>Two years ago, some incumbent Republicans lost primary elections to challengers to their right, marking the growth of hard-line conservatives in Idaho politics.
>Those legislative victories bolstered a far-right voting bloc at the Statehouse and strengthened the Idaho Freedom Caucus, whose membership and influence have fought with and sometimes swayed the state’s red majority. Far-right lawmakers have endorsed fringe views and proposed passing a range of bills, like ones to outlaw COVID-19 vaccines, limit same sex marriage or pursue the phantom of growing cannibalism.
>Now, a set of legislative candidates with extreme views on abortion, COVID-19, the 2020 election and gender-affirming medicine who would be new to the Capitol are running in the May 21 Republican primary.
>As Republicans clash in competitive primaries, these challengers in Treasure Valley races have expressed hard-line views, shared misinformation or perpetuated conspiracy theories prominent in far-right circles.
Freedom Caucus Network power broker Maria Nate blasted controversial state Rep. Heather Scott for support...
>The recording, which we are not posting at the request of our source, is an unfiltered look into a fracture among key far-right figures in Idaho politics, in a state where many races turn on contests of conservative purity.
>It’s a portrait of the tangled relationship between a power broker and a politician. It includes Nate insulting other legislators and accusing Scott of joining the establishment. It shows Scott questioning both whether God wants women in leadership and whether she wants to remain in Idaho at all.
>Heather Scott and Maria Nate have each established their own perch in Idaho politics.
>Scott, from her district near the top of the Idaho Panhandle, has made plenty of headlines. During her first week in office, lawmakers accused her of cutting down a piece of the fire suppression system because she believed it was a “listening device” — a claim she denies.
>She’d explained that the Confederate flag she’d been photographed waving was merely signifying her support for “free speech.” She’d been removed from a committee after she was overheard saying that female House members “spread their legs” to get leadership positions — the same month that Moyle married a fellow legislator.
>But despite all that — or, perhaps, because of all that — she’s cultivated an army of die-hard supporters from the North Idaho grassroots.
>“Heather, do you just not trust me because I’m a woman?” Nate asked. “I do wonder, because you’d said to me a lot of times that women need to follow men.”
>Scott insisted she trusted Nate but acknowledged that she does “think men are stronger leaders.”
>“I just think that’s how God designed us,” Scott said. “Obviously, we’re in a time of attack and crisis. And I think that God has put a lot of women in leadership positions because we’re in judgment. That’s why we’re always — it’s not natural, I don’t think.”
If only the rest of the military would Mann-up like this.
The California-based Raw Milk Institute called the warnings "clearly fearmongering." The institute's founder, Mark McAfee, told the Los Angeles Times this weekend that his customers are, in fact, specifically requesting raw milk from H5N1-infected cows. According to McAfee, his customers believe, without evidence, that directly drinking high levels of the avian influenza virus will give them immunity to the deadly pathogen.
By all means, drink up, morons, get the hell out of our gene pool, we've got enough troubles without your Dimwit DNA.
I refuse as well, and will continue to refuse, at least until my 1997 and 2005 vehicles can no longer be repaired for some reason. I'd love some EV tech but the idea of driving a Big Brother vehicle that's fender-to-fender loaded with spyware and "features" that can only be enabled via subscriptions is horrifying and dystopian. Also forget all the Big Screen distractions inside and all the self-driving antifeatures. At least 1/2 of my driving is done for pleasure and I expect to be focusing on the road and what's happening around me.
literally cutting of your own nose
"Literally"? Really? People lusting after BYD products have no noses now?
“Probably the biggest misunderstanding is they’re all homeless,” Carolyn Pieciak, the retiring founding leader of St. Brigid’s in Brattleboro, says of a surprising shift in clientele statewide.
>“Probably the biggest misunderstanding is they’re all homeless,” she said. “Instead, 76% are low-income elderly who worked their whole lives, are living on Social Security and are struggling.”
>The newly named soup kitchen opened on St. Patrick’s Day 1982. It soon was serving an average of two dozen people,
>“We thought this was a temporary fix — we never thought it would last,” Pieciak said. “Things were not good then, but they’re horrible today.”
>The local influx of older patrons mirrors the situation statewide. According to “The State of Senior Hunger in America” report by the national hunger relief organization Feeding America, an estimated 8% of Vermont elders are considered “food insecure.”
>“We know that inflation and the increase in food prices have hit people on fixed incomes hard,” said John Sayles, CEO of the Vermont Foodbank.
Just stay tuned for the show when/if the Orange Fascist gets into office again. Cuts to Medicare, SS, and a dismantling of the ACA will be top priorities, and then you're going to see huge increases in the numbers of homeless old folks. Grandpa and Grandma trudging their carts down the road, loaded with the sum or their earthly possessions, heading for the next place to sit next to traffic with a cardboard sign or heading for the nearest tent-city that hasn't been ripped apart by the cops. These income/benefits cuts (and similar - think Medicaid) will be savage for younger people too, but younger people can at least, usually, at minimum, get some kind of crappy job whereas older people, the vast majority of whom are on small, fixed incomes, will very often be unemployable due to illness or injury or (as should be obvious to anyone who pays attention) age discrimination. If that sub-minimum-wage job office job can be done by 20yo Sally or 70yo Sam, if that house-painting job can be done by 20yo Chad or 60yo Cindy, guess who's going to get the job and who's going to be unable to rent even a single-room flat because of no job, no income.
I point this out mainly because one seldom encounters articles that are sympathetic to the financial plights of older people - they're assumed to be all out playing golf at The Club all day, eating restaurant meals afterwards, taking long vacations whenever, just because, and living in comfortable, fully-owned houses with incomes that support their upkeep as well as the upkeep+use of that brand new gigantic RV parked outside. Oldster unemployment and poverty and medical debt and, ultimately Oldster homelessness, is just outside of the narrative.
Re: the comments here I'm not for a moment buying the "too busy to cook, must eat fast food" argument or similar arguments portraying fast food as, why, almost necessary in this busy day and age! If you don't want to cook (I don't want to if I can avoid it, but do it anyway occasionally and usually make several days worth of dish X at a time to minimize my cooking time), you can easily go to you nearby Winco/Walmart/Aldi/etc and load up on some interesting frozen dishes for way, way less $ than the prices I'm seeing mentioned here. And I'm not talking about some kind of 1960s "TV dinner" things either - bogus stereotype of the concept. Even Trader Joe's (where you shouldn't shop b/c anti-union) is comparatively cheap and has super interesting frozen stuff. No time to cook tonight? Well just pop your frozen dish out of the freezer and into the microwave and five minutes later you've got an actual "meal" of sorts in front of you, and likely one with 1/10th the calories of that "meal" you got from McFatsos at 5x the price.
Ah, but it won't be DEEP FRIED goodness and lots and lots and lots of volume and lots and lots of pure concentrated sugar in that totally mandatory fast food dessert. No, you'll probably be getting a relatively (to McFatsos) small-ish portion and it probably won't have started its life being deep-fried and it might just have some interesting veggies ... and no dessert unless you explicitly microwave something else.
This Will Not Stand! Must have fat and more fat and more deep fry and more sugar .... that's a "meal" ... and must have it because, er, oh yeah, "no time". Yeah, that's it, no time.
Americans are simply addicted to garbage food (fat/sugar) and in tremendous quantities and if they don't get it, well now, the world is going to hell clearly.
Partial source: worked in fast food in HS (McD's clone) for a few years and did pretty much every task there was to be done in the "kitchen". The "kitchen" being, in that case, a grill for cooking greasy burgers and prepping greasy bacon and a deep fat fryer for frying up those potatoes in bulk and also the "tots" (same grease as the fries) and also the frozen "pie" concoctions (same grease as the fries).
Eating this crap if you have a grocery store anywhere nearby and a microwave is completely unnecessary but people do it anyway because it tastes soooo good! .... because of grease and sugar.
OK if you're on the road all the time, a trucker or on an extended road trip, you have to figure out something cheap/healthy, but pretty much every motel room I've ever rented has come with a fridge and a microwave and I've had no problems figuring out a workable solution with the hardware available.
Say "no" to garbage "food" addiction and you'll save a fortune.
"The whole conceit was that you were getting some OK-level of food ..."
Don't be conceited. And cook your own food at home. You're welcome.
"What we know about Gaza is only tip of atrocity iceberg."
>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."
>Service charges; resort fees; "surcharge" add-ons: If you've been startled by unexpected fees when you pay your check at a restaurant — or book a hotel room or buy a ticket to a game, you're far from alone. But if you live in California, change is coming. A new state law requiring price transparency is set to take effect in July.
>"The law is simple: the price you see is the price you pay," Attorney General Rob Bonta said on Wednesday, as his office issued long-awaited guidance about a law that applies to thousands of businesses in a wide range of sectors.
>Restaurant owners like Laurie Thomas, who heads the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, say the changes will bring higher prices and sticker shock, which could then raise a psychological hurdle in customers' dining habits. That, in turn, will hurt restaurants and their workers, she warns.
>"If it's in the core price of the menu, there will be a pullback" in patrons' spending, she told NPR shortly before the attorney general released the guidelines. "There are some people, I think, that are hoping that the restaurants will just absorb that cost, because we've seen people say, 'Oh, it's too expensive with the service charge.' "
Restaurant Association head thinks it's perfectly OK to mislead customers into thinking that prices are lower than they actually are, and gouge them after they've consumed/used the product. Because having knowledge of true prices would cause some customers to make informed decisions that might hurt sales. What other product information could be withheld to boost sales? What product misinformation could be provided to get those customers to "yes"?
... and over the fact that article mentions the universe being billions of years old, which we know to be false because some old book says so, supposedly, not that any of them have read that book. Ban all Webb data, keep that stuff out of our libraries and schools!
As the dystopian movie Civil War sets records depicting the "colorful horrors of the American future" on its current trajectory, we saw the same mindless, time-honored rancor play out at "Ole Miss being Ole Miss," where a pack of rabid, jeering, shit-for-brains frat bros with white-supremely punchab...
The FAA has opened a new investigation into a potential manufacturing quality lapse on Boeing's 787 Dreamliner and whether inspection records were falsified.
>The FAA has opened an investigation into Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner after the company disclosed that employees in South Carolina falsified inspection records on work done where the wings are joined to the fuselage body.
>Boeing informed the Federal Aviation Administration in April that, despite records indicating completion of required inspections, workers had not performed some of those inspections to confirm adequate bonding and electrical grounding at the 787 wing-to-body join.
>“The FAA is investigating whether Boeing completed the inspections and whether company employees may have falsified aircraft records,” the federal safety agency said via email.
>Boeing said its engineers have established that this newly discovered lapse does not create “an immediate safety of flight issue.”
whatever new term comes into Vogue
These people are reading Vogue? That's an interesting twist. I wouldn't have thought the average Fascist would be all that into fashion. Fashists?
Known as Josh, Dean lived in Wichita, Kan., where Spirit is based. He was 45, had been in good health and was noted for having a healthy lifestyle.
I lived in North Bend for six years, and I'm not even a zebra. Nothing much ever happened there but the town, together with neighboring Snoqualmie, was used in some of the Twin Peaks filming, none of which involved zebras AFAIK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Peaks_(fictional_town)
The rest of that solution is to ban any kind of birth control a woman might choose on her own.
Maybe they should be hunting for truffles
For that they'd have to be trained though.
Oh, where? And how are you (I'm assuming US citizen?) going to get permanent resident status in these places. I (US citizen) would have moved to Germany or Canada decades ago if they were just letting us in, and even formally applied to the latter but got shot down by the authorities there.
I agree that such arrests are just a fear-inducing (i.e. "state terror") tactic. It sounds like the final decision to pursue/not-pursue charges was up to a judge, at least in this case. It would be interesting to know if the cops knew or cared about what (and what quality) evidence they had or didn't have.
