While most of us were busy making plans for New Year’s Eve, Bill Anthony was packing boxes and making plans for the rest of his life. Or, if he followed his wife’s advice, Anthony was resisting the temptation to make plans.

Anthony officially retired from the U.S. Forest Service at the end of the year, ending a three-decade career that culminated with a 14-year stint as the district ranger for the Sisters area. His departure marks the end of one of the more notable, and in some ways unlikely, forestry careers that saw Anthony transform the way people think about forestry with pioneering consensus-based projects that turned critics into collaborators and allies.

“He took the changing mission of the Forest Service to heart and is probably one of the most innovative and creative district rangers that I’ve ever met,” said Tim Lillebo, field organizer for Oregon Wild and a longtime forest activist in Central Oregon.

If you tell Siri you’ve been raped, she wouldn’t tell you to go to a hospital, or to the police. If you tell Siri you want some Viagra, she knows where you could get it.

Tech and feminist blogs recently erupted with a startling story: Siri, the iPhone 4 app that responds to voice queries with preprogrammed or search-engine-based replies, refused to direct its users to abortion clinics. Not only that: Apple’s Siri seems programmed to respond to sexual or sex-related questions almost invariably as if the user were a certain kind of cisgender man.

If you tell Siri you’ve been raped, she wouldn’t tell you to go to a hospital, or to the police; if you tell Siri you want some Viagra, she knows where you could get it. If you tell Siri you want “a blow job,” she looks up escorts for you; if you tell her that you “want your pussy eaten,” she'll direct you to pet stores. (Also, she knows the word “dick,” but not the word “clitoris.”)

The Sandra Meyer Murder

The Sandra Meyer tragedy is one that we add reluctantly to this list out of respect to Meyer’s family members who endured much during the nearly month-long search for the missing Bend woman. Meyer’s mysterious disappearance became a matter of public discussion after family members and police called on the public to help locate her. Family members erected a billboard on the Parkway emblazoned with Meyer’s image and police searched the river around the Old Mill where Meyer’s car was found. Suspicion quickly turned to her husband John Meyer who later shot himself in the couple’s home. Still, Meyer’s family was left in limbo after police found evidence that she had been murdered, but failed to turn up her body. The case came to a shocking and sad conclusion when Meyer’s family members discovered her body on the couple’s property almost a month after the crime. It was an area that police had supposedly scoured thoroughly. Friends have memorialized Meyer by dedicating a room in her honor at the Bend women’s shelter, Saving Grace.

Around conference tables and in city council chambers around the state, elected officials and finance officers are asking themselves how cash-strapped public employers will fund health care premiums that have been promised to future retirees.

In Oregon, it’s a $3 billion question as health care costs continue to rise and an aging and benefit-rich public workforce edges closer to retirement.

For years, school boards, county commissioners and budget officers opted to forestall dealing with the looming issue of so-called other post-employment benefits. But that’s changing as organizations wrestle with the reality of shrinking revenues and growing expenses related to retiree health care.

Unlike the public employee pension system, or PERS, there is no centralized system for funding these benefits, which were traditionally offered as part of the overall compensation package. In most cases, cities, counties and schools agreed to fund health care premiums for retirees from the time they stop working until they reach age 65 when they become eligible for Medicare benefits. That can vary greatly from employee to employee and organization to organization, but the cost is significant.