Conservatives take power in British Columbia: The Tories haven’t held power in BC in around a century, though the province has been ruled by small-c conservatives in the meantime, like the Liberals and the dastardly Social Credit Party. What happened? The New Democratic Party (NDP) of BC, social democrats who occupy the center-left lane in BC politics in the absence of a strong local Liberal Party, called for snap elections in a bid to increase their parliamentary majority. But the NDP’s voters didn’t show up for them, probably because leadership purged its activist grassroots core over things like the Gaza genocide. CBC has the rundown.
Microsoft can’t stop liquidating employees: The company has laid off thousands in recent years, and is now offering buyouts to 60,000 employees, the Seattle Times reports, roughly a quarter of its workforce. Microsoft only expects around 3,000 of those employees to accept the buyouts. The announcement was good for the company’s short-term stock price, something management wants to hear considering first quarter financial reports are due tomorrow.
Seattle can’t stop liquidating children: What did all the prosperity from those tech jobs bring to Seattle? Not children. In fact, so few Seattleites can afford to raise children here that despite rampant, cancerous growth over the past decade and a half, the number of public school students has gone down—way down, to the point where we’re going to start closing schools, although school system administrators prefer the less alarming term “merging.” Details from KUOW. This exemplifies how the tech nouveau riches in our community represent not prosperity, but inequality.
Seattle cop who ordered officers to “fuck people up” for protesting far-right on Capitol Hill gets a slap on the wrist: According to the Seattle Times, “In a May 5 interview with the office of police accountability, the lieutenant reportedly denied making those statements until after he was shown the footage.” Memory is such a fickle thing. The Seattle Police Department faced a lot of backlash for beating the shit out of local community members protesting a Christian Supremacist rally in their backyard, and new police leaders don’t seem interested in doing much about it.
Not all of Indiana’s ACLU is down with Nikkita Oliver’s anti-Zionism: The Indianapolis Star reports some senior attorneys are leaving as the former left-wing Seattle City Council candidate takes over as executive director. What’s the issue? Nikkita comes from the activist world, not the legal and policy nerd world, and actually believing in equality is always controversial in the progressive nonprofit world. “Oliver’s social media posts regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have also generated controversy inside the organization” and “Some staffers felt the repeated critical and broad references to Zionism were problematic.”
Farmworkers take their fight to Washington Supreme Court: The justices heard arguments last Thursday in the case of a Sunnyside mushroom farm in the middle of a long union battle, the Washington Observer reports. Farm owners wanted workers to accept reduced pay and sign away their rights to sue to keep their jobs—so you can understand why the workers are pissed. This can happen because farmworkers are denied equal rights to collectively bargain under federal law, and attempts in Washington state to give them those eights have been killed by corporate agricultural lobbying Democrats in Olympia.
Not all doctors wear stethoscopes: The big ass novelty check is one of America’s proudest inventions. Abro Ahmed of Minnesota got one from Superman after saving a runaway school bus full of kids after the bus driver suffered a medical emergency. He was able to do this by using the zen discipline he learned from Seattle-based doctor-sex television show Grey’s Anatomy: “[The show teaches] you about what to do in situations that you never could see yourself in,” Ahmed told ABC News. “So it’s just something like, you know, some tips and tricks that you could use for the rest of your life.”
Union journalists at second largest Washington paper want their editor out: Remember how the Spokesman-Review recently got their longtime scumbag Disney adult editor suspended after one inappropriate decision too many? Well, the paper’s owners want to keep him on but in a different role as the paper transitions into a nonprofit, and the union is throwing down the gauntlet, RANGE reports. The editor didn’t respond to a request for comment because he “is out on a Disney boat cruise through the end of this week,” according to the union.
The Pacific Northwest is getting a new experimental missile range: Montana is already home to more nuclear missiles than just about anywhere else in the world (Western Washington is a close competitor), but the prairie might see a lot more fire soon. Republicans are planning a new bombing range in the state for hypersonic missiles, those things the Iranians, Yemenis, and Russians are using to outshoot us and our useless, expensive fighter jets, the Billings Gazette reports. The tribes will likely not be happy about this. The US Army previously built its largest domestic base of the 19th century in Montana to keep them down.
Hitler News: Someone burned down Hitler’s ski chalet: It’s kind of wild that the “Eagle’s Nest” in Bavaria was still around after all these years, but an enterprising arsonist appears to have tidied up this particular historical anomaly, the AP reports. The chalet is in Bertchesgaden, and part of a complex of Bavarian mountain bungalows built for the Nazi Party elite. They’re the same bungalows our proud lads get drunk and loot at the end of Band of Brothers.
Canadians asked CIA for approval to release secret report on resettled Nazi war criminals: After decades of coverups, the report was finally released earlier this month after a court order required it. The court order was the result of the Canadian Parliament giving a standing ovation to a veteran of the Nazi Party’s Waffen-SS praetorian guard, infuriating Jewish groups, who sued. The details of the report were so damning—they prove the CIA used Canada as a dumping ground for perpetrators of the Holocaust who had outlived their usefulness as anti-commiunist intelligence agents—that the Canadian government warned the CIA that the secret was about to come out. There’s still redacted information in the report, the Maple reports.
Mac loved the rabbit, that’s just the point! Last week, I watched charming little comedy Local Hero (1983), which is a sort of reverse-Avatar film about a brave oil company operative trying to save a remote Scottish town from itself by demolishing the place and replacing it with a North Sea oil refinery. Everyone in town is actually on board with this for once, but whimsy happens. Anyway, I can’t get the soundtrack by Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits out of my head.
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