FirstCircle

Merritt eventually told police that his father, David, took Benway camping and zip-tied her to a pole inside a tent while he stood outside and chose not to seek help. Merritt told police he participated in order to earn a black rose tattoo, a tattoo for a “brotherhood” of those who have killed people.

Companies offering the drug risk reputation and legal repercussions, according to an Aug. 2 letter sent to CEOs at the two retail giants, as well as Kroger, Albertsons and medical distribution company McKesson Corp. The group said 6,000 Costco customers have signed a petition saying they will cancel their membership if the retailer starts selling the pills.

The religious coalition behind the petition owns about $172 million in shares of the five companies. The coalition was led by Boise, Idaho-based Inspire Investing, which manages $3 billion of assets, and includes the investment arm of the Southern Baptist churches and the American Family Association, a Christian fundamentalist group.

Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!

A new book ban goes into effect in Idaho on July 1.

House Bill 710, a key political win for the Idaho Family Policy Center (IFPC), is targeted at books with Black, feminist or LGBTQ+ themes. It allows any person affiliated with a student at a public or private school to sue its library for carrying a book with “obscene materials.”

The policy defines obscene materials as any literature containing nudity or homosexuality.

While the Bible contains each of these concepts in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, it does not seem that Christian and Jewish texts were the intended target of the ban, but rather books written by queer or Black authors.

IFPC voiced its opposition to The Handmaid’s Tale, the popular dystopian novel criticizing fascism and misogyny, on June 7 after it was removed from the Idaho Fine Arts Academy school library.

Governor Brad Little [R] signed the policy in April, saying that the bill would keep children from reading harmful materials.

The Idaho Library Association is against the bill and says it is harmful to young people, librarians and LGBTQ+ people.

Idaho’s education system ranked 47th in a January analysis of state education levels conducted by Scholaroo.

A Wenatchee fruit grower is facing $353,000 in fines for safety violations that led to a worker being buried alive in a trench collapse last fall in Othello.

Photographs obtained by the Washington Department of Labor & Industries (L&I) show multiple workers of Stemilt Ag Services LLC digging in a trench more than five feet deep and about 25-30 feet long without any type of cave-in protection such as sloping, shielding or shoring.

A crew of 10 workers was repairing an irrigation pipe when a portion of the trench caved in on one of the workers, knocking him down and burying him. His co-workers were able to uncover his face after a couple of minutes to allow him to breathe while they dug for another 10 minutes to get him out of the trench. He was taken to the hospital with multiple crush injuries to his head, face, and body.

“This could have easily ended in death, all because the employer chose to ignore rules to protect workers,” said Craig Blackwood, assistant director for L&I’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health.

L&I cited Stemilt in March with five willful serious violations in connection with the cave-in. There was no protective system inside the trench to prevent a collapse, and no ladder or way for the workers to get out of the trench within 25 feet of where they were working. The piles of dirt dug from the trench were not set back at least two feet away from the edge. Dirt piles too close to the trench can cause the walls to collapse.

Also, there was no one onsite with the knowledge needed to inspect the trench before workers went into it, and no training program for trenching and excavation work. The company was also cited for changing the scene by filling in the trench after the cave-in before L&I inspectors arrived.

Willful violations are among the most serious and mean the employer knew or should have known the safety requirements, but chose to ignore them. The company is appealing the new citation.

It’s not the first time Stemilt has been cited for trenching issues. The company was cited and fined nearly $17,000 in Quincy in 2021 for violating the same trenching safety rules.

“We hope the latest fines will be the wake-up call that motivates Stemilt to keep their workers safe, before someone is killed,” said Blackwood.

The company is now is now considered a severe violator and is subject to follow-up inspections to determine if the conditions still exist.

Televisions that can stream platforms like Hulu or Max usually come loaded with technology that collects information on what viewers are watching, and buyers consent to have their viewing tracked when they open their new TV and click through terms of service agreements. Sometimes, data firms can connect those viewing habits to a voter’s phone or laptop via their IP address, promising a trove of information about an individual and the ability to track them across screens.

