FirstCircle

It will soon be illegal in Spokane for an employer to ask a prospective employee if they’re homeless or reject their application solely because they do not have a permanent address.

The Spokane City Council voted 6-1 Monday in favor of the law, titled “Ban the Address” as a riff on “Ban the box” laws that prohibit inquiries about an applicant’s prior convictions. Councilman Jonathan Bingle was the sole vote against.

City officials believe Spokane is the first in the nation to pass such a law.

“Housing status should never define someone’s potential,” Councilman Paul Dillon said. “Employment really is a critical way we have to reduce homelessness and help people get back on their feet.”

As fascism always does, today’s Armageddon complex crosses class lines, bonding billionaires to the Maga base. Thanks to decades of deepening economic stresses, alongside ceaseless and skillful messaging pitting workers against one another, a great many people understandably feel unable to protect themselves from the disintegration that surrounds them (no matter how many months of ready-to-eat meals they buy). But there are emotional compensations on offer: you can cheer the end of affirmative action and DEI, glorify mass deportation, enjoy the denial of gender-affirming care to trans people, villainize educators and health workers who think they know better than you, and applaud the demise of economic and environmental regulations as a way to own the libs. End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy.

It’s also a self-reinforcing downward spiral: Trump’s furious attacks on every structure designed to protect the public from diseases, dangerous foods and disasters – even to tell the public when disasters are headed their way – strengthen the case for prepperism at both the high and low ends, all while creating myriad new opportunities for privatization and profiteering by the oligarchs powering this rapid-fire unmaking of the social and regulatory state.

Oyer has since told various media outlets that her firing came shortly after she declined to recommend restoring gun rights to actor Mel Gibson, a supporter of President Donald Trump. She is one of several Justice Department officials slated to testify on Monday afternoon before a hearing organized by Democrats in the House of Representatives and Senate about the Trump administration's treatment of the Justice Department and law firms who act in cases disliked by the Republican president.

Democratic U.S. Senator Adam Schiff of California called the mobilization of the Marshals to deliver a letter an effort to "intimidate and silence" Oyer, while U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland compared it to a move "ripped straight from the gangster playbook."

In addition to supporting jobs that address oil patch pollution, these federal dollars are used on wells that lack any owner to pay for reclamation. Left unplugged, such orphaned oil and gas wells leak huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere and can contaminate local water sources with salty water and benzene.

The Interior Department estimates that there are about 157,000 documented orphaned oil and gas wells nationwide. This figure is likely a dramatic undercount: The Environmental Protection Agency stated in an April 2021 report that there could be as many as 3.4 million abandoned wells nationally.

“Undocumented orphaned wells may emit nearly 63 million grams of methane per hour into the atmosphere,” according to a November 2024 report, “the equivalent of over 3.6 million gasoline-powered passenger cars driven per year.”

Orphaned wells represent the final stage in what ProPublica recently described as the oil industry’s “playbook”: When oil wells are no longer productive, large companies sell them off to smaller companies and thereby shed their obligation to plug those wells.

The increasingly marginal wells change hands, eventually landing with operators who lack the financial means to plug them. And when these companies go bankrupt, the wells become orphaned, meaning that the plugging costs then fall on American taxpayers.

Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica detailed cases documented in internal reports and police and court records where staff had beaten, choked, whipped, sexually assaulted and humiliated residents. Those cases included the 2014 beating by staff of a man with intellectual disabilities for failing to pull up his pants. They also included the verbal abuse of a resident with developmental disabilities in 2020, including a threat by staff to break one of his fingers, captured on a recorded 911 line, according to court records, police reports and IDHS watchdog findings.

The reporting also documented a culture of covering up abuse and neglect at the facility, findings later echoed by IDHS’ Office of Inspector General — the watchdog arm that investigates abuse and neglect allegations at state-run facilities and provides agency oversight.

Assuming 128 grams a day and a lifetime in the vicinity of seventy-five years, you’ll leave behind around three and a half metric tons of feces when you die. The volume of your urine will be closer to thirty-eight thousand liters, a bit larger than a standard twenty-foot shipping container and about double the accumulated volume of your flatulence. You’ll have made hundreds of liters of tears, though even for the most emotive of individuals, the portion derived from feelings will represent a minuscule fraction of that number. For all the hullabaloo surrounding ejaculation, the total semen production of even the most alacritous masturbator could be contained handily by a shelf of two-liter soda bottles, and though a period sometimes seems as though it will never end, you could only barely paint a closet with the three or so liters of menses produced during a lifetime. You’ll have made a great deal of mucus, though, close to a hundred thousand liters. And when Atropos snips the thread of your life, the hair from your head, measured as a single strand, will stretch more than three and a half million feet. This is what you will leave behind.

The decision to add the US to the first 2025 watchlist was made in response to what the group described as the “Trump administration’s assault on democratic norms and global cooperation”.

In the news release announcing the US’s addition, the organization cited recent actions taken by the Trump administration that they argue will likely “severely impact constitutional freedoms of peaceful assembly, expression, and association”.

The group cited several of the administration’s actions such as the mass termination of federal employees, the appointment of Trump loyalists in key government positions, the withdrawal from international efforts such as the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council, the freezing of federal and foreign aid and the attempted dismantling of USAid.

The organization warned that these decisions “will likely impact civic freedoms and reverse hard-won human rights gains around the world”.

The group also pointed to the administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters, and the Trump administration’s unprecedented decision to control media access to presidential briefings, among others.

All the talk now is of how we might defend ourselves without the US. But almost everyone with a voice in public life appears to be avoiding a much bigger and more troubling question: how we might defend ourselves against the US.

The law criminalizes being outside with “camping paraphernalia,” like sleeping bags or cookware, without written permission from property owners or the city. It includes a provision that anyone “causing, permitting, aiding, abetting or concealing” violations is subject to up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.

“[The mayor] claims no service providers will get arrested, but ultimately, the law prevails,” said Vivian Han, CEO of the nonprofit Abode Services. “This is for all time, not just while he’s mayor.”

Greg Ward, a minister at Mission Peak Unitarian Universalist Congregation, said his church hands out “blessing bags” of food and clothing.

“Putting [them] in the hands of the unhoused could be aiding and abetting,” said Ward. “That could make us criminals.”

The previous Sunday, the workers spoke with a supervisor at Lamell, Jimenez said, telling him that they wanted a meeting with the company’s president, Ronald Lamell, Jr., to speak about the raise issue. The workers also wanted to discuss what they said were times company superiors entered employer-provided housing without permission. The group asked to have this meeting before they returned to work on Monday, Jimenez said.

The company did not agree to the meeting, and the supervisor indicated there would be “punishment” if the workers did not show up the following morning, Jimenez said.

The workers then commenced a work-stoppage on Monday morning. A manager entered the employer-provided home where Jimenez lives, he said, banging on doors and telling the workers they were fired if they did not show up for work.

The company then offered individual workers their jobs back at a lower wage, $14.50, according to Jimenez — a move he described as “humiliating.” The company also told the workers to vacate their employer-provided homes adjacent to the company’s sawmill, Jimenez said.

At the protest on Friday, the group marched to Lamell’s office with banners and drums, hoping to ask the company’s leadership for their jobs back — with a raise. Though employees could be seen inside through the office’s windows, none came to the door.

Instead, a fleet of Essex police vehicles pulled down the snowy road to the office.

Handing the organ to nurse Tammy Nelson, Shaknovsky told her to mark it “spleen,” even though it weighed at least 10 times as much as the average spleen and was clearly a liver, according to Bryan’s lawsuit. Nelson allegedly did as she was told.

Within minutes, other doctors and hospital higher-ups swarmed the operating room, the suit states. All of them allegedly recognized the organ that had been removed was a liver but nevertheless covered up Shaknovsky’s mistake by documenting on official records that he had cut out Bryan’s spleen.

Shaknovsky allegedly tried to persuade hospital staff members that it was the spleen. He repeatedly left and returned to the operating room to tell people that Bryan had died of a “splenic aneurysm,” the suit states. In informing Bryan of her husband’s death, he allegedly told her the cause was a spleen so diseased that it had swelled to four times the normal size and shifted to the other side of his body.

Ascension nurse Kathleen Montag chased Bryan into the parking lot and lied about how her husband had died to get her signature agreeing to forgo an autopsy, the suit states.

The cover-up fell apart when the district’s medical examiner performed an autopsy and determined that the organ that had been removed was Bryan’s liver while his spleen was untouched and in the normal position, state disciplinary records show. The medical examiner ruled Bryan’s death a homicide caused by bleeding to death and having his liver removed.