Lonnie Rouse shuffled into a wood-paneled conference room at the Washington state Capitol in March 2018. It had been nearly a decade since medical experts diagnosed him with a neurological disease they attributed to his exposure to chemicals at work. In the time since, he had acquired a stutter, begun limping and lost several teeth biting into a banana.

For nearly 20 years, Rouse had packaged plutonium and monitored radioactive waste at the Hanford Site, a now-decommissioned Department of Energy nuclear weapons production plant in south-central Washington and one of the most contaminated nuclear sites in the country. Tanks full of radioactive sludge exposed him to at least 48 potentially hazardous chemicals. The worksite was so toxic, he said, that the floor once melted the rubber off his boots.

The smell of ammonia serves as a warning, workers say, that the underground tanks holding a mix of radioactive sludge have burped chemical vapors into the air above. From 1998 to 2008, it was Rouse’s job to monitor the toxic waste held in the “tank farms.” The containers together hold more than 50 million gallons of liquid waste. Rouse says he lost count of how many times tanks released toxic vapor that took his breath away, sometimes knocking him to the ground and making him vomit and bleed from his nose. According to a 2014 report funded by the federal government, tank farm workers exposed to chemical vapors commonly reported nausea, headaches and nosebleeds.

The liquid sloshing around in those tanks represented the radioactive byproducts of the Cold War. Hanford produced two-thirds of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear arsenal and fueled the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945.

Kathleen Kersey spent 10 years at Hanford, during both the production and cleanup stages. Much of her work involved measuring radiation around the site and making sure levels were safe. She says her safety training covered radiation, but not other hazards like chemical vapors burping from the waste tanks.

Kersey struggles to walk, has short-term memory problems and at one point lost vision in her right eye for three months. A doctor diagnosed her with multiple sclerosis, which is a neurological disorder, one of the categories of illnesses the state’s presumption law recognizes as related to chemical exposure at Hanford. In 2019 she filed a claim, which the state approved.

The DOE has appealed, arguing that something other than her time at Hanford caused her multiple sclerosis.

State records show that the DOE has filed more than 500 appeals since the presumption law passed in 2018. In 20 cases, as it did with Rouse, the DOE has appealed a single worker’s claim half a dozen times or more.

“We have seen tremendous pushback from DOE on essentially almost every single case that’s been brought,” said Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown.

The day after Officer Daniel Valencia and three other Spokane police officers shot and killed a man as he fled into his apartment, he texted one of the others, Officer Matthew Stewart. In the texts, the two strategized: They needed a shared story about why they shot Joshua Musselman to death on December 29, 2024.

They gamed it out.

“So what’s the crime we were investigating yesterday?” Valencia wrote to Stewart. “Unlawful discharge? Haha.”

“Hahahahahahaha,” Stewart replied. “Being a douche lol.”

Each officer involved — Valencia, Stewart, Garth Craigen and Will Mitchell — would have to write a report about their actions and what they saw that day, so it was important their stories matched. As members of one of the deadliest police agencies in the US, which had just gotten a new boss in the form of Chief Kevin Hall — who was then working hard to restore community faith in the department — the snipers needed to make it clear they had a good reason for killing Musselman.

“Right,” Valencia replied. “But for reals. For the report. What’s the crime at that point? Unlawful discharge or are we doing a welfare check? Lol. Cuz no one developed pc. Huh? Lol.”

Stewart: “I would say unlawful discharge at this point.”

“Pc” refers to probable cause, a legal standard established in the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution requiring law enforcement officers to have a strong rationale to make an arrest, search a property or seek a warrant.

But Stewart’s texts dispute the idea that Musselman was getting ready to shoot. Stewart wrote in one of his messages sent a week after the shooting that Musselman was running “so it’s a moving target at 40 yards. Not the best.” He told Valencia this to console him because, Valencia texted, he was “really pissed off … that the two of us shot 10 rounds each and the fucker only got shot four times.”

