Oregon
Oregon man called for jury duty, turns up to court in drag: “Not illegal”
A man in Oregon who was called up for jury duty decided to liven things up by going to court dressed in drag.
Comedian, actor and host Kyle Prosen has made quite a name for himself under the guise of his drag queen persona, Poly Poptart.
Since 2020, Prosen has also garnered attention for his impression of former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin, which he describes as a “product of boredom during the pandemic.” “I’ve hosted entire shows in character as Sarah Palin and done stand up comedy sets as her,” he said.
But while the occasional stand-up show or guest appearance is one thing, Prosen never imagined he would one day be heading to court in Oregon dressed in drag as the former Republican vice presidential pick.
“The night before, I was at my friend Josh’s house watching TV, and he mentioned that I should go to jury duty the next day in drag,” Prosen said.
He said he initially laughed off the suggestion telling his friend: “Yeah, if I would, I would do Sarah Palin.” However, his friend was adamant it was “such a good idea that he wouldn’t let it go.”
Prosen, who has performed countless times as Poly Poptart, eventually relented, but decided if he was going to do it, he was going to do it properly. “Commitment to the bit is my middle name and I say it often,” Prosen said.
The next day he woke at 5:30 a.m. and got himself into his drag outfit, admitting it “fit a little more snugly” than he remembered. Prosen was keen to document the experience, so he had a camera on hand throughout, with the resulting clip posted to his Poly Poptart TikTok account.
In the video, Prosen explains that he had checked and it was “not illegal” to dress in drag for jury duty. “My friend is a judge, and I asked him if dressing up in drag was against the law. As much as I’m committed to the bit, I’m also painfully risk averse,” Prosen said.
‘Guidance on Etiquette’
A spokesperson for the Oregon Judicial Department told Newsweek: “To help ensure that court facilities remain a space of respect and safety, Oregon’s state courts provide guidance on etiquette. Jurors are encouraged to dress comfortably – suits and ties or dresses are not required – and should wear clothes that are clean and do not display foul language, insults, or other negative words. Court rules note the expectation that, ‘All persons attending court … must be dressed so as not to detract from the dignity of court.’”
Walking towards the courthouse and waiting in line, Prosen might have expected his appearance to generate some strong reactions. However, he said the response was negligible.
“It was interesting seeing people’s reactions,” he said. “Portland is very non-confrontational and obsessed with being politically correct. I think people were too professional to want to comment on how someone shows up for civic service. That, or it was just too early to deal with another Portland weirdo’s antics.”
In the end, the court dismissed all of the jurors who were given a number above 110 and Prosen was in the 130s. “The whole day was underwhelming,” he said. “I sat through all the jury things, and was hoping to get at least interviewed by someone, but they didn’t even get to my juror number.”
It was only later, when he posted his video to TikTok, that the biggest reactions were seen. At the time of writing it had been watched close to 700,000 times, with viewers full of praise for Prosen’s antics.
“I was not prepared for Sarah Palin,” one viewer wrote. “I would absolutely do jury duty with you!!! How fun!” a second commented, with a third adding: “You still dressed nicer than 99% of the people I was on the jury with when I did Jury Duty. I was the only one that got the business casual memo.”
“I always learn something about America when I have a post go viral,” Prosen said. “What people are stressed out by, or impressed by. The emotions or fears or burdens they carry. After this, I learned that people were desperate to release some of the political stress they have carried this election season.”
Prosen admits he was “a little scared” that Poly Poptart’s antics would reach “extremist” corners of the internet. Drag events have drawn criticism from some quarters. Last year, GLAAD, the world’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) media advocacy organization, highlighted 161 incidents of anti-LGBTQ protests and threats targeting drag events since early 2022.
Thankfully there was no backlash. In fact, his experience that day has give him “a little more faith” in the idea of America as the land of the free.
“As much as I played a joke during the video, my day at jury duty was actually very empowering, and gave me a lot of hope in the American legal system, of democracy, and American freedom,” Prosen said. “We, as citizens, get to show up how we want or are, and decide cases. The law should apply to everyone, and the law should be able to be interpreted by the average American system.”
Prosen hasn’t ruled out doing it again, though possibly as Poly Poptart next time rather than Sarah Palin.
Oregon
Family of security guard shot and killed at Portland, Oregon, hospital sues facility for $35M
The family of a security guard who was shot and killed at a hospital in Portland, Oregon, sued the facility for $35 million on Tuesday, accusing it of negligence and failing to respond to the dangers that the gunman posed to hospital staff over multiple days.
