Ground Control
What will it look like when drones (like those envisioned by Amazon’s Prime Air) come to U.S. airspace?
In this property-rights-obsessed nation, it turns out you actually don’t have a clear right to shoot down a drone hovering low over your backyard unless it’s putting you in imminent physical danger.
“You have to acknowledge in this day and age that stuff flies over your house,” Ryan Calo, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in robotics and the law, told me. That puts him at odds with conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer, who voiced a more typical reaction on Fox News last year: “The first guy who uses a Second Amendment weapon to bring a drone down that’s been hovering over his house is going to be a folk hero in this country.”
The Bravest Woman in Seattle
2012 Pulitzer Prize winner: A woman testifies about her rape and the rape and murder of her partner:
“She understood, sitting up there on the witness stand, why people might need to imagine her window coverings. But this is not what the survivor of the South Park rapes and murder had come to talk about. The mechanics, both psychological and practical, of how the attacks might have come to pass were now well beside the point. In any sense that would satisfy, they are probably unknowable.
“The reason for her sitting on the witness stand of a packed and sweltering eighth-floor courtroom at the King County Courthouse on June 8, in jeans and a short-sleeved black blouse, hands clasped over knees, a jury of strangers taking notes, a crowd of family and friends and strangers observing, a bunch of media recording, was to say: This happened to me. You must listen. This happened to us. You must hear who was lost. You must hear what he did. You must hear how Teresa fought him. You must hear what I loved about her. You must know what he took from us. This happened.”
How Reporting Almost Got Me Killed, Before It Saved My Life
On April 29, Dorothy Parvaz disappeared. A former reporter and columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Parvaz now works as a correspondent for Al Jazeera, and she’d flown to Syria to cover the latest uprising in the Arab Spring. After Parvaz disappeared, no one knew exactly where she was, or if she was safe, until 19 days later when she was released from an Iranian detention center and sent home to Vancouver, BC.
The Great West Coast Newspaper War
Seized delivery vans, murderous editors, irate blog posts, allegations of insanity, connections to the Church of Satan, illegal predatory-pricing schemes, and more than $21 million on the line—the crazy alt-weekly war in San Francisco has it all.
