Nothing yet about the VBIED driver, whether this is a jihadi or just a plain vanilla disgruntled/suicidal/nuts employee as claimed. To be recategorized should new information warrant a change.
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] A horror scene unfolded overnight in Oregon after a driver crashed into an athletic club with authorities later finding an explosive device inside the vehicle.
An unidentified driver, believed to be a former employee of the club, drove through the front entrance of the Multnomah Athletic Club in the Goose Hollow neighborhood of Portland on Saturday, according to the Portland Police Department.
The incident occurred just before 3am. The driver's vehicle caught fire, and authorities rushed to control the flames.
The driver was found dead and the Explosive Disposal Unit later uncovered evidence of a device.
Multiple streets in the area were closed amid the active investigation. Multnomah released a statement that the club would be closed until further notice 'following a significant incident.'
'All programs, services, and scheduled activities are canceled,' the club added.
Two law enforcement sources told The Oregonian that the driver was a former 'disgruntled employee' of the club.
One of the sources added that investigators believe the employee rented a black Nissan Rogue on Friday to drive it into the building before setting off a series of explosive devices.
The explosives were believed to be a mix of propane tanks and pipe bombs. Only some detonated, and authorities put out the blaze, according to The Oregonian.
One of the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the building's ground floor was 'completely destroyed' and sustained 'millions of dollars in damages.'
Club management notified members via email that no employees were injured in the incident and advised them to steer clear of the premises until further notice.
Photos after the crash, shared by local Fox affiliate, KPTV, showed caution tape surrounding the club.
The club shared an additional statement on Saturday afternoon, announcing that it expected a 'prolonged closure' following a 'serious incident.'
'Our priority is ensuring the club is safe before welcoming our community back,' Multnomah added.
'Our team is cooperating fully with the Portland Police Bureau and Portland Fire & Rescue, who are leading the investigation. Out of respect for that process, we will defer to them for additional details.'
Multnomah Athletic Club is the largest private athletic and social club in the US, with a membership of over 21,000 people, according to the club's website. Membership fees are $280 for an individual per month and $422 for a family.
The Daily Mail has reached out to the Portland Police Bureau for more information and to Multnomah for comment.
Update at 10 a.m. EDT: According to local station WFSB/Fox12, Bruce Whitman has been harassing club members at the club and sometimes at their homes since 2022. There was a psychiatric hold at one point, and restraining orders, so I think we can file this as a Page 3: Non-WoT nutter.
#1
In a more rational world, the unidentified man would have gone to Planet Fitness and gotten hired to do the same thing. Note - subsequently he would probably been fired again for the same thing, but maybe not. Chances are Planet Fitness has lower standards.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
05/03/2026 9:32 Comments ||
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#2
Harassing members since 2022, both at the club and at their homes — including a psychiatric hold — but he wasn’t fired?? Talk about suicidal empathy!
#4
Note: Bruce Whitman is not confirmed as the driver.
More:
https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2026/05/multnomah-athletic-club-destroyed-after-former-employee-drives-explosives-filled-car-into-building-sources-say.html
Posted by: ed in texas ||
05/03/2026 10:34 Comments ||
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#5
Portland seems to have a lot of unhinged nutters.
#8
In the early 1970s, I thought about settling in Porland. I was passing through. Nice at the time. Down the road, I'm glad I didn't. I would not have met my wife of nearly 50 years.
[LATimes] David Allan Coe, a controversial figure who helped pioneer the 20th century “outlaw country” musical subgenre, penning hits including “Take This Job and Shove It” and “Would you Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone),” has died.
Coe died Wednesday night, his representative David Wade confirmed to The Times. He was 86. No other details were available.
The origins of outlaw country music, popular in the 1970s and ‘80s, are largely credited to Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, but Coe was a seminal figure in the subgenre. He began writing and releasing music in the 1970s and was surrounded by some mystique. His debut effort, “Penitentiary Blues,” released in 1969, was compiled with tracks written while Coe was in prison.
