Oregon

Three climbers can thank their black Labrador for keeping them warm until their rescue from Oregon's highest peak Monday, a day after they had slipped and fallen into a crevasse. One rescuer said the dog, Velvet, had played a critical role in keeping the man and two women warm enough in "hellacious" winds and heavy snow on Mt. Hood.

In a plan to curb global warming, five governors from Western states agreed Monday to work together to set a regional cap this year on carbon dioxide emissions, and join forces in a market-based emissions trading program within 18 months. The agreement came as the largest utility in Texas, TXU Corp.

Backers of a proposal to allow terminally ill Californians to hasten their deaths with lethal drugs pointed Thursday to legalized assisted suicide in Oregon, where a new report shows it is used sparingly. Forty-six Oregon residents, most of them cancer patients, used the law to end their lives in 2006, according to the Oregon Department of Human Services' ninth annual report on the so-called Death with Dignity Act that voters there passed in 1994. That law is unique in the country.

Fourteen months ago, Tom McDonald heard the news no one wants to hear. At 76, he was an active retiree who lived in a comfortable ranch house overlooking Lake Oroville, north of Sacramento, a good-looking man with a luxuriant head of silver hair and an outdoorsman's ruddy, fleshy face. He and his second wife, Dolores, traveled the West Coast in their 28-foot RV, took weekend jaunts to Tahoe, lounged with friends and family on their "party barge." Tom went trout fishing. He invented gadgets.

As the director of the veterans' facility explains it, he was simply complying with a request from national headquarters for a "comprehensive self-report" on any maintenance problems at the World War II-era complex near Medford, Ore. There was a periodic problem with bats and the occasional leaky roof, the assessment noted.

An Oregon man on vacation with his family was arrested for putting two of his four children in a car trunk because the vehicle was too small to hold all of them, police said. Children age 12 and 13 had ridden in the trunk for about 20 miles, police said.

Jackson County is closing its 15 libraries because the accustomed federal timber payments used to sustain them are in doubt. County commissioners decided on the closures after Congress failed to renew the timber payments program that paid the county $23 million a year. Other agencies also will see cutbacks.

"YOU want to try a bat hang?" Tim asks and flips over in his harness. His feet point straight up. We're about halfway up a 60-foot black walnut, dangling from a combination of ropes, knots and carabiners. Tim's been doing this for 13 years; I've been at it about 24 hours. What the heck. I flip. Oregon is upside-down, and this, this is all the joy of childhood, of knobby knees thrown over a branch, of hair dangling toward the grass.

It's more of a land-creep than a landslide. The stretch of hillside started to move 53 years ago, then stopped. In January, it started to move again at the rate of about an inch a day. Now, 600 million pounds of earth and debris are making their way down the hill toward the Columbia River, in sight of the Astoria-Megler Bridge that links Oregon and Washington. "It's a wedge of land moving down," said Ken Cook, public works director in this town of about 10,000 people.

A bill giving Oregon's gay and lesbian couples the benefits of marriage through domestic partnerships won legislative approval Wednesday. The Senate endorsed the measure 21 to 9, sending it to Gov. Ted Kulongoski. The governor supports gay rights, and he said he would sign the bill along with one passed earlier to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation.