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    ‘I’m Freaking Out’: New Texts Detail Key Minutes of Idaho Murders

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    Newly released messages reveal that two roommates in the home where four college students were murdered were alarmed by a masked person in the house that night.On the night that four University of Idaho students were fatally stabbed in a house near the campus, two roommates began urgently texting each other after one of them saw a masked man moving through the house.“What’s going on,” one of the residents, Dylan Mortensen, texted to one of her friends upstairs, according to new court documents released on Thursday. The friend did not answer, but she was able to make contact with a downstairs roommate, Bethany Funke. “I’m freaking out,” she texted.Ms. Mortensen and Ms. Funke — who ultimately were the only survivors of the stabbing spree — began texting back and forth shortly before 4:30 a.m., soon after Ms. Mortensen had seen a masked man walking in the hallway outside her bedroom door.The texts on the night of Nov. 13, 2022, give new insight into the confusion and fright of the two surviving roommates, who appear to have hunkered down in Ms. Funke’s room until later that morning. Ms. Mortensen called or texted each of the stabbing victims around 4:30 a.m., but received no response. No one called 911 until more than seven hours later.Ms. Mortensen, who had seen the masked figure in the house, told Ms. Funke by text that “no one is answering” the other roommates’ phones, and she described seeing someone wearing something like a “ski mask almost.” Ms. Funke told her to “run” downstairs to her bedroom so they could be together.“It’s better than being alone,” she texted.Ethan Chapin, left, and Xana Kernodle. Kaylee Goncalves, left, and Madison Mogen. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Federal layoffs hit the deep-red, rural US west: ‘Our public lands are under threat’