The Ohio-born musician entered a reform school in Michigan at 9 years old and spent the following two decades in and out of correctional facilities. His offenses included burglary and auto theft.
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] A massive fire ripped through a key science facility at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg on Saturday afternoon, sending towering plumes of smoke into the sky and sparking fears of a catastrophic loss to decades of research.
Fire crews from St. Petersburg Fire Rescue swarmed 140 7th Avenue South after flames were seen blasting through the roof of the two-story building, identified by officials as the university's Marine Science Laboratory, believed to be more than 80-year-old. Oh, the Huge Manatee!
The blaze quickly escalated into a second-alarm emergency, with dozens of units responding as streets were shut down and collapse zones established amid concerns the structure could give way entirely.
Students, staff and locals watched in disbelief as the fire tore through what many described as the heart of the campus's scientific work.
'All of our research and chemicals are stored there, including what's required in the chemistry classes,' one student wrote online, highlighting fears about hazardous materials inside the building.
Another warned the damage could be irreversible.
'The building on fire doesn't just store paper. It stores entire careers of samples… hurricane research, red tide research, fish and ecology research,' the student said, describing collections gathered over years of fieldwork that 'cannot be replaced.'
The scale of the destruction was visible for miles around as thick, dark smoke billowed high above the campus and surrounding neighborhoods.
Authorities confirmed the building was evacuated and no injuries have been reported.
Emergency crews were still on site battling the flames on Saturday evening, with the extent of the damage still unclear.
The cause of the fire also remains under investigation.
Text taken from the Telegram channel of vzglyad_ru
Text by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin is in italics
[ColonelCassad] Trump has appointed Sarah Rogers to combat free speech violations and censorship in Europe.
The Trump administration has allocated half a billion dollars to combat censorship in the European Union. This task will be carried out by Deputy Secretary of State Sarah Rogers – a vibrant and dangerous woman, but the outcome of the online war seems predetermined: it will only get worse. The US administration wants right-wing conservatives and other anti-immigration voices – its ideological allies – to win elections in EU countries more often.
If they are sufficiently radical in their statements, their content is censored, and their authors are persecuted. This can equally be seen as a fight against incitement to hatred and a fight between European liberal elites and their political opponents. It will be easy for European officials to discredit her as an enemy.
The daughter of wealthy parents with a law degree from the Ivy League (specifically, Dartmouth), whose profile at the beginning of her career was defending tobacco companies ("merchants of death" in American cultural slang). And now this diva, having received half a billion from daddy Trump, will lecture Europeans on the kind of government they need and push for those culturally close to her—those considered far-right within Europe.
At the same time, Sarah Rogers is a more likeable person than the image conjured up by the description above. She's smart, charismatic, beautiful, and speaks with passion and conviction.
Goodness.
At times, she's overly blunt, but that's actually endearing. Finally, she has principles, and freedom of speech is one of them. From her first days in office, Rogers has declared that combating internet censorship is her priority. And the Americans' cross-border understanding of the law has led her to now fight censorship in the European Union.
Success is unlikely. Trump's main problem in Europe isn't that liberals don't like him, but that Europeans don't like him. And it would be strange if they did, since he constantly humiliates Europe. As a result, his fervent desire to support "his own" is actually hurting those [who are] "his own." In short, it's bad policy. Only this isn't US policy, or even Trump's policy, but rather the favorite pastime of Sarah Rogers—a pleasant woman who's been given a personal budget because it's impossible to refuse.
Apparently, the results of Brussels' manipulation of the elections in Romania and Hungary have pushed the Trump administration to the conclusion that rhetoric alone won't sway leaders close to them, and that proactive measures are needed to achieve their goals, because simply talking about "conservative values" in the face of a growing economic crisis is ineffective.
The latest incident with Hungary was a slap in the face for Trump and Vance, who openly championed Orbán to the bitter end and ultimately lost. As for the fight against censorship, that's certainly ridiculous, since the leaders in censorship are American Big Tech, which is in no hurry to roll back its censorship. And no Sarah Rogers will change that. $500 million won't save the father of American democracy either.
