After apparently shooting his wife with a 12 gauge shotgun, Thomas Jarboe called 911 to explain what happened. “She has been abusing me, she is my caretaker, and is completely destroying me,” Jarboe said to the dispatcher, according to court documents first reported by KOMO News. “She hates all my kids, my kids all hate her.” The 75-year-old professor emeritus at the University of Washington said he was acting in “self-defense” when he shot Kay Sew, who was 63. Jarboe suffers from advanced Parkinson’s disease and amnesia, and a neighbor told KOMO News those illnesses often led to fights between the […]
Washington State
As of Sunday afternoon, there were only about 20 buildings still standing in the city of Detroit, Oregon. The wildfires raging along the West Coast hit the small, rural enclave three hours outside of Portland over the weekend, burning a majority of the community’s structures—including City Hall, where the fire department’s office is based. Locals have suggested the destruction was as if “a bomb went off.” “We have approximately 20-25 structures still standing, and the rest are gone,” the Idanha-Detroit Rural Fire Protection District said on their Facebook page, noting that several firefighters currently on the frontlines of these massive blazes […]
On Friday morning, days after wildfires overtook Butte County, California, relatives of 49-year-old Kelly Burke were frantically searching for her and spreading the word that she was missing on social media. One neighbor in the woods near her town, Berry Creek, claimed to see Burke evacuate with friends, but no one could reach her. “Living in Idaho and not being able to search for mom is killing me,” Burke’s daughter Chelsea Vonarmfelt wrote on Facebook. The next morning, Vonarmfelt began a long drive from Boise, intent on finding Burke, who’d vanished after the North Complex fire leveled her rural community of […]
When he couldn’t reach his cousin Jake Hyland on Monday, Jim Mabry drove to his family’s remote property in rural Washington state, where wildfires turned pastures of 4-foot-high sage into dust. Jake and his wife, Jamie, along with their 1-year-old son, Uriel, were visiting their land in Okanogan County when flames from the Cold Springs Fire ripped through the area. Relatives couldn’t reach the couple, or emergency services, because power lines were down. On Tuesday, Mabry discovered Jake’s truck stuck in a ravine, about a quarter of a mile from the land. The vehicle had blown through a barbed wire fence. […]
President Donald Trump may have shown diminishing concern for the threat posed to the American public by the novel coronavirus in recent weeks, but his administration and allies are increasingly pointing to the pandemic as a justification for further longstanding policy goals on immigration. For months, the Trump administration has utilized the pandemic as a pretext for raising the barriers for entry into the country, effectively halting most immigration into the United States for the duration of the crisis, refusing to issue COVID-19 guidances for those still stuck in the immigration legal system, and using a quarantine law from the late […]
As states rush to get back to work and President Donald Trump orders the nation’s coronavirus task force to switch its focus to reopening the economy, health experts are pressing more than ever the need for contact tracing. It’s a tool that proved effective in past epidemics like SARS and Ebola, and it’s regarded as essential to safely reopening the country with the looming threat of higher surges in cases. But it’s also complex and time-consuming. Before the coronavirus pandemic, there were only about 2,200 contact tracers, or disease detectives, in the U.S., according to the Association of State and Territorial […]