oregon nonprofit Public Land Stewards is looking for volunteers for its first big cleanup of the year in the China Hat area. 

The cleanup on Saturday, April 8 will run from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Volunteers will be divided into seven groups, with each group capped at 20, and they will meet at Morning Star Christian Elementary School. 

Last year, volunteers managed to clean up 25 tons of trash in four hours. 

“We’re out here just to clean up trash today, we’re not here to pass judgement on people who are leaving it,” Public Land Stewards’ Jeremy Evans said at least year’s event. “We’re trying to get rid of the divisiveness in our country, not add to it. It’s easy to blame certain user groups for what we see out here. We’re trying to avoid that, we’re all responsible for everything.” 

You can sign up to volunteer here

▶️ McKenzie Pass ski tour shortened due to avalanche concerns

Skiers paid tribute to the skiing mailman of McKenzie Pass on Saturday.

The John Craig Memorial Ski Tour and Race kicked off with 275 registered skiers.

The Oregon Nordic Club hosted the event, which got its start in the 1930s.

The course differed this year due too much snow.

Usually the Mount Jefferson Snowmobile Club grooms all the way to Dee Wright Observatory, but this year the slopes along Windy Point proved a little dicey to negotiate.

Earlier this month the club’s snow cat was almost pushed off the road by an avalanche near the scenic overlook.

The annual event honors Craig, a pioneer postmaster who carried mail across the pass by horse in the summer and skis in the winter. He was found dead in his shack near the top of the pass in the winter 1877.

 

Related: ▶️ PHOTOS: Avalanche pushes snowcat to edge of Windy Point

Grooming at Virginia Meissner Sno-Park extended into April

Good news for free heel skiers, grooming of the nordic trails at the popular Virginia Meissner Sno-Park will continue through the first half of April.

The board of the Meissner Nordic Community Ski Club announced Friday night that the Deschutes National Forest approved the organization’s request.

It’s a one-time extension that is snow pack dependent.

▶️ The Great Outdoors: Grooming Virginia Meissner Sno-Park

 

Meissner Nordic grooms a network of trails out of the sno-park off the Cascade Lakes Highway southwest of Bend.

Their use permit with the Forest Service allows grooming until March 31st.

The sno-park sits at an elevation of 5,400 feet, and in years past the snow hasn’t lasted through the season.

This past week the snow stake has measured between five to six feet of snow on the ground.

 

Related: ▶️ Snow dragon forming at Meissner Sno-Park, and you can help build it