Police arrested 57 people for criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor akin to loitering. Travis County Attorney Delia Garza's office said Friday all those charges have been dismissed after a county judge found insufficient evidence to proceed.
Just lovely. Despite being a long-time Mint customer (and currently pre-paid for quite some time into the future) I fully expect to get screwed in some substantial way by this.
Knowing you are the reason your kid is dead. Or maimed. Christ how do you live with that?
Oh, it's legit all right, and yes these people are (evil) morons. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2024/apr/23/washington-state-republican-party-endorses-6-candi/
Sue Kuehl Pederson picked up 86% of the convention votes and secured the party’s nomination for commissioner of public lands.
Kuehl Pederson wants to make logging a more prominent part of the state’s economy.
“Unfortunately, our timber industry, which was the backbone of our economy for at least a century … it went down the tubes,” Kuehl Pederson said in a speech Friday.
Kuel Pederson, a former senior environmental analyst at Seattle City Light, said the state needs to get its power from a mix of resources. She said the state will experience power blackouts if it transitions completely away from hydroelectric power produced by dams.
“You know, wind and solar are fine,” she said. “They make you feel good about, you know, clean air, but you can’t live off of it.”
Some Republicans have been defensive that the party has a strong anti-democratic bent. But the state GOP convention embraced it, putting it right in the party platform.
>A resolution called for ending the ability to vote for U.S. senators. Instead, senators would get appointed by state legislatures, as it generally worked 110 years ago prior to the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913.
>“We are devolving into a democracy, because congressmen and senators are elected by the same pool,” was how one GOP delegate put it to the convention. “We do not want to be a democracy.”
Fucking neckbeard. Sounds like Traumatic Brain Injury for the poor girl, she could be affected (seizures &other neurological problems) for the rest of her life.
How in hell can your 10-14yo not go to school and nobody lifts a finger? School's not mandatory in W. VA? Somebody's been watching closely enough that they know how many times the girl left the house in four years, but nobody thought intervention was called for?
>Florida Governor Ron DeStantis has signed a law that prevents cities or counties from creating protections for workers who labor in the state's often extreme and dangerous heat.
>Two million people in Florida, from construction to agriculture, work outside in often humid, blazing heat.
>For years, many of them have asked for rules to protect them from heat: paid rest breaks, water, and access to shade when temperatures soar. After years of negotiations, such rules were on the agenda in Miami-Dade County, home to an estimated 300,000 outdoor workers.
>But the new law, signed Thursday evening, blocks such protections from being implemented in cities and counties across the state.
>Miami-Dade pulled its local heat protection rule from consideration after the statewide bill passed the legislature in March.
>"It's outrageous that the state legislature will override the elected officials of Miami Dade or other counties that really recognize the importance of protecting that community of workers," says David Michaels, an epidemiologist at George Washington University and a former administrator at the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA).
>The loss of the local rule was a major blow to Miami-Dade activists and workers who had hoped the county heat protection rules would be in place before summer.
>In Texas, Austin and Dallas created ordinances that required employers to provide paid water breaks to outdoor workers. But last year Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a "preemption" law that blocked local jurisdictions from making such rules. The goal, Abbott's office said, was to prevent a "patchwork" of differing local rules, which they contended would cause confusion for businesses in the state.
School board members in a Sheboygan County district listed “Christian values” and “conservative politics” as desired characteristics in a posting for a superintendent position at a public school.
>Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates held 12 focus groups with students, teachers, community members and school board members and put together a “Leadership Profile Report.”
>The original report, released on March 13, 2024, included a section of “Desired Characteristics of the next Cedar Grove-Belgium Superintendent as identified by the school board.” One of the points listed was: “must match the make-up of our community (conservative, Christian values).”
>Making religious beliefs a desired job characteristic is illegal, said Ryan Cox, legal director with ACLU of Wisconsin.
>“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of religion, including in the recruitment phase,” Cox said. “The ACLU of Wisconsin is extremely concerned that a public body might be attempting to apply a religious test as a condition of employment, or even as a preferred ‘qualification.’