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      Republican representative McKay Erickson walked through the halls of the Wyoming capitol with a Trump 2024 pin on the front of his suit jacket. Much of Erickson’s home district in Lincoln county falls under the jurisdiction of the Bridger-Teton national forest and Grand Teton national park.With that federal land, comes federal workers. While it appears districts in Wyoming crucial to US energy dominance have been spared the brunt of the layoffs, McKay said his forest-heavy district has not been so fortunate. He’s hearing from his constituents about the layoffs, and he’s troubled about the implications for his district’s future.“These people have a face to me,” Erickson said. “They have a face and a place in either Star Valley or Jackson that I know quite well.”Erickson is a small-government conservative, laments bureaucracy and stands by his belief that there’s a need to “cut the fat” at the federal level. But in his district, he foresees a lack of trail maintenance hurting local outfitting companies and understaffed parks with closed gates.“This way is so indiscriminate, and it doesn’t really drill down on the real issue as to where those cuts need to be,” Erickson said. “I’m afraid that probably all we’re going to lose is services.”Erickson’s district is in a bind that’s playing out across the American west.Wyoming, for the third presidential election in a row, voted for Donald Trump by a wider margin than any other state in the country. Neighboring states Idaho and Montana also swung red with mile-wide margins. All three have high proportions of federal land (Idaho – 62%, Wyoming – 48%, Montana – 29%), and thriving outdoor recreation industries dependent on public lands.Erickson, while watching cuts with apprehension, said that he is still supportive of the president, who won more than 81% of presidential votes cast in Lincoln county in 2024.“It hasn’t really shaken me. It’s concerned me, but not shaken me in my support,” Erickson said.As layoffs under Trump and billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) bleed out of the Beltway and across the country, local business owners, politicians and federal employees in the rural Mountain West told the Guardian that they feared devastating consequences for their communities.The Guardian reached out to US senators from Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, some of whom have publicly praised Doge’s work, about their constituents’ concerns. None responded to a request for comment.Few towns represent the ties between small town economies and public lands better than Salmon, Idaho. With a population of just over 3,000, Salmon is cradled by a nest of federal lands, including the Salmon-Challis national forest, the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness and a smattering of Bureau of Land Management holdings.Dustin Aherin calls Salmon home, and is the president of Middle Fork Outfitters Association, which represents 27 local businesses. He said that the day-to-day duties of forestry service employees, from river patrol to permitting to conservation, keep businesses like his alive. Recent layoffs put their future in jeopardy.“The team in the field that manages the Middle Fork and Main Salmon river, all but two were terminated. And the two that were left have been reassigned,” Aherin said. “We have no on-the-ground management as of right now.”The urgency caused by the layoffs sent Aherin to Capitol Hill, where he spoke with the Guardian between meetings with federal officials. He held cautious optimism that Idaho’s federal delegation would be able to help craft a solution.A hundred miles south-west of Salmon, in Stanley, Idaho, Hannah, a terminated employee from the Sawtooth national forest who requested anonymity, has a grim outlook for the future of the small mountain town. She said that about 40% of staff was cut, including the entire wilderness and trail crew. She wonders who will handle the public-facing jobs, from cleaning toilets and campgrounds to providing visitor information, and worries about the effects on Stanley, which took a major hit in the 2024 wildfire season.“In a small town like this where you only have a couple good months of a summer season, one hard year and another hard-ish year could be really bad for some local businesses,” Hannah said.Hannah said the termination cost her her health insurance just weeks before a costly surgery, and she expects to have to relocate. In the early stages of her career, she said the experience will likely sour her, and other young civil servants, on public service.“We’re losing the next generation of public land stewards,” Hannah said. “And our public lands are under threat.”Similar anxiety is creeping into communities surrounding the Mountain West’s marquee national parks, which are economic engines for the region. A 2023 report estimated that National Parks generated more than $55bn in economic impact off of a budget of $3.6bn. Many of these dollars went to gateway towns in red states, such as those framing the entrances to Grand Teton national park or Yellowstone national park.Dale Sexton, owner of Dan Bailey’s fly shop in Livingston, Montana, is helping push the revival of the Yellowstone Business Coalition, whose 400-plus members are lobbying Montana’s federal delegation to work to address the effects of federal layoffs. Sexton is pragmatic about the national political climate and is betting that an economics-based argument will move the needle.“I’m envisioning that our delegation currently doesn’t want to abandon the Doge ship,” Sexton said. “But I’m also hopeful that outcry becomes so loud that it garners their attention and affects change.”Livingston city commissioner Karrie Kahle envisions a trickle-down effect from the layoffs.“As we lose federal workers first, if one of them is lost, we’re potentially losing a whole family from our community,” Kahle said. “If that federal worker has a partner, is that partner a teacher or doing other work in our community? Are we going to lose kids out of our school systems?”Andrea Shiverdecker, an archaeologist in Montana’s Custer-Gallatin national forest, lost her job on Valentine’s Day. Along with the impact on her personal life and community, Shiverdecker dwells on potential consequences for Yellowstone.“I don’t think people understand the sheer volume and amount of people that come through our ecosystem every year and the amount of manpower it takes to keep cleaned up,” Shiverdecker said. “This is what we fear with our public lands … We need to be stewards and foster them for future generations.”Shiverdecker said the layoff process has been disorienting. She said she was terminated 25 days before the end of her probationary period, while paperwork was being run for her promotion. She said she believes in “good people” and hopes to somehow return to her job, but right now, she has a lot of frustration.“How am I getting laid off for performance issues when you were processing my promotion?” Shiverdecker said. “It’s heartbreaking as a dedicated public servant, as a disabled veteran, as somebody who loves the fact that they’ve served. That’s the biggest honor you can give.” More

