Free Republic

BY THE OREGONIAN/OREGONLIVE (Compiled from news accounts, court records, public notices) Last week's arrest of a long-sought accused eco-saboteur pushed the spotlight back on a tight-knit cell of radical environmentalists responsible for a $48 million run of firebombings and other crimes across the West in the 1990s and early 2000s. Six men and five women prosecuted in Oregon received sentences ranging from three years to 13 years. They were arrested starting in 2005 in what the FBI called "Operation Backfire," a task force that tracked down the suspects with the help of an informant deep within the underground group....

A fourth grade teacher in from the McMinnville Elementary School in Oregon has been arrested for two counts of attempted rape of a child in Redmond, Washington. Andrew Bert Hammond, a 50-year-old male, was arrested during an undercover operation. Hammond has been charged with four counts of communication with a minor for immoral purposes, second-degree attempted rape of a child, and third-degree attempted rape of a child. He's being held on $100,000 bond at the King County Correctional Facility, according to local news. Police had created fake profiles on social media and dating apps that were location-based. Hammond was on...

Andrea Churna thought someone was trying to kill her when she called Redmond police for help the night of Sept. 20, 2020. Raised around cops, she did what she was asked to do when police arrived to find her armed with a handgun. She put the weapon down, walked out of her apartment unarmed, clad in a T-shirt and yoga pants, hands up, and laid face down on the carpeted hallway floor outside her door — “proned out” as officers at the scene described it. None of that kept police from killing her. An officer, just 18 months out of...

MacKenzie Scott and Melinda French Gates are joining forces to give $40 million to projects focused on advancing gender equality in tech, higher education, minority communities and caregiving. Both Scott and French Gates have previously given to causes around gender equality.

DURING DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE JOE BIDEN’S VICE PRESIDENTIAL TENURE, HIS 26-YEAR-OLD NIECE COORDINATED THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION’S CHINA APPROACH AS A SPECIAL ASSISTANT TO THE TREASURY DEPARTMENT’S U.S.-CHINA STRATEGIC AND ECONOMIC DIALOGUE. Casey Owens, the latest member of the Biden family to benefit financially or professionally from the former Senator’s connections, joined “the highest-level bilateral economic forum” four years after graduating from college and a stint at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She wielded considerable influence over the direction of U.S.-China relations between 2009 and 2011, as she described her team as “advising” former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and responsible...

Amazon is gauging how employees feel about moving away from the company's Seattle campus, largely because of the Covid-19 pandemic and Seattle’s new payroll tax. Amazon sent an email to workers asking if they’d be willing to work in Seattle’s suburbs and outlying areas, including Redmond and Tacoma. The story was reported by Bloomberg on Friday. **SNIP** Amazon employs about 50,000 workers at its Seattle headquarters, which includes more than 40 buildings - including the company’s landmark, greenhouse-like glass Spheres - sprawling across several blocks. **SNIP** Amazon has had a rocky relationship with the Seattle City Council since at least...

Nobody dares take a sledgehammer to the OS Microsoft has announced that it is time to simply tear stuff down and rebuild anew.Sadly, this is not in reference to Windows, which still labours under code built up over decades of twiddling, but is instead related to the modernisation of its campus.That said, we quite fancy the idea of being issued one of those natty hardhats. Handy for weathering the latest Windows 10 update if a little flimsy when it comes to wholesale demolition.And we can't see any attachment points for a handy Hololens either.The Windows giant will tear down 13...

Facebook is investigating News for Democracy, an organization backed by liberal megadonor Reid Hoffman, over misleading news pages the group operated prior to the 2018 midterm elections, the social network said Monday. News for Democracy created several active Facebook pages that may have broken the social network’s advertising policies and rules against misleading users during the race, The Washington Post reported. **SNIP** Mr. Hoffman, a LinkedIn co-founder and Microsoft board member, did not return requests for comment, The Post reported. Dmitri Mehlhorn, his top political adviser and a News for Democracy, declined to comment, the report said.

Liberal abuse of Facebook to manipulate elections didn’t stop in 2017. A new Washington Post report indicated the same strategy was widespread in 2018 and earned as many as 16 million views in just a two-week span. Liberal billionaire Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and member of the board of directors for Microsoft, was exposed last week for funding a project that created fake Facebook pages to manipulate the 2017 Alabama special election between Roy Moore and Doug Jones. A new Washington Post article has revealed that the group that created the project, News for Democracy, had created 14 fake...