>Cox added that the ACLU plans to investigate further, including past actions taken by the board and will “take appropriate action to enforce the law as the facts require.”
Nobody was injured in the incident, according to authorities, but the fire engulfed the office’s door, impeding the evacuation of staff. The senator was not present at the time, his spokesperson said.
>An arsonist set fire to the door of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Burlington office Friday morning, briefly trapping staff inside, according to police.
>Nobody was injured, authorities said, and the senator was not present at the time.
>According to the Burlington Police Department, an unidentified man entered the vestibule outside Sanders’ third-floor office on Church Street at around 10:45 a.m. and sprayed “an apparent accelerant” on the door. The man lit the accelerant, prompting “a significant fire” to engulf Sanders’ office door and a portion of the vestibule, police said in a press release. The man then fled.
>The blaze impeded staff members’ egress from the office, police said, “endangering their lives.” The building’s sprinkler system extinguished the fire. Firefighters and police officers evacuated Sanders’ office and those nearby.
>The Burlington Police Department released an image of a man it identified as a suspect in an alleged arson attack on Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Burlington office on Friday, April 5, 2024. Photo courtesy of the Burlington Police Department
>Police said they had not apprehended a suspect and had not identified a motive. They released photos of a man they described as a suspect and asked for the public’s help in identifying him.
Much of the new investigation has focused on whether the select committee had hidden information that may have exonerated Donald Trump.
>Members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol have warned America for three years to take former President Donald Trump at his word.
>Now, as Trump is poised to win the Republican presidential nomination, his criminal trials face delays that could stall them past Election Day, and his rhetoric grows increasingly authoritarian, some of those lawmakers find themselves following their own advice.
>In mid-March, Trump said on social media that the committee members should be jailed. In December he vowed to be a dictator on “day one.” In August, he said he would “have no choice” but to lock up his political opponents.
>“If he intends to eliminate our constitutional system and start arresting his political enemies, I guess I would be on that list,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose). “One thing I did learn on the committee is to pay attention and listen to what Trump says, because he means it.”
>Lofgren added that she doesn’t yet have a plan in place to thwart potential retribution by Trump. But Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), who has long been a burr in Trump’s side, said he’s having “real-time conversations” with his staff about how to make sure he stays safe if Trump follows through on his threats.
>“We’re taking this seriously, because we have to,” Schiff said. “We’ve seen this movie before … and how perilous it is to ignore what someone is saying when they say they want to be a dictator.”
Republicans placate an evangelical base that's getting nastier with sexism — even if costs the party women's votes
>"Stand where he tells you to stand, wear what he tells you to wear, and do what he tells you to do."
>This is the wedding night advice offered to brides by Josh Howerton, a senior pastor at Lakepointe Church in Dallas, Texas. Lakepointe, according to the Dallas Morning News, is one of the biggest megachurches in Texas, with over 13,000 people a week attending its main location. The church itself cites a number over 40,000 a week, between its six campuses and online services. Howerton opened Sunday morning services on February 25 with this paean to sexual coercion.
>Claiming that the bride has "been planning this day her whole life," and so the groom should indulge her: "Stand where she tells you to stand, wear what she tells you to wear, and do what she tells you to do. You'll make her the happiest woman in the world."
>Then he hits folks with this counterpoint: In exchange, the bride should take a submissive role in what he pointedly calls "his wedding night," to "make him the happiest man in the world." (Howerton did not respond to a Salon request for comment.)
>"We are offering our pilots voluntary programs for the month of May to reduce excess staffing," a United spokesperson said in a statement to NPR, attributing the decision to "recent delays in Boeing deliveries."
>United says it won't have to cut flights.
>The effort to trim pilot staffing is the latest sign that production problems at Boeing and its suppliers are rippling through the aviation industry. The plane maker has been forced to reduce deliveries of its 737 Max jets after a door plug panel blew out in midair during an Alaska Airlines flight in January.
>Boeing says it's slowed production at its factory near Seattle to focus on quality and safety, as regulators at the Federal Aviation Administration push the company and its supplier for a plan to fix widespread manufacturing problems.
