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Jury acquits militia that occupied Oregon wildlife refuge — but the saga is far from over

In a stunning conclusion to a five-week trial, a jury acquitted seven defendants who faced a slew of conspiracy and weapons charges related to their armed takeover of a wildlife refuge earlier this year.

U.S. marshals tackled the attorney for the group’s leader and used a Taser on him.

Trump does deserve credit for North Korean talks, Chuck Todd says

Meet the Press Moderator joins Sunday TODAY’s Chuck Todd and says President Donald Trump deserves credit for helping create conditions to start talks of denuclearization with North Korea, but says some questions still loom. {"1222279235816":{"mpxId":"1222279235816","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Neutral","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","description":"Jacob Cartwright, a truck driver in Oregon, accidentally plugged the wrong address into his GPS and wound up lost more than 100 miles out of his way. 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Oregon state Rep. Mike Nearman, the Polk County Republican who allowed far-right demonstrators to breach the state Capitol in December, now faces criminal charges.

According to court records, Nearman has been charged with first-degree official misconduct, a class A misdemeanor, and second degree criminal trespass, a class C misdemeanor.

As lawmakers met in a special legislative session to take up COVID-19 relief that day, surveillance footage showed Nearman exiting the locked Capitol building into a throng of protesters who were trying to get inside the statehouse. In doing so, he appeared to purposefully grant entrance to far right groups demanding an end to ongoing restrictions related to COVID-19.

The armed occupiers of a wildlife refuge in Oregon say they will turn themselves in on Thursday morning, hours after Cliven Bundy -- the father of protest leader Ammon Bundy -- was arrested by federal agents.

Cliven Bundy, who came to the national spotlight in a fight with the federal Bureau of Land Management over grazing rights for his cattle in 2014, was heading to Oregon earlier Wednesday.

After landing in Portland, Oregon, Bundy was taken into federal custody, the FBI said.Read MoreIt's not clear what he's been charged with. The FBI said authorities would make charging information available on Thursday morning.

An Oregon community group is calling for change to address racism after the fatal shooting of a Black teenager by a white man in an incident that police said began as an argument over loud music. 

Aidan Ellison, 19, was found dead with a single gunshot wound to the chest early Nov. 23 after officers responded to reports of a shooting in the parking lot of a hotel, according to police in Ashland, a predominantly white community near the state's California border.

Robert Paul Keegan, 47, was arrested on a murder charge, though he said he was in fear for his physical safety

Armed anti-government protesters have taken over a building in a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, accusing officials of unfairly punishing ranchers who refused to sell their land.

One of them is Ammon Bundy, the 40-year-old son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who is well-known for anti-government action.

Asked several times what he and those with him want, he answered in vague terms, saying that they want the federal government to restore the "people's constitutional rights."

Through the marshlands along the Oregon-California border, the federal government a century ago carved a whole new landscape, draining lakes and channeling rivers to build a farming economy that now supplies alfalfa for dairy cows and potatoes for Frito-Lay chips.

this year’s historic drought has heightened the stakes, with salmon dying en masse and Oregon’s largest lake draining below critical thresholds for managing fish survival.

The brewing battle over the century-old Klamath Project is an early window into the water shortfalls that are likely to spread across the West as a widespread drought, associated with a warming climate, parches watersheds throughout the region.

Rural Oregon’s LostProsperity Gives Standoffa Distressed Backdrop

a lifelong resident who has lost his job twice and has filed for bankruptcy once, said that was not the case anymore. He now works for the state as a prison guard, a job he said he hated.

“You do what you have to do to stay alive,”

SALEM — Republicans in the Oregon Senate fled the Capitol on Monday to stop Democrats’ bill to cap greenhouse gas emissions after the plan cleared a legislative budget committee earlier in the day.At Monday’s 11 a.m. Senate floor session, just one Republican showed up: Sen. Tim Knopp of Bend. Democrats waited as sergeants at arms searched Capitol offices to see if they could round up any other Republicans. But they were unable to find any, so Senate President Peter Courtney, D-Salem, adjourned the chamber until Tuesday.

Under the state Constitution, a two-thirds majority of the Senate must be present to conduct business including voting on bills. That means Democrats, despite their supermajority, need at least two Republicans to be present. Courtney said he does not plan to ask the governor to send the state police looking for the Republicans, and Brown said without a request from Courtney she lacks the authority to do so.

“If (Senate Republicans) don’t like a bill, they need to show up and change it or show up and vote ‘no,’” Gov. Kate Brown said in a during a briefing with reporters. Instead, the senators “have chosen to take a taxpayer funded vacation … Oregonians should be outraged and I am, too.”

Hopes of a surge in Covid-19 vaccine shipments under a new policy to release second doses held in reserve appear to be evaporating -- with the revelation that those doses have already been distributed, contrary to recent indications by the Trump administration.

When Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar was asked Friday whether there is in fact a reserve of second doses left to release, he said, "No. There's not a reserve stockpile."

The revelation appears to contradict what Azar announced on Tuesday at an Operation Warp Speed briefing, where he said the administration would be "releasing the entire supply for order by states, rather than holding second doses in reserve."Read MoreAnd it adds another level of confusion for state officials, who have scrambled to distribute the vaccines after being tasked to do so by the federal government.

n incident that took place in Oregon last week has sent shockwaves around the world. A man got rather gravely upset with a teenager as he was playing loud music. The confrontation escalated into a verbal spat followed by a fatal shooting.

“The victim had apparently been playing some music loudly in the parking lot and this upset the suspect, which caused the suspect to go down and engage him in an argument,”said the Ashland Police Department in a news release.

Keegan pulled a gun from inside his coat and let out a bullet striking Ellison. The 19-year-old was pronounced dead at the spot. Keegan was at the scene when police reached. The killer was immediately arrested and taken to the Jackson County Jail.

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson purchased the territory of Louisiana from the French government for $15 million. The Louisiana Purchase stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to New Orleans, and it doubled the size of the United States. To Jefferson, westward expansion was the key to the nation’s health: He believed that a republic depended on an independent, virtuous citizenry for its survival, and that independence and virtue went hand in hand with land ownership, especially the ownership of small farms.

On the contrary, as one historian writes, in the six decades after the Louisiana Purchase, westward expansion “very nearly destroy[ed] the republic.”

By 1840, nearly 7 million Americans–40 percent of the nation’s population–lived in the trans-Appalachian West. Following a trail blazed by Lewis and Clark, most of these people had left their homes in the East in search of economic opportunity. Like Thomas Jefferson, many of these pioneers associated westward migration, land ownership and farming with freedom. In Europe, large numbers of factory workers formed a dependent and seemingly permanent working class; by contrast, in the United States, the western frontier offered the possibility of independence and upward mobility for all. In 1843, one thousand pioneers took to the Oregon Trail as part of the “Great Emigration.”

Two 5.9 magnitude earthquakes struck the Pacific Ocean off Oregon's coast early Friday morning,

The tremors occurred about 89 miles and 98 miles west of the coastal town of Gold Beach, Oregon, after 1 a.m. (PT)

At least five earthquakes ranging in magnitudes from 3.2 to 5.9 have occurred in the area in the last few hours, according to USGS.

Bracing for the possibility of political violence stemming from Tuesday’s election, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown is declaring a state of emergency in the Portland area

It’s the second time in two months that the governor has declared an emergency in preparation for possible violence.

“I want to be very, very clear that voter intimidation and political violence will not be tolerated,” Brown said.

Oregon became the first U.S. state to decriminalize possession of all illegal drugs after voters passed a ballot initiative in Tuesday’s election.

Oregonians can no longer be criminally charged for possessing small amounts of illegal drugs, including heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine. The punishment for these felony and misdemeanor drug possession offenses will now be a simple $100 fine. The initiative also redirects some taxes raised through sales of legal marijuana to finance a new voluntary treatment system for drug users.

his marks the nation’s most significant development toward ending the 50-year war on drugs launched by President Richard Nixon.

Although zoning may seem like a technical, bureaucratic and decidedly local question, in reality the issue relates directly to three grand themes that Joe Biden ran on in the 2020 campaign: racial justice, respect for working-class people and national unity. Perhaps no single step would do more to advance those goals than tearing down the government-sponsored walls that keep Americans of different races and classes from living in the same communities, sharing the same public schools and getting a chance to know one another across racial, economic and political lines.

Single-family exclusive zoning, which was adopted by communities shortly after the Supreme Court struck down explicit racial zoning in 1917, is what activists call the “new redlining.” Racial discrimination has created an enormous wealth gap between white and Black people, and single-family-only zoning perpetuates that inequality.

By addressing a problem common to America’s multiracial working class, reducing exclusionary barriers could also help promote Mr. Biden’s third big goal: national unity. Today, no two groups are more politically divided from one another than working-class whites and working-class people of color. For centuries, going back to Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, right-wing politicians have successfully pitted these two groups against each other, but every once in a while, America breaks free of this grip, and lower-income and working-class people of all races come together and engage in what the Rev. William Barber II calls “fusion politics.”

Nicole Berg's stunted wheat field is so short and sparse she doesn't think the combine can even reach the wheat without, as she puts it, eating rocks.

Berg is a dryland wheat farmer in the sweeping Horse Heaven Hills of southeastern Washington state. She shows off one head of half-turned golden wheat amid a sea of them. Besides being too short, the plant's kernels didn't fill out properly.

"See how the wheat head is curled like that?"