In a wrongful death complaint filed Tuesday, the estate of Bobby Smallwood argued that Legacy Good Samaritan Medical Center failed to enforce its policies against violence and weapons in the workplace by not barring the shooter from the facility, despite staff reporting threats and aggression toward them in the days before the shooting.
“The repeated failures of Legacy Good Samaritan to follow their own safety protocols directly led to the tragically preventable death of Bobby Smallwood,” Tom D’Amore, the attorney representing the family, said in a statement. “Despite documented threats and abusive behavior that required immediate removal under hospital policy, Legacy allowed a dangerous individual to remain on the premises for three days until those threats escalated to violence.”
In an email, Legacy Health said it was unable to comment on pending litigation.
The shooting at Legacy Good Samaritan Medical Center in Portland was part of a wave of gun violence sweeping through U.S. hospitals and medical centers, which have struggled to adapt to the growing threats. Such attacks have helped make health care one of the nation’s most violent fields. Health care workers racked up 73% of all nonfatal workplace violence injuries in 2018, the most recent year for which figures are available, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The gunman at the Portland hospital, PoniaX Calles, first visited the facility on July 19, 2023, as his partner was about to give birth. On July 20 and July 21, nursing staff and security guards filed multiple incident reports describing outbursts, violent behavior and threats, but they weren’t accessible or provided to workers who were interacting with him, according to the complaint.
On July 22, nurse supervisors decided to remove Calles from his partner’s room, and Smallwood accompanied him to the waiting room area outside the maternity ward. Other security guards searching the room found two loaded firearms in a duffel bag, and his partner told them he likely had a third gun on his person, the complaint said.
According to the complaint, over 40 minutes passed between the discovery of the duffel bag and Smallwood’s death. Two minutes before he was shot, a security guard used hand gestures through glass doors to notify him that Calles was armed. Smallwood then told Calles he would pat him down, but Calles said he would leave instead. Smallwood began escorting him out of the hospital, and as other staff members approached them, Calles shot Smallwood in the neck.
The hospital did not call a “code silver,” the emergency code for an active shooter, until after Smallwood had been shot, the complaint said.
Smallwood’s family said his death has profoundly impacted them.
“Every day we grieve the loss of our son and all the years ahead that should have been his to live,” his parents, Walter “Bob” and Tammy Smallwood, said in the statement released by their attorney. “Nothing can bring Bobby back, but we will not stop fighting until Legacy is held fully responsible for what they took from our family.”
After the shooting, Legacy said it planned to install additional metal detectors; require bag searches at every hospital; equip more security officers with stun guns; and apply bullet-slowing film to some interior glass and at main entrances.
Around 40 states have passed laws creating or increasing penalties for violence against health care workers, according to the American Nurses Association. Hospitals have armed security officers with batons, stun guns or handguns, while some states allow hospitals to create their own police forces.
Oregon
Oregon geologist looks to volcanic rock to store carbon dioxide as tool to fight climate change • Oregon Capital Chronicle
Layers of volcanic rock in eastern Oregon, the Willamette Valley and the Columbia Basin have created fertile soil for farming and ranching, but in the future it could provide fruitful ground for a whole other industry designed to fight climate change.
Oregon’s state geologist is pitching a novel idea of using the region’s rocky basalt layer – born of lava that flowed millions of years ago from cracks in the Earth’s crust – to be a bank for storing planet-warming carbon dioxide.
Ruarri Day-Stirrat, state geologist and executive director of the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries, discussed the potential for geologic carbon sequestration at a State Land Board meeting in Salem last month, and will seek funding to begin investigating potential sites in eastern Oregon. It involves using machines to capture carbon dioxide from the air or to capture it directly from a source like a big livestock operation or a factory, turning it into a solid mineral and storing it in rocky layers deep in the earth. The strategy is still a very new one, and so far not cost-effective or scalable in the fight against climate change. But places like Oregon, Washington and Iceland that have lots of volcanic rock are unique in their potential to store carbon deep underground.
“At the moment, it’s definitely in that seed idea,” Day-Stirrat told the Capital Chronicle. “We want to drill a stratigraphic test well to understand whether it’s even plausible – not even feasible – but plausible.”
At the encouragement of the State Land Board – which includes Gov. Tina Kotek, Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade and state Treasurer Tobias Read – he’ll present the idea to the state Legislature in January and start to raise funding.
There’s potential to store more than 14,000 megatons of carbon dioxide in the basalt beneath Oregon and Washington, according to a 2013 U.S. Geological Survey study. That’s equivalent to more than 200 years worth of carbon dioxide emissions from Oregonians and Oregon industry. In eastern Oregon, quite a bit of that rocky layer is deep beneath land owned by the state, which is where Day-Stirrat sees the greatest potential for development.