Other times, firms focus on dividing households into groups based on what they’re watching, how they use their TVs and how many campaign ads they’re seeing, which is a boon to political campaigns eager to target specific groups of voters. Connecting this data to voter files is increasingly a focus — a move that adds individual voting habits into the mix.

Less than an hour after taking off from Phoenix on May 25th, the plane experienced an uncontrolled side-to-side yawing motion known as a Dutch roll while cruising at 32,000 feet. The pilots of Southwest flight 746 were able to regain control and the plane landed safely in Oakland, according to a preliminary report from the FAA.

“A Dutch roll is definitely not something that we like to see,” said Shem Malmquist, a commercial pilot who flies the Boeing 777 and an instructor at Florida Tech.

The Boeing 737 Max 8 jet involved in the Dutch roll incident is less than two years old. According to the FAA, a post-flight inspection revealed damage to a backup power control unit, known as a PCU. That system controls rudder movements on the plane's tail.

As the week draws to a close, clients of Cencora and The Lash Group have been submitting breach notifications to state attorneys general.

The Lash Group partners with pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies, and healthcare providers to facilitate access to therapies through drug distribution, patient support and services, business analytics and technology, and other services. Their substitute notice explains that based on their investigation, personal information including personal health information was affected, “including potentially first name, last name, date of birth, health diagnosis, and/or medications and prescriptions.”

With only partial numbers from some clients available, there are already 542,062 patients affected. When full numbers are revealed, the grand total for this incident will likely be significantly higher. (See UPDATE below)

Update 1: Added Johnson & Johnson entries and Abbott entry, bringing current partial total affected to 717,723 for 18 clients.

Update 2: Added Amgen, but no numbers available, so partial total remains at 717,723 but for 19 incidents.

A medic who worked at Sde Teiman's field hospital said that Palestinian detainees there are stripped "of anything that resembles human beings" and that the harassment and torture are done not to "gather intelligence" but "out of revenge" for the October 7 attacks.

Israel has detained thousands of Gaza residents since October, with many of them held under a recently amended law that empowers Israeli authorities to imprison people indefinitely without charge or due process. Human rights organizations have documented Israeli forces' brutal and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees, including women and children.

"A 19-year-old detainee told an Al Mezan lawyer that he was tortured from the moment he was arrested," the group said. "He described how three of his fingernails were removed with pliers during interrogation. He also stated that investigators unleashed a dog on him and subjected him to shabeh—a form of torture which involves detainees being handcuffed and bound in stress positions for long periods—three times over three days of interrogation. He was then placed in a cell for 70 days, where he experienced starvation and extreme fatigue."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13612789

Finally had my performance review with my boss. (It's about a month late and I'm the last one on the team to get it.)

Objectives: 💯 Goals: 💯 Feedback: FenrirIII is great. Keep up the good work! No negative feedback. Bonus: 100% Raise: 0%

I find out that there was an incident that cost me my raise (i.e. my director denied it).

Earlier in the year, my Sales team fucked up and screwed up a deployment, which has nothing to do with me. I went out of my way to fix their fuck up because they punted it over to me. It took 2 weeks and a lot of favors to get it fixed and running.

That same Sales team blamed the whole thing on me (again, not involved until they screwed up) and told the customer (who had never met me) to tell my VP and Director that I suck when they met them in person at an event. Unbelievable. Now, I'm expected to go work with these sabotaging assholes and keep breaking my back to keep them from torpedoing me again.

Fuck that. It's quiet quitting time and job hunting elsewhere. There will be other asshole Sales people out there, but maybe I can get a pay bump out of it.

The Utah team was staying at the Coeur d’Alene Resort after it was selected to play in the NCAA Tournament hosted by Gonzaga University. As team members walked from the hotel to a downtown restaurant, they were followed by a driver in a truck who was shouting racial slurs at them.

When they left dinner to return to their hotel, the driver and others who were recruited to harass the team followed them back to the hotel, revving their trucks’ engines and harassing them further, according to a police report.

Cecil Kelly III, a longtime resident of Coeur d’Alene, was not shocked by what happened, but he is saddened.

Kelly remembers in the 1960s there were agreements between the business community that “you would not rent a room to a Black person.”

“And you would not feed a Black man,” he said.