The messages in which Valencia and Stewart strategized their reports were part of a longer string of texts that started one hour and 14 minutes after they’d killed Musselman. They were filed by Rondi Thorp, the attorney for Musselman’s family, which is suing the Spokane Police Department for the killing.

“Glad to have you next to me on a gun battle,” Valencia texted the day of the shooting, even though the officers had Musselman — who never fired his airsoft rifle while police were on the scene — dramatically outgunned with their AR-15 assault rifles. “Fuck yeah brotha. Felt a lot better when you came with me.”

Stewart: “Thanks homie. I’m glad you were there too! Makes me feel better.”

He told Stewart that the shooting had made them “Brothas for life now dogg,” according to the texts. “We’ll have to meet up and get a couple of beers now.”

Stewart described the damage the shots did to Musselman. “At least one hit him in the chest, on in the pelvic girdle, and one in the shin. There were probably more but he was all bloody.”

“I’m hoping that we hit him at least once each lol,” Valencia replied.

In his ruling, Judge Barlow noted that the statute requires a technical impossibility on pain of legal liability. “Aylo is correct that the statute, as amended, now essentially imposes strict liability for entities like it when it comes to determining the location of its websites’ users.”

The court recognized that the problem is that SB 73 “requires entities like Aylo to geolocate its website users with perfection to avoid liability.” But, at the same time, the court acknowledged “that geolocation perfection is not presently possible.”

EFF explained this technical impossibility in our comment to the Department of Commerce. VPNs protect user privacy by routing web traffic through intermediary servers. Because destination websites only see the IP address of the VPN server, they have no reliable mechanism to tell whether a connection originates from Salt Lake City, Seattle, or Shanghai. So, under Utah's current statutory framework, platforms are left with an impossible choice: completely block all VPN traffic nationwide or withdraw access from Utah entirely.

"Given its own description of the existing evidence and the circumstances of this case, the development of contrary evidence seems practically inconceivable, and the possibility of a future meritorious prosecution strikes the Court as fanciful," Edelman concluded.

Hearn's lawyers say Thursday's ruling allows him "to move forward with his life as he deserves."

The Reflecting Pool, which was drained after July 4th, remains empty and fenced off for repairs, with no public timeline for completion.

Ada County Sheriff’s Office Detective Tim Cooper in a news conference Wednesday identified Mathew Francis Betkouski, a Lockheed Martin organic chemist who worked on NASA-related projects, as the man who poisoned himself with cyanide in Sacred Heart Catholic Church and was buried without a name. The case was reopened in 2019 because a church member had asked about its progress.

The chaos and uncertainty began in the greater Chicago area in the fall of 1982, when 12-year-old Mary Kellerman died in the hospital after consuming Tylenol capsules. Six more people, all below the age of 35 and also living in the Chicago area, died the same way.

Investigators discovered the capsules were laced with a lethal dose of cyanide, leading to a widespread recall of Tylenol and immediate removal of the medication across shelves nationwide.

Referred to as the “Unknown Wanderer” before his identification, Betkouski had a documented fascination with chemistry and explosives. His odd behavior increased following a brain injury in 1974 from falling off a tall fence, Cooper said, adding that though plagued with mental illness, Betkouski was a brilliant man who struggled to connect with people.

Gas prices are still high, diesel is at a record high, and the reserve has shrunk more than 30% in six months. While the reserve held around 415 million barrels of oil in February, it now holds less than 285 million barrels of oil — lower than it has been since the early 1980s.

These rapid drawdowns of oil threaten the salt caverns' structure, says Samantha Gross, director of the energy security and climate initiative at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan policy think tank. As the reserves get lower and lower, the physical facilities can get degraded, Gross says: " You can damage them by pumping too much out of them."

"At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch... into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch," Trump wrote on the social media platform.

Trump added that the arch near the National Mall will "house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage."

