The most senior (and it's said most powerful) Republican in the U.S. Senate, Ted Stevens was indicted by a federal grand jury for not mentioning the $250,000 in labor and materials he received from a construction company. Veco Corp. actually lifted Stevens' house in the air while a new first floor was built, and no money changed hands. They also threw in a Viking grill. If you have had any remodeling done lately, you know......

Will the "Bento Bandit" be next? By Flickr User Bento Panda The local office of the FBI seems to be fresh out of creative names for its criminals. Behold the most recent stories regarding criminals the FBI are looking for locally--the Waddling Bandit and the Candy Man Bandit. The Waddling Bandit apparently has a distinctive gait while Mr. Candy Man robs banks while sucking on lollipops. The names don't exactly inspire a citizen corps to......

Photo of Seattle tourists courtesy of the FBI About those photos we released to the world, implying you were terrorists...really sorry about that. Clearly, you're just innocent European businessmen who appear to be of Middle Eastern descent. On Monday, the FBI announced that a world-wide manhunt for two unidentified men who were spotted "acting suspiciously" on a Washington State Ferry last summer has been called off. The previously mysterious men in the photos went to......

Either that or they have hired the stoners they are busting to come up with operation names. "Operation Green Reaper" is underway in the Seattle area— a series of no-knock raids on indoor marijuana grow operations. So far, fourteen people and two companies have been indicted for involvement in a large-scale grow operation. The two companies caught up in the raids were garden supply stores in Auburn and Tukwila. Photo Courtesy of the AP......

Not D.B. Cooper's Parachute, AP Photo/Kevin P. Casey Back to searching rural Washington and Oregon! The FBI has confirmed that the parachute found in a Clark County, Wash., field is not infamous hijacker D.B. Cooper's. Parachute experts, as well as Earl Cossey, the man who packed the parachute given to Cooper the night of the hijacking, determined the recently discovered was not Cooper's. FBI spokesperson Robbie Burroughs crushed our mystery-loving hopes by saying, "From......

A decades-old mystery may be closer to being solved, thanks to a parachute that was found in Clark County. The parachute is currently being analyzed at an FBI lab in Seattle, in hopes it might be connected to D.B. Cooper. The case of Cooper, who hijacked a Northwest Orient Airlines plane in 1971 with $200,000 ransom, only to abandon the plane via parachute over Washington state, has long fascinated Washington residents and the FBI,......

A Seattle-area man whose identity had been stumping the FBI has been identified with the help of his parents. The 52-year-old man had been arrested two weeks ago by federal authorities on charges of identity theft and fraud. The government had not been able to identify the man, who had been known to use over 30 aliases, because he had burned the tips of his fingers to alter his prints. The man who had......

Seriously, we're surprised the local news stations have not created special icons to attach to all of their recent environmentally-motivated arson stories. Usually, if an event has gone on this long or had this much prominent news coverage in Seattle, local newscasters have given it some sort of pet-name by now. We nickname our windstorms, snowstorms, local scandals, and minor earthquakes. And they all come complete with their own graphics. (Our personal favorite? "The Sinatra......

AP Photo/Elaine Thompson Fires destroyed three multi-million-dollar homes early this morning in Woodinville. The homes had previously been featured in the annual "Street of Dreams." Explosive devices were found and removed in the three homes that had burned and a fourth that had been spared from the flames. (It had been previously reported that four homes burned and there were five explosive devices. We're going to stick with the most recent AP report.) Responders......

David Copperfield may think he can make the word "no" disappear, but it's going to be for a grand jury to decide. A federal grand jury is looking into a 21-year-old Washington woman's claim that Copperfield raped her at his private, 150-acre resort in the Bahamas. The story she tells is pretty amazing...we hesitate to use the word "incredible," because if it's true she's endured something terrifying. She says she was approached almost immediately after......

Monday the 10th, at 7pm, the Paramount Theatre presents Charlie Chaplin's 51st, 52nd, and 53rd films, all from 1916: The Floorwalker, The Fireman, and The Vagabond. They're all half-hour or so shorts from early on in his Mutual Films era, and feature Chaplin's genius for environmental comedy, with mishaps with escalators and fire poles. In his autobiography, Chaplin wrote that his notion of humor was based on "the subtle discrepancy we discern in what appears......

The P-I is still defending its decision not to run the random photo of Arab-lookin guys the FBI passed them last week, as if not participating in a man-hunt for two guys who happened to ask a question about the workings of the ferry in front of the wrong citizen detective is something that needs any more ink. Robert Jamieson Jr says: The trouble with public outings goes beyond these men being stripped of their......

Seattle Police, or the Washington State Ferry system, or the FBI, or whatever shadowy anti-terrorist unit is in charge of this particular investigation hasn't contacted Seattlest at this time. They haven't asked us into the evidence room in the basement of some nondescript building and opened the box containing the suspicious device they found in a Seattle/Bainbridge ferry bathroom and asked us to identify it. We can identify it, however, and you probably can too......

The people who bring you Sidewalk Cinema take over pizza-and-beer-serving Central Cinema tonight with a '50s B-movie double-feature in glorious 16mm: Port of Hell and Sky Liner. In Port of Hell, a ship with an atom bomb on board (fucking Commies!) shows up in the L.A. harbor just when harbormaster Gibson Pardee is getting all sorts of blowback for his stringent safety concerns. It's a race against time, and the film only runs 80 minutes!......

It's always good to be reminded that here in the other Washington, our Republicans are just as nutty, corrupt and paranoid as their cousins in D.C. Today, David Postman over at the Times reports on his blog that state Sen. Joe Zarelli recently hosted right-wing Israeli politicians and others at a two-day conference down in Vancouver, to fan the flames of Islamophobia. Known as the Convergence Northwest conference, Zarelli invited "[m]embers of Israel’s Knesset, former......

