New innovations in slow news weeks.

[June 22nd, 2005] WINNERS

The Downing Street memo is finally moving from mainstream newspapers' inside pages to the front pages. Now people don't have to go to left-wing blogs to learn about the prescient British warning that the Bush administration cooked weapons intelligence on Iraq before the war.

Oregon Health & Science University has landed a spot on the top-25 list of federal grant-earning medical schools, making it one of the country's best-funded research schools. That ought to make the 65 OHSU employees laid off last week feel much, much better.

Medical tokers -oops, marijuana patients-celebrated the news that Oregon would resume issuing medical-marijuana cards. The state had temporarily halted the issuance of new cards after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling confirmed that medical pot violated federal law. But the state's restart essentially says, "Hey, Supremes, kiss our bud!"

LOSERS

Last week's tsunami scare on the Oregon Coast-sparked by an offshore quake-was like a summer blockbuster: blaring sirens, streets snarled with panicky drivers, confused government officials. But in the end, the coming apocalypse is still...coming. Flaws revealed by last week's drill, from swamped 911 systems to conflicting warnings , have officials scrambling to be better prepared for the real thing.

The Oregonian's sports page got called out by the newspaper's own public editor, Michael Arrieta-Walden, for mistakenly reporting last week that the Trail Blazers had offered their coaching job to Phoenix assistant Marc Iavaroni. The late-night deadline decision to run with the story based on an anonymous source ended up backfiring.

Continuing downpours and a labor shortage have proven to Willamette Valley strawberry farmers what Beatles' fans have long known: Nothing lasts forever, not even strawberry fields. Frequent rain has soaked Oregon's fields and made for moldy, rotting berries, producing the smallest crop Oregon has yielded since 1945.