NPR News

OLYMPIA, Wash. – Washington lawmakers are headed home for the holidays. The legislature adjourned its special session Wednesday afternoon after taking a nearly $500 million bite out of the state budget gap.

Washington Governor Chris Gregoire called lawmakers back for 30 days to close a $2 billion hole. Instead, they stayed 17 and addressed about a quarter of the problem.

THURSTON COUNTY, Wash. – The bodies of four Washington-based Army helicopter pilots have been recovered from the wreckage of two military choppers that went down on a training flight. The crash happened Monday night under reportedly clear skies over Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

An Army spokesman says the pilots were flying OH-58 Kiowa helicopters and would have been using night vision goggles. It's not clear yet if this was a mid-air collision.

Retired Kiowa pilot Justin Rich says flying with night vision is like looking through a paper towel tube.

Good morning.

Our early headlines:

-- Fate Of Payroll Tax Cut, Jobless Benefits Uncertain As Lawmakers Haggle.

-- 'The Protester' Is 'Time' Magazine's Person Of The Year.

SALEM, Ore. - In coming days, the state of Oregon is going to start turning away new applicants to several social service programs. The move was announced Tuesday as part of a series of temporary cost-cutting measures that will be in place at least until lawmakers gather at the capitol in February.

Oregon's legislative budget writers and Governor John Kitzhaber say the state can't afford to wait to do something about dwindling revenues. They announced a hiring freeze that includes putting a hold on state police recruit classes.

OLYMPIA, Wash. - Washington Governor Chris Gregoire wants to put teeth into a statewide system for evaluating teachers and principals. In Olympia Tuesday, Gregoire said she'll ask the Legislature to approve a new four tier performance rating. It would go from unsatisfactory, to basic, to proficient, and top out at distinguished.

The governor wants the law to require educators in the two lowest tiers improve within a year or be fired.

Mike Naumes thinks Oregon schoolchildren should be eating more Oregon pears. And not just the D'Anjou, Bartlett and Bosc pears approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's School Lunch Program, but the lesser-known Comice pears of southern Oregon's Rogue Valley.

Anyone who's ever tasted a Comice pear would have a hard time arguing with that. They're fat and green, extraordinarily sweet and juicy — a world apart from your typical supermarket pear.

A bill before Congress that would allow some types of "robocalls" to be made to cellphones if consumers have given companies their numbers doesn't have many sponsors and wouldn't seem to be the kind of legislation that would stand much of a chance of passing when an election year looms.

But it's getting an increasing amount of attention this week thanks to something that's very rare these days — bipartisan opposition.

This just in: After 15 years of deliberation, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has yet to decide whether it will approve a genetically modified salmon for human consumption.

Now there's a catchy lead. But the truth is, the long-running regulatory saga of AquaBounty's application to sell salmon with a growth hormone gene from one fish plus an antifreeze gene from another — which help it grow twice as fast as typical farmed salmon — does not seem headed toward a conclusion.

The news that scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland will talk Tuesday at 8 a.m. ET about "the status of their searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson" has reignited speculation that they might be about to say they've found the so-called God particle.

A cold air inversion concentrated east of the Cascades is keeping the air clogged with tiny particles. And public health officials in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho warn that people trying to warm up in front of wood fires could make the pollution worse.

Here's what's going on in the atmosphere: Usually, air temperature decreases as you get higher. But in an air inversion, the opposite happens. And the warmer air acts like a lid, keeping particles concentrated near the surface.

USA Today, ESPN, The St.

What is it with kale? That's what one of our producers asked this week, after hearing about the "Eat More Kale" standoff between Vermont t-shirt maker Bo Muller-Moore and the fast-food chain Chick-fil-A. (Check this story on last night's All Things Considered for more details.)

It's true that kale seems to be enjoying a certain limelight these days, and not just because Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin was willing to say publicly, "Don't mess with kale."

Dozens of Fortune 500 companies paid no net state income taxes over the past three years, including one in the Pacific Northwest. That's one of the findings of a report issued Wednesday by a liberal think tank.

The report examined federal Securities and Exchange Commission filings from the more than half of Fortune 500 companies that reported profits over the past three years.

Those filings show how much each company paid in state income taxes nationwide. The results varied widely, even among companies in the same industry.

The U.S. Senate heard testimony Tuesday on protecting whistleblowers who work on federal projects. A key witness was the well-known Hanford Nuclear Reservation whistleblower Walt Tamosaitis.

He testified he was taken out of his high-level management role on Hanford's waste treatment plant after he raised safety concerns. He now works in a basement office.

Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill asked Tamosaitis what effect that has had on the larger project.

RICHLAND, Wash. – The Hanford Nuclear Reservation is treating more contaminated groundwater than ever before. In November alone, pumping stations at the southeast Washington site churned out a record 100 million gallons of treated groundwater. That could fill more than 150 Olympic-size swimming pools.

Deep beneath Hanford there are massive plumes of contaminated groundwater inching toward the Columbia River. The plumes carry toxic stuff like radioactive contamination and hexavalent chromium.