With their new drive to undo the left-liberal foundations that recast them as villains and to avoid another bout of Biden-esque regulation, tech’s billionaires found in Trump the perfect political partner. Together, they forged an alliance that fused deregulation with political repression—accelerating tech’s pursuit of profit, dismantling the very agencies meant to protect workers, and slashing social protections like healthcare, all while eroding the social and political conditions that once fomented the tech workers’ revolt against them. Indeed, what defines the power of the tech oligarchy is precisely their ability to operate not just as economic but as political actors—shaping public discourse, installing politicians, setting policies, and even redefining the terms of governance itself. Ironically, the very class solidarity developed through the countless tech worker protests, open letters, and walkouts helped provoke its own gravest threat: a unified tech elite hell-bent on stamping out the movement.

• Police, fire, and medical personnel responded to a shooting at the Seattle Center on Sunday around 6 p.m. The venue had hosted hundreds of thousands of visitors over the weekend for the annual Bite of Seattle food festival.
• The three people killed in Sunday's shooting include a 19-year-old man, a 44-year-old man, and a 56-year-old woman.
• Four surviving victims were treated for their injuries and released from medical care while a fifth victim, a 2-year-old boy, remains at Harborview in satisfactory condition.
• Two guns were recovered and authorities believe at least two people may have been shooting at each other, though any motive for the shooting is unclear.
• One shooting suspect, a 15-year-old male, is in custody and police are still searching for at least one other suspect. Anyone with information is encouraged to call 206-233-5000; tips can be provided anonymously.
• A candlelight vigil in honor of the shooting victims is scheduled to take place at 8:30 p.m. on Monday at the Seattle Center's International Fountain.

Cook has openly embraced Trump, particularly in his second term, attending the president’s inauguration, presenting him with an engraved golden trophy, and giving money to the White House to help construct the president’s $300 million pet project ballroom.

The relative workplace calm may be over. “I hope we never find out, but I seriously started wondering what our leadership would do if an Apple employee was summarily executed by our government,” wondered one employee.

Many workers claimed hypocrisy between Apple’s longtime professed commitment to progressive values and causes and the extent to which its CEO has cozied up to the Trump administration. “But but but…. we changed the Apple website to MLK last Monday, so that cancels out.” Another pointed sarcastically to the company’s recent announcement of Black History Month Apple Watch bands. “Went to hang out with the guy who didn’t even acknowledge MLK Day and took away park access on the day,” commented one worker.

For some, the affront was personal. “As a lifelong Minnesotan and an Apple badged employee for over half my life I feel pretty abandoned by the company that has told me it stands for humanity more times than I can count,” wrote another worker. “Silence on ICE violence speaks volumes.” Another pointed out the “Three retail locations in the Twin Cities and not a peep” from Cook. “This isn’t leadership. This is an absence of leadership.” To which a colleague quickly countered: “I disagree, this IS leadership. This is intentional, nobody travels to the white house by mistake.”

An Apple employee who has spent decades at the company said they had noticed a marked cultural and political shift within Apple under Cook’s tenure. “A lot of people are talking about how Steve Jobs would have never given a gold bar to a politician,” referring to the 24-karat gold trophy Cook presented Trump at the White House in August.

There is something destabilizing about having known someone only as a child and then hearing they were gunned down in the street. The person you see in your mind lying in that street is still a child. I’m sure his mother feels that way, too, or she sees him at every age all at once, including those he did not live to see.

After Alex was wrestled down to the ground, and after a federal agent pulled the trigger and Alex went still, nine more shots were fired into his body. I keep reading reports that there was a struggle before the first gunshot, but all I see is a person trying to keep his head off the ground while seven masked men surround and beat him. Certainly, through his training as an ICU nurse, he knew that it was important to protect his head. Once in the old neighborhood, when he was seven or eight, he’d fallen off his bike, his helmet splitting cleanly in half like a cantaloupe. He showed the halves to all the neighbor kids as a way to warn them to never ride without one.

The lies being told about him by America’s most powerful people are flagrantly incongruous to anyone who watches the videos. He doesn’t reach for his weapon at his waistband, which he had the legal right to carry, and which an agent removed from him before they killed him. He was not approaching the officers when they pepper-sprayed him and tackled him to the ground. He was helping up a woman who those same agents had just shoved to the curb.