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      in Elections

      3 Idaho Big-Game Guides Led Illegal Mountain Lion Hunts, U.S. Says

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      The three face federal charges for leading hunts as part of an unlicensed outfitting business separate from their employer, federal prosecutors said.Three big-game hunting guides in Idaho are facing federal charges that they illegally led mountain lion hunts in national forests and then shipped some of at least a dozen carcasses out of state, according to federal prosecutors.All three people were licensed guides in the state and employed by a legal outfitter, but they also booked clients for mountain lion hunts separately from their employer starting in December 2021, the U.S. attorney’s office in Idaho said in a news release.The three guides, Chad Michael Kulow, 44, Andrea May Major, 44, and LaVoy Linton Eborn, 47, led paying clients on hunts through Caribou-Targhee National Forest in southeast Idaho and the Bridger-Teton National Forest in western Wyoming as part of an unlicensed business, the prosecutors said. Their groups killed 12 mountain lions from December 2021 to February 2022, prosecutors said.It’s legal to hunt mountain lions in Idaho for most of the year with proper licensing. The three guides are accused of running an unlicensed outfitter in a side business and not following federal and state reporting requirements of the mountain lion kills.At least three of the mountain lions killed during these hunts were shipped to Texas without being presented to Idaho Fish and Game, the state agency that oversees hunting, prosecutors said. Hunters in Idaho must report and present any mountain lions to the state agency within 10 days of their being killed, according to its hunting season manual. The three hunters also used false business information in their big game mortality reports, which is required by the state agency, prosecutors said.The three were indicted in August on several charges, including conspiracy and violating the Lacey Act, a federal law that prohibits transporting animals that are illegally taken or possessed. All three were arrested last week and have pleaded not guilty to the charges.Lawyers representing the three defendants did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday.The most serious charges the three face carry a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.Nicholas Arrivo, the managing attorney for animal protection law at the Humane Society of the United States, said that the Lacey Act was “vigorously” enforced and has been around since 1900. The law, among the oldest related to wildlife in the country, is meant to prevent illegal animal trafficking, he said.Kristin Combs, executive director of Wyoming Wildlife Advocates, said that while most hunters in her state hunted for food, she had noticed that wildlife was increasingly “valued in a very different way.”“This is totally trophy hunting,” she said. “No one is out there, like, eating mountain lion.”She said that trophy hunting — the hunting of animals to display their bodies rather than for food — had increased in recent years.But Ms. Combs added that she did not often hear about outfitters or licensed guides leading illegal hunts.“Mostly,” she said, “outfitters and guides have licenses and want to keep them.” More

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      in Elections

      3 Men With White Supremacist Ties Sentenced in Plan to Attack Power Station

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      Two of the men met through a neo-Nazi online forum and recruited other people to join their scheme, which was rooted in white supremacist ideology, prosecutors said.Three men with white supremacist ties, including two former U.S. Marines, were sentenced to prison last week after plotting to destroy a power station in the northwestern United States, the U.S. Department of Justice said.The men, Paul James Kryscuk, 38; Liam Collins, 25; and Justin Wade Hermanson, 25; received separate sentences on Thursday for charges related to what the Justice Department described as a racially motivated scheme to attack a power grid.The men gathered information on weapons and explosives, manufactured firearms and stole military gear, prosecutors said.Mr. Kryscuk, of Boise, Idaho, was found in October 2020 with a handwritten list of about a dozen places in Idaho and surrounding states that were home to components of the power grid for the northwestern United States, prosecutors said.The Justice Department did not disclose details about where the men wanted to carry out an attack or their ultimate goal. Sentencing documents on the public court system were not available.Mr. Collins, of Johnston, R.I., received the longest sentence of 10 years for aiding and abetting the interstate transportation of unregistered firearms. Mr. Kryscuk was sentenced to six years and six months for conspiracy to destroy an energy facility. Mr. Hermanson, of Swansboro, N.C., was sentenced to one year and nine months for conspiracy to manufacture firearms and ship interstate.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Supreme Court Allows, for Now, Emergency Abortions in Idaho