But it’s expensive to drill and develop a project, and could be counterintuitive to the mission of reducing pollution and slowing climate change if energy must be used to capture the carbon dioxide, mineralize it and to inject it into the ground. Modeling from the En-ROADS simulator developed by the nonprofit Climate Interactive and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows that direct carbon capture and storage is not the most effective way to spend money in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and it would be far more effective in the next 75 years to spend money to decarbonize the energy sector and to tax polluters.
“We should be investigating a lot of different solutions. And yes, each project has more or less cost. And at the moment, we’re probably doing all the cheap ones, and they’re cheap for a reason,” Day-Stirrat said.
Northwest projects
Some direct air capture and geologic carbon storage projects are already underway. In the Dalles, Google is building its own $20 million direct carbon capture facility. The University of Wyoming is also running a test project near Hermiston, with more than $10 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to eventually capture carbon dioxide emissions from a natural gas plant, mineralize them and inject them into underground basalt.
In those facilities, a chemical filter grabs or locks carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and holds onto it until it is isolated, turned to a solid and then injected into the earth.
Test projects are also happening in Washington, and a consortium that includes the Rocky Mountain Institute, a Colorado-based climate nonprofit, and the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries is trying to create a direct carbon capture and storage hub in the Northwest.
To initiate a project in eastern Oregon, Day-Stirrat said his agency needs to be able to drill more than 3,500 feet beneath the ground to see how deep the water table is, where water flow zones are and if there are any plausible areas to store mineralized carbon and if it’s possible to get the mineralized carbon that deep. Standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency do not allow any geologic carbon sequestration to happen in an area where water could be compromised, Day-Stirrat said.
“Direct air capture still has a ways to go. But there’s a lot of research and development money going into understanding the technology and what the scale up globally could look like,” he said.
Day-Stirrat, 45, said he expects in his lifetime to see it used as a tool for reducing emissions and slowing the worst outcomes of climate change.
“I’d be disappointed if it doesn’t,” he said.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
Oregon
South Central Oregon Cascades and Siskiyou Mountains and Southern Oregon Cascades under a winter weather advisory until Tuesday morning – up to 6 inches of snow
On Monday at 8:32 p.m. the National Weather Service issued a winter weather advisory in effect until Tuesday at 10 a.m. for South Central Oregon Cascades and Siskiyou Mountains and Southern Oregon Cascades.
The weather service says to anticipate, “Snow above 5000 feet. Additional snow accumulations between 3 and 6 inches. Winds gusting as high as 35 mph.”
“Plan on slippery road conditions. The hazardous conditions could impact the Tuesday morning commute,” adds the weather service. “Slow down and use caution while traveling.”
Winter driving guide: Tips from the weather service for safe and sound travels
Winter’s icy grip often turns roads treacherous, leading to over 6,000 weather-related vehicle fatalities and more than 480,000 injuries each year. When you find yourself on snowy or freezing rain-slicked roads, your top priority should be safety. Slow down and exercise caution. In temperatures near freezing, it’s prudent to assume icy patches on the road and adjust your driving accordingly. Be on alert for ice accumulating on power lines and tree branches, as they may break and fall. If possible, avoid driving in these conditions altogether. But if you must venture out, choose routes with fewer trees and power lines, and never touch a downed power line. If you encounter one, dial 911 immediately. Here are additional winter weather driving tips:
Share your travel plans:
When traveling out of town in hazardous winter weather, inform your family or friends of your destination, planned route, and estimated time of arrival.
Prepare your vehicle:
Ensure your gas tank is full and equip your vehicle with essential winter supplies, including a windshield scraper, jumper cables, a small shovel, flashlight, cell phone, blanket, extra warm clothing, drinking water, and high-calorie non-perishable food.
Stay calm when stranded:
If you become stranded, stay composed. Notify someone about your situation and location. Avoid attempting to walk to safety. Attach a cloth to your car’s antenna or mirror to signal that you require assistance. Make your vehicle more visible by using the dome light and flashers.
Be mindful of snow plows:
Keep an eye out for snow plows and allow them ample room to pass. Only overtake a plow when you have a clear view of the road ahead.
Check road conditions:
Before embarking on your journey, verify the current road conditions to make informed travel decisions.
These winter driving tips from the weather service are your key to a safer journey on snow-covered roads. By following these guidelines, you can significantly reduce the risk of accidents and ensure your well-being during challenging winter weather.
Advance Local Weather Alerts is a service provided by United Robots, which uses machine learning to compile the latest data from the National Weather Service.
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