>The launch of the larger 737 Max 10 model has also been delayed indefinitely. United had been expecting to begin receiving those jets this year, but is now considering other options to replace them.
>"Deliveries are going to be way behind what they expected," United CEO Scott Kirby said at an investor conference last month, confirming that the company has looked into buying additional planes from Boeing's rival, Airbus
This is a tough column to write, because I don’t want to demean or insult those who write me in good faith. I’ve started it a half dozen times since November but turned to other topics each time because this needle hard to thread.
>The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.
>This is not subjective. We all saw it. Plenty of leaders today try to convince the masses we did not see what we saw, but our eyes don’t deceive. (If leaders began a yearslong campaign today to convince us that the Baltimore bridge did not collapse Tuesday morning, would you ever believe them?) Trust your eyes. Trump on Jan. 6 launched the most serious threat to our system of government since the Civil War. You know that. You saw it.
>The facts involving Trump are crystal clear, and as news people, we cannot pretend otherwise, as unpopular as that might be with a segment of our readers. There aren’t two sides to facts. People who say the earth is flat don’t get space on our platforms. If that offends them, so be it.
Former president Donald Trump disseminated on social media on Friday an image of President Biden with his hands and feet tied and his mouth gagged.
>Former president Donald Trump disseminated on social media on Friday an image of President Biden with his hands and feet tied and his mouth gagged, the latest example of the Republican candidate’s use of increasingly violent rhetoric and imagery this campaign season.
>The image can be seen about halfway through a 20-second video that Trump posted on his Truth Social site. The post says it was recorded Thursday on Long Island, where Trump traveled this week to attend a wake for a recently killed police officer.
>In the video, two trucks decorated with giant Trump flags and altered American flags are driving on a highway. On the tailgate door of one of the trucks is the image of Biden lying horizontally, bound and gagged.
>Trump has a history of sharing and promoting violent images featuring his perceived enemies.
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.
After racial slurs were yelled at University of Utah women’s basketball players on Thursday evening, many North Idahoans acknowledged the region’s decadeslong struggle with hate speech and white supremacist groups.
>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.
"once synonymous" - that's rich. Today's ID is rotten to the core with right-wing domestic terrorists.
--- >The incident occurred in a part of the Pacific Northwest that was once synonymous with hate groups and has lately seen a rise in extremism even among its elected officials. Coeur D'Alene and northern Idaho became known as a haven for extremism and racist groups in the 1970s and '80s when the Aryan Nations relocated its headquarters there. Skinheads held parades in the 1990s. Activity declined following a lawsuit, but two summers ago 31 members of the white nationalist group Patriot Front were arrested there, with plans to disrupt a queer pride event.
>"This is yet another example to those individuals who claim incorrectly that racism is no longer a problem. They are wrong," Tony Stewart with the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations said at the press conference, carried by KXLY television.
>"We are witnessing a troubling growth of a very toxic environment in our country and locally, by individuals and organized extremist groups to advance many forms of hatred," Stewart said.
>People in the U.S. are leaving and switching faith traditions in large numbers. The idea of "religious churning" is very common in America, according to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI).
>It finds that around one-quarter (26%) of Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated, a number that has risen over the last decade and is now the largest single religious group in the U.S. That's similar to what other surveys and polls have also found, including Pew Research.
>PRRI found that the number of those who describe themselves as "nothing in particular" has held steady since 2013, but those who identify as atheists have doubled (from 2% to 4%) and those who say they're agnostic has more than doubled (from 2% to 5%).
>As for why people leave their religions, PRRI found that about two-thirds (67%) of people who leave a faith tradition say they did so because they simply stopped believing in that religion's teachings.
>And nearly half (47%) of respondents who left cited negative teaching about the treatment of LGBTQ people.
>Those numbers were especially high with one group in particular.
>"Religion's negative teaching about LGBTQ people are driving younger Americans to leave church," Deckman says. "We found that about 60% of Americans who are under the age of 30 who have left religion say they left because of their religious traditions teaching, which is a much higher rate than for older Americans."