All across the Ist-A-Verse (or at least the American parts thereof), writers and editors are in the midst of enjoying their three-day weekend. But after the week we've all had, we feel like the break is not only needed, but deserved. Just look at everything we've been doing! Gothamist headed into the Memorial Day weekend with a number of tasks accomplished. They worried about Long Islanders giving New Yorkers a bad name. They tried......

The strangest terrorist in the history of sports, television broadcasting, cheerleading, and terrorism is evidently operating out of Seattle. He or she alleges this conspiracy: that sports television producers are biased against sluttily-dressed cheerleaders. And he or she is doing something about it--sending insecticide-laced letters to TV networks and local stations. This is from one of the author's letters, several of which have had a Seattle postmark:For the last 6 years, Ohio State cheerleaders have......

It seems that it's always about day two of the fest that we really fall in love with this place---the overheard intense discussions of films, the industry gossip, the random interactions with individuals you will never see again, and all that swag just ripe for the taking---really, these are a few of our favorite things. When we last left off, we were headed into Zoo. The buzz going into the film was not good;......

Happy New Year! We were only a few minutes into it when the first Seattle gun violence of 2007 happened at Skyway Park Bowl and Casino (which is actually in Renton, but whatever). A pregnant woman, a woman and a man were all shot just minutes after midnight at the bowling alley and taken to Harborview. The P-I doesn't list a motive. So it took five minutes for someone to get shot in the area......

According to a recent discussion on the Hobo Bicycle Elite Message Board, there was an incident with some assholes who assaulted bicycle enthusiasts during last night's Critical Mass festivity. Allegedly the instigators later played the ingenious "PSYCHE! We're actually cops but we waited till after kicking your ass to tell you that" save. That's a good save to pull if you can get away with it, unlike, say, DMX, who wasn't all that convincing......

LAist has so much fun this week! They go to E3, where they overhear the timeless remark "Man, this is where nerdy girls get laid." Is that a promise? They also give us this week's best CDs and make us realize that LA is the best place to use Zillow. Ah, Houstonist. They're biking to work, that is, if they can figure out how to get there. That's right, Mapquest says "Houston had the......

On your way home from work today don't grab that massive Sunday Seattle Times from the yard and toss it straight into the recycling bin. Usually, yes, if you don't get to it on Sunday it isn't worth reading, but at least pull the section with the "Is ecosabotage terrorism?" article out and bring it into the house this time. It's worth reading. Once upon a three months ago the Seattle Times was the local......

Oh no, oh no, the ferries are a top target for the terrorists! The No. 1 target, in fact. Well, the No. 1 target for maritime terrorism, which is kind of like saying Cupcake Royale is the No. 1 target for cupcake terrorism. Just as we don't buy that Bad Men would threaten our cupcake supply, we are similarly unconvinced that any maritime target is likely to be the subject of an attack. When we......

Although we live relatively close to the the Ave and even head over there from time to time for cheap eats or discount athletic shoes we had no idea the place was living under the thumb of an East African gang. The owner of Schultzy's was on the TV last night and apparently he was also in the dark to the fact that he was behind on his protection money payments and claimed ignorance of......

Love the environment. Protect the environment. Do your best to repair the environment. We all have our own ways of doing those things. Seattlest might take the bus to work. Maybe you wear hemp underwear and only drink organically produced beer. These other guys over here maybe plant incendiary devices at tree farms and UW research centers. Actually, while we may feel that your hemparoos are criminal, it's that last form of loving the environment......

Seattlest readers driving south this holiday weekend might wanna swing by the Ariel Store and Tavern on State Highway 503, 10 miles east of the I-5 Woodland exit, about 140 miles south of Seattle. Why? Every November, the tavern hosts "D.B. Cooper Days" to commemorate Thanksgiving Eve, 1971 -- the night the notorious skyjacker parachuted from a jetliner over southwest Washington with $200,000 in ransom money, never to be heard from again. Details vary from......

Local FBI (that's Fantagraphics Books Inc) leader Gary Groth will read excerpts of the Nixon tapes Saturday night at the Rendezvous' Jewel Box Theater in Belltown, as part of the travelling theater series Verbatim Verboten. The premise of the series is an interesting one: word-for-word (hence the "verbatim" title) interview transcripts with famous people who thought they were speaking off the record. According to The Chicago Reader, the Windy City's version of the show featured......

In October of 2004 two servers belonging to Indymedia.org were believed to be seized by federal investigators. Indymedia, remember, "was established by various independent and alternative media organizations and activists in 1999 for the purpose of providing grassroots coverage of the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle." The Electronic Frontier Foundation is reporting today that after months of secret legal proceedings they have gotten access to documents concerning the missing servers. The documents say......

The FBI is investigating a man who spent a signifigant amount of time in Seattle from 1999-2000 for possible connections to the London bombings. From the P-I: British police have identified Haroon Rashid Aswat as a possible source of logistical, financial and technical support to the four bombers, according to media reports. The question for federal agents in Seattle is whether the man named by Scotland Yard is the same man as Aswat Haroon Rashid......

With not much happening in our own city’s mayoral race, we thought we would look across the Cascades to eastern Washington and see what is happening in our sister city Spokane…oh my. Not only did it get passed by Tacoma as Washington’s second largest city, but their mayor has just taken a leave of absence following a scandal involving gay chat rooms and charges of child molestation. Last week The Spokesman-Review reported that Mayor......