More than 15 years ago, the Portland Fire Bureau was locked into a conflict nearly identical to a July Supreme Court case involving New Haven, Conn. firefighters: Would it be acceptable to hire or promote minority firefighters from a separate testing list than their White colleagues? While diversity has increased since that time – in 1994, only 2 percent of the Fire Bureau were African Americans – change has been slow....

State Sen. and former Representative Chip Shields has endorsed Lew Frederick for appointment to fill his unexpired term in the State House of Representatives. 

SEATTLE (AP) -- The state Department of Social and Health Services has hired a Muslim consultant to provide cultural and dietary advice to foster parents for seven children taken from the Seattle home of an Ethiopian refugee...

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) -- A survey by The Oregonian has found that most of the estimated 2,400 new teachers who graduated from Oregon colleges this year were unable to get hired anywhere in the state...

The effort to recall Mayor Sam Adams failed Monday, when the campaign failed to collect 32,183 signatures – the number necessary to force a special recall election within the regulation 90-day window.

Oregon Health & Science University is limiting visitors younger than 12 to many of its inpatient units and begin screening all visitors for the presence of an influenza-like illness.

SALEM, Ore. (AP) -- John Kitzhaber and Bill Bradbury go back quite a ways. When Kitzhaber was governor, he appointed Bradbury as Oregon secretary of state in 1999. They are close friends, so close that Kitzhaber jokingly dubbed the tall and lanky Bradbury the "Big Chinook," after Bradbury's advocacy of Oregon's iconic fish ...

Three million current or former Washington residents have a stake in $700 million in unclaimed property being held by the Washington State Department of Revenue. You may be one of them.

Paddling the Willamette River can be both a serene and chaotic experience – migrating cormorants, blue herons and other water fowl; the concrete, steel and wood remains of Portland's industrial past; the toxic dead zones and Superfund sites along the river.Oregon Attorney General John Kroger is leading the state's fight against pollution with the office's first ever unit designed to investigate the state's biggest environmental crimes perpetrators...

Washington state's 2008 payday lending statistics show a downturn in the number of payday loan companies, but an increase in the use of their services over the past two years.