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THURSDAY, JANUARY 16, 2014
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Lawmakers grill Cover Oregon boss ■
Organization has to be selfsustaining by 2015 BY JONATHAN J. COOPER The Associated Press
34 officers are removed from US missile force BY ROBERT BURNS AND LOLITA C. BALDOR The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — In what may be the biggest such scandal in Air Force history, 34 officers entrusted with land-based nuclear missiles have been pulled off the job for alleged involvement in a cheating ring that officials say was uncovered during a drug probe. The 34 are suspected of cheating several months ago on a routine proficiency test that includes checking missile launch officers’ knowledge of how to handle an “emergency war order,” which is the term for the authorization required to launch a nuclear weapon. The cheating scandal is the latest in a series of Air Force nuclear stumbles documented in recent months by The Associated Press, including deliberate violations of safety rules, failures of inspections, breakdowns in training, and evidence that the men and women who operate the missiles from underground command posts are suffering burnout. In October the general who commands the nuclear missile force was fired for engaging in embarrassing behavior, including drunkenness, while leading a U.S. delegation to a nuclear exercise in Russia. The AP disclosed in May an internal Air Force email in which a missile operations officer complained that his force was infested with “rot” — bad attitudes and disregard for discipline.
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Teamwork helps clean beach ■
Southwestern baseball team, other college officials help remove dock debris
tiny white polystyrene pellets cross the length of the beach, which lies between Sunset Bay and Bastendorff Beach off Cape Arago Highway. Calum Stevenson, ocean shores specialist for the Oregon State Parks and Recreation Department, says the agency is depending on volunteers — as well as inmate work crews from the Shutter Creek Correctional facility — to rehabilitate the beach, which has no direct public access. “It looks much better,” said Stevenson, watching as students scooped up handfuls of tiny white polystyrene pellets into plastic bags. Anne Matthews, a graphic designer and photographer at SWOCC, said the baseball team got involved after Matthews contacted Delia Devila, a resident director for college housing, about organizing a cleanup effort. One of Devila’s housing co-workers, Ryan Phillips, is a member of the team. In lieu of practice, the players piled into cars and headed for the beach. Coach Jason Cooper said that although the team was regularly
BY THOMAS MORIARTY The World
LIGHTHOUSE BEACH — While there’s still much work to be done, Lighthouse Beach looked significantly cleaner Wednesday afternoon than it has in weeks, thanks to several dozen volunteers in red. Thirty-five members of the Southwestern Oregon Community College baseball team, along with two resident directors and the college’s graphic designer, took to the sand to help Oregon State Parks clean up foam, concrete and wood debris from a dock that washed up early last week. The dock, which washed out to sea from a private slip in Charleston on New Year’s Day, has broken up into increasingly smaller pieces over the past week. That breakup has spread millions of
involved in community outreach projects, it had never attempted a large-scale cleanup project like this one. “We do a nonprofit camp every year for youth,” he said. In addition to the SWOCC students, a handful of personnel from U.S. Coast Guard Station Coos Bay also made the trek down to the beach to help. Stevenson said the dock’s owner had provided several of their employees to help clean up the foam, as well as leaf blowers with vacuum capability. State parks personnel brought pickup trucks to help carry away the debris brought up by the volunteers, who were given use of a private stairwell by beachfront homeowners. Although the volunteers removed significant quantities of foam from the beach, the larger wood and concrete fragments of the dock have yet to be dealt with. Reporter Thomas Moriarty can be reached at 541-269-1222, ext. 240, or by email at thomas.moriarty@theworldlink.com. Follow him on Twitter: @ThomasDMoriarty.
Battle of the bookworms Pirates, Bulldogs face off in literary competition BY CHELSEA DAVIS The World
NORTH BEND — The Pirate-Bulldog rivalry rages on in a battle of the brains. North Bend High and Marshfield High teams faced off Wednesday afternoon at the North Bend library in preparation for regionals in the Oregon Battle of the Books, sponsored by the Oregon Association of School Libraries. Both Pirate and Bulldog teams rapidfire answered questions about 12 novels they’ve read over the last year. Students read 12 books to get ready — from John Green’s “The Fault in Our Stars” to Gaby Rodriguez’s “The Pregnancy Project.” During the roundrobin, “quiz bowl” type contest, the bookworms had to answer “In which book...?” and content questions. Teams huddled together, whispering Muriel Simpson, Coquille Geri Rescorla, Coos Bay Max Clausen, Coos Bay Dennis Wheeler, Florence Judy Wuethrich, Troutdale William Whitaker III, Eugene Lorin Holmen Sr., North Bend
By Lou Sennick, The World
Moderator Tim Novotny, right, waits for an answer from Team Novelists, left from North Bend, to one of their questions in the Battle of the Books Wednesday afternoon. They were competing against a team from Marshfield, Team Anderson. Four teams from each school competed. excitedly to get the answer within 15 seconds. Their teammates mouthed the answers to each other in the audience. While Wednesday’s rivalry was just practice, North Bend’s four teams snagged most of the points. Overall they swept the Pirates 225-125. “We talk about them, do test questions and our coach asks us questions,” said Lyrra Isanberg, spokesperson for Royala Morgan, Coquille Duane Beyer, Coos Bay Dorothy Lawson, Reedsport Linda Haney, Lakeside Frances Howard, Reedsport Imogene Humphrey, Reedsport
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By Thomas Moriarty, The World
Members of the SWOCC baseball team comb Lighthouse Beach for pieces of foam from a washed-up dock Wednesday afternoon near Charleston.
DEATHS
SALEM — State lawmakers grilled the leader of Oregon’s troubled health insurance exchange Wednesday about whether Cover Oregon’s technology and reputation can ever recover from widespread problems with an online enrollment system. Legislators said they’re concerned the problems will deter people from signing up, endangering the exchange’s long-term viability. “We have a disaster on our hands, and it’s going to be very hard to spin this in a way that the public is going to want to get excited about it,” said Rep. Jim Thompson, a Republican from Dallas who has long supported the exchange. Dr. Bruce Goldberg, acting director of Cover Oregon, said he’s planning for contingencies in case Oracle Corp., the state’s primary technology contractor, can’t fix the system in the next two months or very few people enroll in coverage. Federal grants are funding Cover Oregon through the end of the year, but the organization will have to be self-sustaining by 2015 or ask the Legislature for money. Cover Oregon is funded through an assessment on every insurance plan it sells, so it can’t survive unless people sign up. “We can only speculate about the ability to repair the credibility or not,” Goldberg said. “To do so is certainly going to take a tremendous amount of hard work over the coming months.” Several Republican lawmakers asked whether it’s time to drop Cover Oregon and have the federal government run Oregon’s exchange instead, as it does for 36 other states. One of them, Rep. Jason Conger, R-Bend, who voted to create a state-based exchange in 2011 and is running for U.S. Senate, said he’s “lost faith” in Cover Oregon’s ability to fix the problems. In a letter Wednesday, he urged Gov. John Kitzhaber to close it down. “I don’t believe any more that it’s going to happen tomorrow or the next day or in six months,” Conger
Marshfield’s Team Curtis. “The ones we get wrong we go back and look for the answers. It helps to read the books multiple times, but you don’t necessarily have to.” While Marshfield lagged behind for most of the evening, Isanberg brought the heat in the final round, nearly SEE BATTLE | A8
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