Author: rpnadmin

SEATTLE — Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson on Friday defended her decision to oust the city’s police chief as the “right decision at the right time,” but she declined to explain why. The leadership change came as police continue searching for people involved in a fatal, gang-related shootout at a food festival near the Space Needle last weekend. A 15-year-old was arrested at the scene and has been charged with assault, but charging documents say the gun he was seen firing wasn’t involved in the deaths of two bystanders. Wilson and then-Police Chief Shon Barnes faced criticism for being slow to…

PHOENIX — Three western U.S. states would take less water from the Colorado River under a federal proposal released Friday to stave off a crisis in the beleaguered waterway. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation proposal spares four other states from facing mandatory cuts for now. It’s meant to be flexible, allowing deeper cuts in drier times while giving the states more time to collectively agree on how to manage the dwindling resource that flows through dams to produce hydropower. The Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada could together be forced to reduce their use by up to 3…

CHICAGO — A former Illinois sheriff’s deputy won’t get an early medical release from his two-decade prison sentence for killing Sonya Massey inside her home after the Black woman called 911 about a possible prowler, state officials decided Friday. Sean Grayson had been diagnosed with colon cancer prior to the 2024 shooting, and his attorney noted in January that the cancer had advanced to his liver and lungs. The three-member Illinois Prisoner Review Board voted unanimously Friday to deny Grayson’s application for early medical release, Liz Mitchell, a board spokesperson, said in an email. Grayson, who is white, was convicted…

A 27-year-old Sacramento man has been charged with sending threatening messages to the Mississippi judge whose son was among the friends with 18-year-old Nolan Wells when he vanished during a July 4 boat outing to Horn Island. Joseph Alfredo Vasquez Dumarce was arrested Thursday and charged with interstate transmission of a threatening communication, a federal offense, after allegedly sending a series of Facebook Messenger threats to Jackson County Chancery Court Judge Ashlee Cole, according to a recently unsealed federal complaint. The charge carries a maximum of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, court documents show. Investigators say Mr.…

ICE’s main detention center where it holds families awaiting deportation is beset by a “culture of cruelty,” according to a report by a senior Senate Democrat who said migrants were made to wait for medical care, provided undrinkable water and faced taunts from guards. Parents and children said the staff at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, would intentionally eat candy, pizza and cookies in front of children who, under the rules of the facility, were prohibited from treats. “One child described a guard slowly eating a lollipop in front of detained children ’on purpose’ to make…

DETROIT — The jokes practically wrote themselves as an eclectic group of progressive pastors, imams and a rabbi walked into a room, finding their seats around a table to talk about religion and politics. Though there was no shortage of levity, a sense of urgency filled the Detroit meeting room as Abdul El-Sayed, a former gubernatorial candidate who is running as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate in Michigan, began speaking about how his Muslim faith informs his progressive views. The public health researcher asked the group of faith leaders ahead of Tuesday’s primary, “What does the inspiration of holding…

Anthropic said its artificial intelligence models hacked into three other organizations during testing, just days after ChatGPT maker OpenAI raised concerns over AI controls after it disclosed its rogue models hacked another company. Anthropic, the San Francisco-based AI company behind Claude, posted on its website Thursday that it discovered the three incidents after reviewing more than 141,000 evaluation runs. It had launched a “large-scale” cybersecurity review which specifically looked for evidence whether its AI models were able to access the internet from within testing environments that should have been sealed off, in response to the OpenAI incident, Anthropic said. Anthropic…

Federal regulators are clearing the way for robotaxis to operate without manual controls like steering wheels or eventually even brake pedals as the rules start to catch up to the evolving technology. Amazon’s fully autonomous Zoox vehicles got approval Thursday to begin charging customers for rides in the specially designed cars that feature four inward-facing seats once they secure state and local approval. Zoox has already been offering free rides in Las Vegas and San Francisco since last year. At least a couple people were waiting at most stops Thursday afternoon for rides up and down the Vegas strip aboard…

NEW YORK — American oil and gas giants raked in massive spring profits while fighting between Iran and the U.S. impeded petroleum shipments and consumers around the world paid more for fuel and confronted shortages. The conflict, now in its sixth month, halted most shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway that previously served as a delivery route for a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas. With global supplies constrained, prices for Brent crude, the international standard, soared from about $70 to above $100 a barrel for much of March, April and May, and at one…

GULF SHORES, Ala. — A TSA agent discovered a set of stolen Civil War-era cannonballs in a passenger’s suitcase during a routine security screening at an Alabama airport earlier this month, law enforcement officials said. The Transportation Security Administration said in a statement Friday that the relics were discovered at Gulf Shores International Airport on July 18 after the agent observed what appeared to be a large, opaque item inside a suitcase during an X-ray screening. When he opened the luggage, he found five small cannonballs wrapped in paper towels and notified a supervisor. “I had never seen anything quite…