The other video that’s gone most viral of Alex shows him providing a final salute for an ICU patient at the VA hospital where he worked. Alex speaks in a low, reverent tone before a flag-draped body, demonstrating the same compassion we saw in the footage of him helping a woman who’d been pushed to the ground by federal agents. It’s the same caring tenor of his voice in his last words: Are you okay?

During Friday’s episode of The Paul Allen Show on Twin Cities radio station KFAN, Allen, Chad Greenway, and Alec Lewis opened the show discussing the intense cold weather in the region. One person mentioned the recent story about a Los Angeles Rams player putting cayenne in his socks to stay warm, and Allen mentioned the urban legend about trees “exploding” from cold weather.

Umprompted, Allen then interjected by asking, “In conditions like this, do paid protesters get hazard pay? Those are the things that I’ve been thinking about this morning.”

A few minutes later, the conversation switched to football, and Allen once again worked a paid-protester reference into a discussion about NFL coaching hires.

“Everybody’s catching strays this week. [Brian] Flores, Kevin Stefanski from Baker [Mayfield], Charlie ‘Biyatch’ caught one out of nowhere. They’re just all over, paid protesters caught one this morning,” he said, referencing his earlier comments.

Herrera said 10-year-old Karla is stressed thinking of the school she’s missing.

“She would at least want to finish elementary school,” Herrera said.

Spokane Public Schools board member Nikki Otero Lockwood held a moment of silence at Wednesday’s board meeting after she learned of the young student’s detention.

“The child’s absence is deeply felt by classmates, educators and a school community that is grieving and trying to make sense of this loss,” Lockwood said.

Karla is an “amazing” girl and left everyone with that impression, Herrera said. She came to Spokane at 4 years old and eventually enrolled in school and learned English. She loves books, Herrera said, and was teaching herself to write Japanese characters.

Herrera said Karla “was saying goodbye to everything she knew with that kind of innocent certainty only a child has.”

Karla is now one of the 1,700 children in custody since family detention centers reopened in April.

Tiul Caal will likely remain in detention until his next court hearing slated for March 9 under immigration Judge Veronica Marie Segovia.

Segovia, who was appointed as an immigration judge in November 2023, is known for denying immigrants asylum in the U.S., and more often than other immigration judges across the board.

Segovia denied a Turkish immigrant’s asylum case in 2025, despite the Department of Homeland Security stating the immigrant had met the legal requirements for asylum, according to a report by the Guardian. Segovia suggested the immigrant’s rape, torture and beatings he experienced in Turkey were “not as bad” as the report states.

Segovia saw 193 cases in the first 11 months of 2025. She granted other forms of relief for eight of those cases, but only granted full asylum for one of them, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research center.

Her asylum denial rates are also significantly higher than her counterparts, data shows. Segovia denied 36% more asylum claims than other immigration judges across the U.S. in that same time period.

The Texas processing center is crowded, Tiul Caal told Mesa, with many detainees falling ill because of poor conditions.

The FDA initiated the first recall in an Aug. 19 notice, announcing certain raw frozen shrimp products processed by Indonesian company PT. Bahari Makmur Sejati (doing business as BMS Foods) had tested positive for Cesium-137, also known as Cs-137. A handful of manufacturers sold these products under different brand names to retailers nationwide.

The FDA published an expanded recall notice on its website on Dec. 19, one of 12 notices that have been issued in the growing recall.

Cs-137 is a radioisotope of cesium, meaning it is a chemical element that emits radiation as it breaks down. It is man-made and is produced by nuclear fission, according to the FDA. In the United States, it is used in medical devices and measurement gauges.

Because it is widespread around the globe, trace amounts can be found in the environment, including soil, food and air, the FDA said. Agencies, including the FDA and U.S. Customs & Border Protection, test for, monitor and regulate the presence of the substance due to the risks associated with long-term exposure.

The FDA said low-level radiation exposure over time can lead to serious health complications. Exposure to Cs-137 alone can cause burns, acute radiation sickness, cancer and death. Due to the risks, governing agencies restrict potential exposure to lessen the possibility of these long-term impacts.