U.S. diplomat Sarah Rogers is pledging $500,000 to fight online “censorship” and ripping into European elites over mass migration.
Depending on who you ask, she’s either just another MAGA troll meddling in European democracy, or the best hope of saving it.
What Sarah Rogers, the U.S. undersecretary of State for public diplomacy, can never be accused of is speaking in diplomatic niceties.
With hundreds of thousands of dollars at her disposal, she has positioned herself as the point person for U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign to save Europe from what the White House has called “civilizational erasure.”
For Rogers, that means backing MAGA-aligned movements against mass migration, attacking political elites across Europe and waging an unapologetic campaign against laws policing online speech — often in eye-wateringly direct terms.
“Germany infamously retains very few Jews, yet imported barbarian rapist hordes,” Rogers posted in January on her official X account.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited by Andrey Bulkin
[REGNUM] The United States is seriously planning to restore Pluto's planetary status, which it lost in 2006 by a decision of the International Astronomical Union.
This is not the first time that proposals have been made to "rehabilitate" Pluto, but this time the initiative was put forward by Jack Isaacman, the head of NASA, one of the world's leading space agencies.
SPACE AS A CURE FOR DEPRESSION
On April 28, Isaacman testified in the U.S. Senate at a hearing on the space agency's 2027 budget. During the discussion, Republican Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas took the floor and asked the NASA administrator's opinion on Pluto's status.
"Senator, I am a strong advocate of making Pluto a planet again, " Isaacman replied.
To understand why Pluto's status is so significant for the United States, it's important to remember the story of its discovery in 1930. The United States was experiencing the Great Depression at the time, and officials and newspapers were looking for some positive news amid the bleak news of the crisis.
It was at this moment that 24-year-old Clyde Tombaugh, a farm boy from Kansas, discovered a new planet. This was a truly unique event—almost all the planets in the Solar System had been known since ancient times, and the last new planet at that time, Neptune, had been discovered in Europe almost a century earlier, in 1846.
The story of this discovery reads like a movie script. Tombaugh had no formal training in astronomy, as his family couldn't afford university, but he was passionate about the science. He built his own telescopes and sketched the night sky.
After sending his drawings to several observatories, he unexpectedly received not criticism but recognition, and eventually, a job offer from the director of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. At the time, they had just resumed the search for the mysterious "Planet X," which the observatory's late founder, Percival Lowell, had unsuccessfully sought to explain the orbital irregularities of Uranus and Neptune.
As Kevin Schindler, a representative of the observatory, told Space.com, Lowell's hypothesis contained a fundamental error: at the beginning of the 20th century, the masses of Uranus and Neptune were estimated incorrectly, and in fact, there were no unexplained deviations in their motion.
Lowell, unknowingly, was searching for an astronomical phantom. But Tombaugh, armed with a blink comparator—a device for alternately comparing photographs of the same patch of sky on different nights—discovered a tiny moving dot on February 18, 1930. "This is a great example of scientific chance," Schindler noted. " Tombaugh was looking for a phantom, but he found a planet. "
From that moment on, Pluto occupied a special place in the American worldview. In an era of economic and social decline, the country acquired a new national symbol—the only planet discovered by an American.
ONE OF OUR OWN AMONG STRANGERS, A STRANGER AMONG OUR OWN
The status Pluto received after its discovery seemed unshakable until 2006, when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) decided to demote the planet.
Until that moment, there was simply no formal definition of the word "planet" in science. Everyone knew that they were large celestial bodies orbiting the Sun, but it wasn't clear where planets ended and large asteroids and other celestial bodies began.
By the mid-2000s, as more and more objects were discovered in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune's orbit, including Eris, which is comparable in size to Pluto, it was decided to formalize the concept.