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      A majority of the justices dismissed the case, reinstating a lower-court ruling that paused the state’s near-total abortion ban.The Supreme Court said on Thursday that it would dismiss a case about emergency abortions in Idaho, temporarily clearing the way for women in the state to receive an abortion when their health is at risk.The brief, unsigned opinion declared that the case had been “improvidently granted.” The decision reinstates a lower-court ruling that had halted Idaho’s near-total ban on abortion and permitted emergency abortions at hospitals if needed to protect the health of the mother while the case makes its way through the courts.The decision, which did not rule on the substance of the case, appeared to closely mirror a version that appeared briefly on the court’s website a day earlier and was reported by Bloomberg. A court spokeswoman acknowledged on Wednesday that the publications unit had “inadvertently and briefly uploaded a document” and said a ruling in the case would appear in due time.The joined cases, Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States, focus on whether a federal law aimed at ensuring emergency care for any patient supersedes Idaho’s abortion ban, one of the nation’s strictest. The state outlaws the procedure, with few exceptions unless a woman’s life is in danger.The decision was essentially 6 to 3, with three conservative justices siding with the liberal wing in saying they would drop the case.It was the first time that the court was confronted with the question of statewide restrictions on abortion, many of which swiftly took effect after the court eliminated a constitutional right to the procedure two years ago.Tracking Abortion Bans Across the CountryThe New York Times is tracking the status of abortion laws in each state following the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Supreme Court Will Hear Challenge to Tennessee Law Banning Transition Care for Minors

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      The move comes as states around the country have pushed to curtail transgender rights.The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether a Tennessee law that bans certain medical treatments for transgender minors violates the Constitution.The move means the court will for the first time hear arguments on the issue of medical care for transgender youth.The Biden administration had asked the justices to take up the case, United States v. Skrmetti, arguing that the measure outlaws treatment for gender dysphoria in youths and “frames that prohibition in explicitly sex-based terms.”In the government’s petition to the court, Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar wrote that the law bans transgender medical care but that it “leaves the same treatments entirely unrestricted if they are prescribed for any other purpose.”Federal courts have splintered over laws aimed at blocking transition care, intensifying pressure on the Supreme Court to intervene. The justices have considered whether to take up the appeals at their private conference each week, but they had repeatedly postponed making a decision.The move comes as states around the country have pushed to curtail transgender rights. Conservative lawmakers have prioritized legislation in recent years that targets gender-transition care and at least 20 Republican-led states have enacted measures restricting access to such medical care for minors.It is also part of a broader effort at legislation aimed at regulating other parts of life, including laws about which bathrooms students and others can use and which sports teams they can play on.This spring, the justices temporarily allowed Idaho to enforce a state ban that limited medical treatment for transgender youth. The law, passed by the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature, makes it a felony for doctors to provide transgender medical care for minors, including hormone treatment.The decision in that case, which came to the justices as an emergency application, appeared to split largely along ideological lines, with the court’s liberals dissenting.Along with Idaho, the justices had been asked to weigh in on legislation in Kentucky and Tennessee.The Tennessee measure bans health care providers from offering transition care to minors, including puberty blockers and hormone treatments.The Kentucky law, known as S.B. 150, bans doctors from providing gender-transition surgery or administering puberty blockers or hormone therapy to people under 18.In June 2023, federal judges in both states, in separate rulings, temporarily blocked the laws days before key parts of the laws were set to go into effect.Shortly after, a divided panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit overturned the lower court decision, reinstating the bans. Plaintiffs in Kentucky and Tennessee appealed to the Supreme Court. More

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      in Elections

      Mountain Landslide Destroys Section of Highway to Jackson, Wyo.

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      The road, linking Idaho with Wyoming, is a key route to Jackson Hole, a tourism hub. It had been closed to traffic before the landslide.A landslide in the Teton mountains destroyed part of a highway that links Idaho to Jackson, Wyo., forcing the authorities to close the road indefinitely on Saturday just as the area was entering its summer tourism season.No one was injured when a section of the Teton Pass “catastrophically failed,” the Wyoming Department of Transportation said in a statement on Saturday. The highway west of Jackson had been closed to traffic before the road gave way, and crews were working to build a detour around a section where a crack had appeared in the surface days earlier.The department said it expected a long-term closure. Gov. Mark Gordon of Wyoming said in a separate statement that geologists and engineers would “develop a long-term solution to rebuild the roadway.”Even a short closure would pose major logistical challenges for the area, in part because the road serves Jackson Hole, a major tourism hub in Teton County. Travel and tourism is Wyoming’s second-largest industry, according to the Jackson Hole Travel and Tourism Board, and the county took in about $1.7 billion in travel-related spending in 2022.“We understand this highway is a lifeline for commuters, deliveries, medical care access and tourism, especially with limited alternatives and the summer season upon us,” Darin Westby, the director of the state’s Transportation Department, said in a separate statement.The department’s “engineers, surveyors and geologists mobilized quickly to try to maintain highway viability as long as possible, but catastrophic failure could not be avoided,” Mr. Westby said.The Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce said on its website that travelers could still reach the Jackson area from the west by taking two other roads through the Snake River Canyon. But that detour adds more than an hour of driving time, the local news outlet WyoFile reported.The section of Wyoming State Highway 22 that collapsed was initially closed earlier in the week after cracks appeared in the surface. It reopened after crews patched the cracks but was closed again after a separate mudslide a few miles away sent mud and debris spilling over the road, the Transportation Department said.The department said in its statement on Saturday that its crews were still working to clear that mud and debris. More

