A muggle-friendly news summary.

[July 18th, 2007]

From the "where are they now?" department: Former Trail Blazers president and Portland Family Entertainment co-founder Marshall Glickman left town a few years ago after PFE's ownership of the Portland Beavers and Timbers didn't exactly pan out (although PFE's renovation of PGE Park did turn out to be a genuine asset for the city). Glickman is in Boston now and last week announced that his company G2 Strategic has struck a deal to help two ATP tennis tournaments in Germany sell their tickets. Glickman couldn't be reached for comment.

As first reported on WWire, a man accused of beating and strangling his live-in boyfriend to death and then keeping the body in a bathtub on ice has been sentenced to 22 1/2 years in prison. In a plea deal with prosecutors, Jeffery Scott Rogers, 37, pleaded no contest to first-degree manslaughter and second-degree abuse of a corpse in the 2006 killing of 50-year-old amateur musician Timothy Gripp in the couple's Southeast Portland home (as reported last week with "In Cold Blood"). Rogers had faced murder charges that could have meant a life sentence with no parole for 25 years, if he'd been convicted. The lead investigator told WW after the sentencing July 16 in Multnomah County Circuit Court that Rogers may have tried to preserve the body because he lacked a car to take it away.

A comparison of Portland's homeless population reveals a 70 percent drop in the number of people the city considers chronically homeless. But there is one caveat in the sharp decline from 1,284 people in 2005 to 386 in 2007, according to Heather Lyons, Portland's homeless-program manager. A person who is chronically homeless has lived on the streets for one year or more, has had repeated episodes of living on the streets and has a disability under the federal definition. In 2005, the city used a looser definition of disability—which included homeless people with self-identified disabilities —in its chronically homeless count. In 2007, they tightened the category to folks with certified disabilities . But Lyons says she considers the 70 percent decline to still be an accurate estimation.

Presidential horse-race alert: Second-quarter fundraising in Oregon for White House candidates shows the Beaver State making a splash in the big national multimillion-dollar puddle of partisan money-grabbing. This quarter's champ: former Democratic Sen. John Edwards, who pulled in $148,000 from Oregonians in the past three months ending June 30. Behind him are Republican Mitt Romney ($113,000) and Democratic Sens. Hillary Clinton ($97,000) and Barack Obama ($66,000). Romney's still Oregon's overall money leader, with a total of $325,000. Reminder: All this 2007 fund-raising is for the 2008 election.

Will the last Republican who thinks President Bush's Iraq war was a good idea please stand up? The latest in a string of GOP-ers—such as Oregon Sen. Gordon Smith, Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander and Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar—distancing themselves from the quagmire now seems to include Oregon's lone Republican in the House, Rep. Greg Walden of the 2nd Congressional District. The Medford Mail Tribune reports that at a July 4 town hall meeting in Medford, Walden defended his support of the war but also blamed problems with the conflict on poor intelligence and poor planning. But more surprisingly, Walden went on to say that if he'd known then what he knows now, he'd have voted differently on the invasion. Repeated calls to Walden's office for comment weren't returned.

Score two victories in recent weeks for Oregon's second largest union. On top of Service Employees International Union Local 503's sealing a two-year deal last week with the state for 18,000 workers, the union got a win from the Employment Relations Board. The board on June 28 denied a bid by a splinter group calling itself the Oregon Workers Union to break away with 1,900 workers. The would-be OWU, mainly representing workers from the state Highway Division, petitioned to leave SEIU because it believed the big union to be "ineffective and undemocratic." No hard feelings, though, says the OWU's Craig Chadwick. "I'm going to try and make the only horse we got work,'' he says, referring to SEIU.