Friday Harbor, Washington—Two summers ago, an orca nicknamed Tahlequah—officially J35, a 20-year-old member of the endangered Southern Resident killer whale (SRKW) population that normally populates the Salish Sea in the summertime—captured the attention of people around the world as she mourned the death of her new calf by displaying its limp corpse, pushing it around on her rostrum for 17 days straight.
For most of its existence, the “Patriot” militia movement has been described by those monitoring its spread as “antigovernment”—which isn’t fully accurate, since most of its adherents openly say that they don’t have a problem with government regulations in such areas as abortion and “law and order.
Like all of the major internet sites—notably Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google—Amazon.com has an ongoing problem with not only providing a platform for violent far-right extremists, but helping to monetize their operations.
FRIDAY HARBOR, Washington—After a striking absence for most of the spring, the San Juan Islands’ Southern Resident killer whales made their return this month in glorious fashion: a full-on daily display of frolicking and foraging orcas by the 22 members of the J pod. Best of all, they appear to be well-fed and comparatively healthy.
America’s far-right “Patriots” explored new ways to snooker themselves this holiday weekend in two rallies, both ostensibly aimed at attacking the “radical left,” on opposite sides of the country.
In Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, hundreds of militiamen swarmed to the Civil War historical site to defend it against a supposed “antifa” protest that was in fact entirely a hoax and so never materialized.
Alexander John Feaster wasn’t terribly popular with his neighbors in Hunter, Oklahoma. An unrepentant neo-Nazi, he liked to decorate his home with bright red swastika banners, and would go out on the town dressed in full Nazi regalia, including the red armband.
Now he’s under arrest for shooting a 26-year-old woman who swiped one of those banners last weekend on a late-night dare.
What the documentary Blackfish started—namely, the long, slow demise of the captive orca theme park industry, along with its abusive practices and dubious ethics—may be finally finished by the COVID-19 pandemic.
As Orlando Weekly reports, SeaWorld’s increasingly grim bottom line is being sharply worsened by the closures of its three U.S. parks (in San Diego, San Antonio, and Orlando) during their respective states’ stay-home orders.
The organizers of a Saturday rally in Olympia, Washington, to protest the state’s anti-COVID stay-at-home orders—including the militiamen of 3% of Washington—were happy to have what they thought was a conservative PAC step up and finance the event. The PAC paid for facilities, outhouses, security, and promotion, and it all seemed good.
A cluster of far-right Idaho lawmakers—15 of them out of the 105 there are total—held a “special session” of their own this week in the Statehouse in Boise to decry Gov. Brad Little’s COVID-19 stay-at-home orders as “unconstitutional” and a prime example of “tyranny.” The session, however, had no effect other than to underscore their impotence.
The “Boogaloo Boi” who shot a California sheriff’s deputy last week was officially charged Tuesday with the shootings of two federal officers in an ambush at an anti-police protest in Oakland a week before—and it turns out that he had an accomplice, who has also been charged. He met this accomplice on Facebook before plotting the shootings.