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      in Elections

      Chad Daybell Sentenced to Death in ‘Doomsday’ Killings

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      Chad Daybell was convicted on Thursday in the murders of his first wife and two children of his current spouse, Lori Vallow Daybell. The couple’s extreme beliefs drew attention to the case.An Idaho judge on Saturday sentenced a man to death, two days after he was found guilty of first-degree murder and other charges in the 2019 killings of his first wife and two of his current wife’s children, capping a case that drew scrutiny because of the couple’s “doomsday” religious beliefs.The decision came after jurors took more than a day to deliberate during the special sentencing proceeding in the case against the man, Chad Daybell, 55, in Ada County District Court in Boise, Idaho.Earlier on Saturday, the jury had recommended the death penalty before the judge ordered a short recess to make a final sentencing decision.As the judge, Steven W. Boyce of the Seventh Judicial District, read his decision, Mr. Daybell sat with his hands in his lap, expressionless at the defense table. Defense lawyers did not have any questions when asked by the judge.“The court typically would address the defendant further,” Judge Boyce said. “But in this special sentencing proceeding, the victim-impact statements and the evidence has already demonstrated on the record, I think, the seriousness of what’s occurred.”“I don’t find any reason to further delve into the court’s rationale, other than what was listed in the statute,” he added.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Idaho Drag Performer Wins Over $1.1 Million in Defamation Suit Against Blogger

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      The jury unanimously sided with the performer in a case against a blogger who made false claims that the artist had exposed himself to a crowd at a pride event in 2022.A drag performer in Idaho won more than $1.1 million in damages on Friday in a defamation lawsuit against a blogger who falsely claimed that he had exposed himself to a crowd that included children at an event two years ago.The jury unanimously decided that the blogger, Summer Bushnell, had defamed the artist, Eric Posey, when she claimed in videos and comments online that Mr. Posey exposed his genitalia while dancing onstage during a pride event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, even though he had not. It awarded Mr. Posey $926,000 in compensatory damages for defamation and another $250,000 in punitive damages, according to his lawyer, Wendy J. Olson.“Can this guy be arrested for exposing his genitals to minors?” Ms. Bushnell wrote in one Facebook post, according to Mr. Posey’s complaint. Mr. Posey claimed that Ms. Bushnell’s online viewership soared as a result of those posts, while he “was exposed to hatred, contempt and ridicule.”In an interview, Ms. Olson said that Ms. Bushnell’s false claims about Mr. Posey had a profound effect on his social life, employment prospects and mental health. “He was called names and racial slurs. He was harassed. He really shut down, emotionally,” she said.Ms. Olson added in a statement that the verdict and the damages sent “the clear message that truth matters, that facts matter, and that you can’t dehumanize and damage someone to suit your own purposes.”In recent years, far-right activists have increasingly targeted drag shows across the country. Protesters and conservative commentators have accused drag performers of targeting children, which has in many cases prompted angry demonstrations, harassment, abuse and threats of violence against drag artists. Some Republican-led states, including Florida and Tennessee, have sought to restrict the performances, though federal judges have not always been receptive to those efforts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More