Melinda Gates says she will preference women and non-whites over men and white people, specifically for these immutable characteristics that have nothing inherently to do with business success. Melinda Gates has decided to enter the venture capital world by sending her money to people based at least partly on their sex and skin color, she said in a recent Fortune interview. Disparate Outcomes Can Signal Broader Possibilities In the Fortune interview, Gates says “I think real change can occur when the VC community starts to demand that the people it invests in have diversity, the right values, and the right...

Most Pacific Northwesterners spend long, rainy months pining for summer. But Microsoft President Brad Smith is having a hard time celebrating because he sees three clouds on the political horizon. During an appearance at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., on Tuesday, Smith told Recode’s Kara Swisher that he has three immigration-related concerns that could make this “a tough summer.” If President Donald Trump takes any of the actions Smith warned about, Microsoft employees would be directly impacted. Smith told Swisher he is worried that Republicans and Democrats will fail to reach a compromise on DACA, a program...

REDMOND, Ore. — B.J. Soper took aim with his AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and fired a dozen shots at a human silhouette target. Soper’s wife and their 16-year-old daughter practiced drawing pistols. Then Soper helped his 4-year-old daughter, in pink sneakers and a ponytail, work on her marksmanship with a .22-caliber rifle. Deep in the heart of a vast U.S. military training ground, surrounded by spent shotgun shells and juniper trees blasted to shreds, the Central Oregon Constitutional Guard was conducting its weekly firearms training. “The intent is to be able to work together and defend ourselves if we need to,”...

Project Veritas has released its third undercover video of another Common Core executive revealing the political ideology behind the national educational standards. And this time the anti-American agenda is made clear. The featured Common Core salesperson in this video is Kim Koerber of National Geographic Education (funded by the Gates Foundation, by the way) and a former Pearson Education publishing executive. Her expressions of hatred for America's founding documents coupled with her undying love for Common Core brings the problem to an entirely new level. Plus, she brings a new meaning to the word disgust when talking about those...

The billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has told the BBC that the United States "should set a better example" by taking in more refugees. Mr Gates said his home country "had the capacity" to follow the examples of Germany and Sweden, who were "to be congratulated" for welcoming migrants. But he acknowledged that relaxing immigration laws "was not easy". Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mr Gates added that governments were dealing with "tight budgets". However, he emphasised that the issue was largely a political one, and that "the total number of refugees is not a world record".

"On why the free market won’t develop new forms of energy fast enough: ...Without a substantial carbon tax, there’s no incentive for innovators or plant buyers to switch."

On the day that Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) told a local newspaper that she believed amnesty legislation could be brought to the floor by August, she met with Satya Nadella, the new CEO of Microsoft. “I believe there is a path that we get a bill on the floor by August,” House GOP Conference Chair McMorris Rodgers said last Friday. “We’re going to have to push that this is a legal status, not amnesty." That same day, she tweeted a photo of herself with Nadella from her verified @cathymcmorris Twitter account.

Software engineer Jennifer Kolar is to be sentenced this week in federal court for her role in Earth Liberation Front arsons, including one at the University of Washington. Her time in prison will be reduced because she turned state's witness, but that doesn't mitigate the fact she is now regarded as a snitch by peers and could be labeled a terrorist by the government.By Kim McDonald "Don't hang up," FBI Special Agent Jane Quimby told Jennifer Kolar on Dec. 10, 2006. "There were arrests and there is a target letter for you." She gave Kolar the name and number...

Georgia resident looking for help in the Washington area. My brother is in the hospital, he was just diagnosed with lymphoma and has congestive heart failure possibly connected to the lymphoma. The hospital is in Kirkland Washington and I am leaving very soon to be with him during this frightening time. He has no other family in the area and I do not know how to contact his friends for help with travel around the area. I have never been to Washington and would be delighted at any Freeper help on the availablility and desirablilty of public transportation from the...

Millions of Windows users may unwittingly be test subjects for an unfinished Microsoft antipiracy tool.The software maker has been delivering a prerelease version of Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications software to PCs as a "high priority" item in the built-in update feature in Windows. The tool, also known as WGA Notifications, is used to validate the authenticity of Windows software installed on a PC. The move is a first for the software maker. Microsoft normally asks people to join test programs before it initiates the download of any such trial software. "I don't think that we have done it before," David...

REDMOND - The Redmond Police Department is facing a $1 million lawsuit after a woman says an officer used his Taser on her during a medical emergency. Video from the police car camera shows that something was wrong with Leila Fuchs last July when police pulled her out of her car. For nearly 10 minutes when officers first pulled up, they say she remained unresponsive. "She's just gotten into this collision at Redmond Way and 145th -- small accident," said defense attorney James Egan. But he says it's the decisions an officer made when Fuchs wouldn't unlock her door that...