Two civilian women and an officer were injured by the shooter, who Eddy identified Saturday as 77-year-old John Drake, of nearby Mullan, Idaho.

Eddy said he didn’t know Drake’s motive, and he’s “not sure we ever will.”

He said Drake shot two women who were sitting in a pickup outside the sheriff’s office, in the legs. He initially said an officer was shot in the ear inside the sheriff’s office but clarified Saturday that the officer, who law enforcement has not identified, got hit in the ear with a glass shard caused by Drake’s gunfire.

Eddy said all three victims’ injuries were minor. Drake had several guns with him at the time of the shooting, he said.

Eddy said Saturday that no one ever expects someone to come into the sheriff’s office and open fire.

I think it's called a "baffle". The original one, which was probably between 12-15 years old, held up well but eventually started coming apart such that drops of crud could spray up and out of the disposal on occasions when the motor was on. I was expecting a tedious and potentially expensive repair that would involve removing the unit from the sink. But it turns out, at least with the brand I have (Insink--or), that the baffle is designed to be easily replaced. All you have to do is reach in and yank out the old one (nothing holds it in but friction), then plug the new one back in its place. Done.

The old baffle had all kind of nasty brown crud on the bottom of it and there are horrors inside the unit of course, but it's working fine. I don't often use the unit and that no doubt accounts for its longevity. The best part, apart from how easy the fix was, was how cheap it was - the baffles themselves cost me less than $10 each online.

A California judge ordered the end of a dragnet law enforcement program that surveilled the electrical smart meter data of thousands of Sacramento residents.

The Sacramento County Superior Court ruled that the surveillance program run by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) and police violated a state privacy statute, which bars the disclosure of residents’ electrical usage data with narrow exceptions. For more than a decade, SMUD coordinated with the Sacramento Police Department and other law enforcement agencies to sift through the granular smart meter data of residents without suspicion to find evidence of cannabis growing.

The court ruled that the challenged surveillance program was not part of any traditional law enforcement investigation. Investigations happen when police try to solve particular crimes and identify particular suspects. The dragnet that turned all 650,000 SMUD customers into suspects was not an investigation.

“[T]he process of making regular requests for all customer information in numerous city zip codes, in the hopes of identifying evidence that could possibly be evidence of illegal activity, without any report or other evidence to suggest that such a crime may have occurred, is not an ongoing investigation,” the court ruled, finding that SMUD violated its “obligations of confidentiality” under a data privacy statute.

Granular electrical usage data can reveal intimate details inside the home—including when you go to sleep, when you take a shower, when you are away, and other personal habits and demographics. In creating and running the dragnet surveillance program, according to the court, SMUD and police “developed a relationship beyond that of utility provider and law enforcement.” Multiple times a year, the police asked SMUD to search its entire database of 650,000 customers to identify people who used a large amount of monthly electricity and to analyze granular 1-hour electrical usage data to identify residents with certain electricity “consumption patterns.” SMUD passed on more than 33,000 tips about supposedly “high” usage households to police.

Congressional Republicans are reportedly trying to insert anti-abortion language into government funding legislation as the shutdown continues, with the GOP and President Donald Trump digging in against a clean extension of Affordable Care Act tax credits as insurance premiums surge.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, sounded the alarm on Saturday about what he characterized as the latest Republican sneak attack on reproductive rights.

Wyden said Saturday—which marked day 39 of the shutdown—that “Republicans are spinning a tale that the government is funding abortion.”

“It’s not,” Wyden continued. “What Republicans are talking about putting on the table amounts to nothing short of a backdoor national abortion ban. Under this plan, Republicans could weaponize federal funding for any organization that does anything related to women’s reproductive healthcare. They could also weaponize the tax code by revoking non-profit status for these organizations.”

“The possibilities are endless, but the results are the same: a complete and total restriction on abortion, courtesy of Republicans,” the senator added. “Trump said he’d leave abortion care up to the states. Well, this latest scheme makes it crystal clear: A de facto nationwide abortion ban has been his plan all along.”