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Payment spat leads to a mess
cross-hairs once again
OREGON’S ELEMENTARY PRINCIPAL OF THE YEAR
Bruce Reynolds
By Keith Chu The Bulletin
Dog waste disposal company’s manager is arrested in Bend By Erin Golden
IN THE SENATE
The Bulletin
A payment dispute between a customer and the owner of a Bend dog waste disposal business turned into a messy situation Monday evening, when the business owner was arrested after dumping 30 gallons of dog waste on the customer’s lawn and in her garage. Bend police were dispatched to a home in southeast Bend around 5:15 p.m. after the customer, Deborah Dillow, called to report that the woman she’d hired to clean up after her SharPeis had backed up her truck to the garage and started tossing out bags of waste. Melinda Hofmann, who runs a business called The Bomb Squad, said she cleaned up Dillow’s yard three times, beginning in March. But over the last few weeks, the deal turned sour when Dillow didn’t pay about $150 she owed Hofmann. Dillow said she wants to pay but fell behind because of medical issues and a death in the family. On Monday evening, Hofmann put a casserole in the oven and headed out to take her dogs to the park. She said she didn’t plan to stop by Dillow’s house, but when she realized she’d be passing by, she thought she’d go ask for the money again. Hofmann rang the doorbell. When she didn’t get a response, she decided to take matters into her own hands. “I didn’t really even think about it much,” she said. “I just decided to give her back her poop.” See Mess / A4
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won the award.
and students,” said R.E. Jewell Elementary
Along with other state principals’ of the year,
School Principal Bruce Reynolds, at an as-
Reynolds will be invited for a visit with Presi-
sembly held Tuesday to announce he had been
dent Barack Obama next year.
named Oregon’s Elementary Principal of the Year.
“I will need help coming up with what to say,” Reynolds said of his upcoming meeting with
Students, school staff and Reynolds’ wife, the president. Reynolds, 53, has been principal Tracy, organized the assembly as a surprise
at Jewell for seven years and has worked for
for the principal, who did not know he had
Bend-La Pine Schools since 1978.
More unmarried couples are living together in India By Rama Lakshmi The Washington Post
The very sight of sickness fires up an immune response, study says LOS ANGELES — Next time you glare at someone for sneezing near you in an elevator, be sure to look long and hard at the offending germspreader: it may protect you from getting what he or she has. A new study published this month in Psychological Science
suggests that the very sight of sickness prompts the immune system to mount defenses against illness. That finding follows naturally from earlier research suggesting that disgust — the typical first reaction we have to a person with, say, open sores — may be part of a “behavioral immune system.” See Immunity / A4
Subjects who had watched the disease fright fest, their levels of IL-6 rose almost 25 percent higher than their pre-slideshow levels.
NEW DELHI — About three years ago, Arushi Singh and her boyfriend began looking for an apartment to rent together. They found the perfect place, with a balcony and big lawn, in a posh area of India’s capital. But when they went to sign the lease, the landlady demanded to know whether they were married. “We said no,” recalled Singh, 26, who moved here from another city for her job as a public health advocate. “She frowned and asked for a letter from my father stating that he approves.” The couple walked out. They eventually found another place but this time kept their marital status to themselves. “Things have changed,” Singh said. “Young people today have the ability to make decisions that are not linked to their parents’ beliefs.” In a nation that frowns on premarital sex and prefers arranged marriages, more young, unmarried couples are choosing to live together, oftentimes quietly. See Unmarried / A5
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By Melissa Healy
GOLDMAN SACHS: Executives deny any wrongdoing, Page A3
WASHINGTON — Stamping out the U.S. Senate tactic called “secret holds” is a little like killing cockroaches: just when they seem like they’re gone, they come back even stronger. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., knows firsthand. He’s campaigned since 2002 against the maneuver, which lets any senator hold up any nominee or bill almost indefinitely. He and his Republican partner, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, thought they scored a major victory in 2007 when Congress adopted a package of ethics reforms that included the first limits on secret holds. But even though the provision — which was weaker than the one Wyden and Grassley originally authored — unmasked the anonymous holders six days after the hold was entered. In practice, loopholes in the rule meant that it never caused any secret hold to be revealed. Now, a few days after Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., revealed that more than 50 of President Barack Sen. Wyden Obama’s nominees were blocked by secret holds, Wyden and Grassley are trying again to get rid of the practice. “Those who want to exercise what is one of the handful of extraordinarily significant powers a senator has, shouldn’t be able to do it in secret,” Wyden said in an interview just off the Senate floor on Tuesday. See Holds / A5
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Federal records offer glimpse of risks SeaWorld whale trainers face By Jason Garcia McClatchy-Tribune News Service
ORLANDO, Fla. — Four years ago, a killer-whale trainer at SeaWorld San Diego suffered a torn ligament when an orca bit him on the ankle and pulled him underwater for nearly 30 seconds. Two years before that, a killer whale at SeaWorld San Antonio repeatedly launched itself on top of a trainer during a performance and prevented him from leaving the pool, though the trainer was not hurt. And three years before that,
another SeaWorld San Diego trainer was pulled into a tank by an orca and broke an arm.
Incidents of injury display aggression The incidents are among a handful of injuries to trainers or displays of apparent orca aggression at SeaWorld marine parks — five in all from 1999 to 2006 — chronicled by federal investigators during a 2006 probe into a trainer accident at SeaWorld San Diego. Details of the episodes, which
are contained among notes, interview transcripts and other documents compiled during that investigation and obtained by the Orlando Sentinel, offer a glimpse at the risks SeaWorld trainers face as they work with one of the world’s most powerful predators. Questions about the safety of SeaWorld’s orca trainers resurfaced after a veteran trainer at SeaWorld Orlando, Dawn Brancheau, was drowned Feb. 24 by a 12,000-pound male orca named Tilikum. See Trainers / A5
Ramirez Buxeda / McClatchy-Tribune News Service
Trainers work with the animals from shallow ledges built into the sides of its tanks at SeaWorld’s Shamu Stadium in Orlando, Fla.