FirstCircle

According to testimony at his trial, Nelson ignored his training and moved to arrest Sarey by himself, resulting in a scuffle that ended when Nelson shot Sarey in the belly at point-blank range. Testimony and video showed that as Sarey slumped to the ground, Nelson cleared a malfunction in his handgun, looked around and then shot Sarey a second time in the head.

“Using unnecessary violence was nothing new for Nelson,” Eakes wrote, noting Phelps had already concluded during an earlier ruling that Nelson had a pattern of using violence “during routine and nonthreatening situations when someone showed him disrespect or failed to acknowledge his authority.”

Sarey was Nelson’s third fatal shooting as an Auburn officer. The city has paid about $6 million to settle claims against Nelson, including $4 million to Sarey’s family.

The leaders of the Greater Idaho movement have asked President-elect Donald Trump to support their efforts to have counties in eastern Oregon join Idaho – a state they say is more in tune with them politically, economically and culturally.

“Unlike typical politicians, you have a unique ability as a practical problem-solver to get things done, and your support can bring a peaceful resolution to Oregon’s long-standing east-west divide,” the three leaders said in a Dec. 4 letter to Trump.

Matt McCaw, the executive director of Citizens for Greater Idaho, said Thursday morning that the group has not yet received a response from Trump.

“It takes time for these things to filter through, but we are hopeful that somebody from the administration will reach out to us and pick this up,” McCaw said. “This is an idea whose time has come.”

The letter added that “eastern Oregon residents recognize that representative government will never come from Oregon because we are outvoted on every issue the progressives put forth, leaving us completely disenfranchised

On a recent snowy morning in Derby, Letourneau accompanied a reporter up to the hill near his home, pointing out along the way a large “Trump 2024” flag he had strung up nearby. Along the road at the foot of the hill, he has a large white and red sign telling state and federal law enforcement to “beware” and stay off of his land.

But he does allow the government to lease a slice of that land to operate a surveillance tower, a deal Letourneau said he signed off on because he thinks the tower is an important tool for local U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. He said he’s heard for years about those same agents arresting people who attempt to enter the U.S. on the road that runs along the hill and, at points, parallels the Canadian border.

“We need something they can work with to catch those aliens,” he said, referring to people who cross the border without authorization. “They’re coming right and left.”

We were losing slowly. Now we are losing quickly. Democracy, accountability, human rights, social justice – all were rolling backwards as money swarmed our politics. Above all, our life-support systems – the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, ecosystems, ice and snow – have been hammered and hammered, regardless of who is in power. Donald Trump might strike the killer blows, but he is not the cause of an ecocidal economic system. He is the embodiment of it.

Trump has pledged to wage war on planet Earth, ripping up US climate commitments and reverting to unrestrained fossil fuel extraction and burning. If he follows the Project 2025 agenda, he will leave the UN climate framework altogether, making his assault on Earth systems much harder to reverse.

His evangelical base, eager to advance the biblical apocalypse, will love him for it. Most simply deny climate breakdown. Others perceive events such as floods and fires not as warnings, but as joyous portents of the end of times: a great cleansing, in which the righteous will be uplifted to sit at the right hand of God, while their enemies will be cast into the fiery pit. What we will see under a new Trump presidency is a neat alignment of the interests of fossil fuel companies and a constituency gunning for Armageddon (and hoping that Benjamin Netanyahu will assist its delivery).

Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.

Lt. John Rodgers, a 20-year sheriff’s veteran in Clark County, where Springfield is the county seat, made the statements in several posts on Facebook, WHIO-TV reported. In one post, he reportedly wrote: “I am sorry. If you support the Democrat Party I will not help you.” Another said: “The problem is that I know which of you supports the Democratic Party and I will not help you survive the end of days.”

The sheriff’s office said Rodgers, who has commanded the department’s road patrol, would remain on duty, with a written reprimand for violating the department’s social media policy.

Humor. Harper's Magazine, August 1992.

While Boeing did not specify what would be taken away from Thursday’s offer if it were to fail, Holden said that could mean cutting any number of gains, including canceling a commitment to build the next airplane in the Puget Sound region, backing away from a 38% wage increase or losing a 1% decrease in health care costs.

On Friday, some workers were heeding Holden’s warning. Sitting down for an interview with The Seattle Times, Holden had just finished a Zoom call with more than 500 members who questioned him closely about the new offer and his recommendation to accept it. He had told them about the risk of losing the earlier gains.

The response from those on the call, he said, “led me to believe … they’re looking to accept it.”

For sure, there are still Machinists unwilling to bend. Rob Davis, a 13-year Everett employee, said he’s still a no vote and dismissed the union leadership as “a finger puppet of Boeing.”

Andrew DeFreese, an equipment operator in Everett, said Friday he’s also sticking with his no vote. He wants to hold out for more paid time off and quicker steps to progress through the wage scales.

Another fired worker, Hossam Nasr, said the purpose of the vigil was both “to honor the victims of the Palestinian genocide in Gaza and to call attention to Microsoft’s complicity in the genocide” because of the use of its technology by the Israeli military.

Nasr said his firing was disclosed on social media by the watchdog group Stop Antisemitism more than an hour before he received the call from Microsoft. The group didn’t immediately respond Friday to a request for comment on how it learned about the firing.

The same group had months earlier publicly called on Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to take action against Nasr for his public stances on Israel.

Nasr, an Egyptian-raised 2021 graduate of Harvard University, is also a co-organizer of Harvard Alumni for Palestine.

Google earlier this year fired more than 50 workers in the aftermath of protests over technology the company is supplying the Israeli government amid the Gaza war. The firings stemmed from internal turmoil and sit-in protests at Google offices centered on “Project Nimbus,” a $1.2 billion contract signed in 2021 for Google and Amazon to provide the Israeli government with cloud computing and artificial intelligence services.

A Kootenai County magistrate judge with numerous reprimands who appeared in court dressed as Darth Vader on Halloween is up for re-election in November. A campaign led by a former litigant of a divorce and custody case he oversaw in 2012 hopes to remove him.

Judge Clark A. Peterson, 57, was appointed to the bench in 2010 and has faced complaints over the years that his fantasy role-playing hobby interfered with his judicial work.

Campaign fliers call Peterson “Demon Lord” in reference to his former avatar: the demon prince Orcus, Lord of the Undead. He posted hundreds of comments on online fantasy message boards while at work, according to a 2013 Spokesman-Review story.

The judicial council’s investigation also looked into other allegations of misconduct by Peterson. On Halloween, he appeared in court dressed as Darth Vader, walking out from his chambers with Star Wars music playing on his cell phone.