The IAU, the recognized body responsible for naming and classifying astronomical objects, has established three criteria. To be considered a planet, an object must orbit the Sun, possess sufficient mass to be spherical under its own gravity, and be able to "clear the vicinity of its orbit of other objects."
Pluto passed the first two criteria, but failed the third. Its orbit intersects with numerous icy Kuiper Belt objects. Instead of permanently banishing Pluto from the IAU, the IAU created a new category—"dwarf planet," of which it became the most prominent representative.
The decision immediately sparked controversy that continues to this day. Critics of the definition point to its inherent inconsistency. If the "orbital clearing" criterion is formally applied, then Pluto isn't the only one subject to "demoting."
Earth, strictly speaking, hasn't cleared its "neighborhood" either: it shares its orbit with asteroids. Jupiter shares its orbit with huge groups of so-called Trojan asteroids, but no one calls it a dwarf planet, which would be absurd given its size—it's the largest planet in the Solar System.
The debate gained new momentum in July 2015, when NASA's New Horizon probe flew past what was then known as the ninth planet. The images it transmitted transformed Pluto from the blurry pixels it had been for so many years to a fully-fledged world with a complex geography. The probe beamed back images of Alp-sized icy mountains, vast ice plains, and a bright, heart-shaped region known as Tombaugh Regio.
Moreover, at that time it was already known that Pluto had an atmosphere, and that it also had five satellites, while classical planets like Mercury and Venus did not have any.
These new data have bolstered the case for Pluto's return to planetary status.
University of Arizona professor Eric Asfaugh gave a very clear example in a comment to The Independent : if we were to one day find an Earth-sized planet around another star, teeming with life, but orbiting a super-Jupiter (the name for a class of objects an order of magnitude more massive than Jupiter), it would not be considered a planet under the strict IAU rules—and this, in the scientist's opinion, is absurd.
Yet their opponents from the other camp, including astronomer Mike Brown, whose discoveries prompted the division of planets into normal and dwarf planets in 2006, insist that scientific classification should help us understand the structure of the solar system, not serve individual impulses and sympathies.
"NASA leaders can look back with nostalgia on the days when Pluto was considered a planet, but the scientists working on these issues will continue to try to explain and classify the objects of the solar system in a way that truly helps us understand the world we live in," Brown said, commenting on Isaacman's speech.
SPACE AMBITIONS
The NASA chief's remarks came at a time when the United States is experiencing yet another surge in self-awareness. Rhetoric about the US's sovereign right to dictate its rules to the world has long since transcended diplomacy and trade, and recent events in Venezuela and the Middle East, as well as statements about Greenland, Cuba, and the Panama Canal, are clear evidence of this.
In this context, Isaacman's remarks about the need to restore recognition to Clyde Tombaugh seem like yet another attempt to restore historical justice in a specifically national context. Pluto is not just a celestial body, but the only planet discovered by an American, and its downgrading is perceived by some in the US political elite as a symbolic defeat.
The slogan "Make Pluto a Planet Again " (MPAPA), voiced by the head of NASA and already picked up by the media, is an obvious copy of Donald Trump's main election slogan " Make America Great Again " (MAGA), and this approach turns a scientific problem into one of the elements of a political game.
However, reducing the NASA chief's motivation solely to his own jingoistic patriotism would be an oversimplification. The domestic lobby also played a role. The Lowell Observatory in Arizona remains a significant scientific and educational center that consistently conveys nostalgia for "our" planet.
Senator Moran, who initiated the conversation with Isaacman, represents Kansas, where Clyde Tombaugh grew up and where the self-taught astronomer has long been a source of pride. Therefore, for politicians in the state, protecting Tombaugh's legacy is one way to secure voter support ahead of the midterm elections on November 3, 2026.
Furthermore, it's worth remembering the context of the budget hearings themselves, where the Pluto proposal was aired. As Scientific American points out, Isaacman's remarks came amid fierce criticism from Democrats: the Trump administration proposed cutting NASA's science funding by 46 percent, an initiative the agency's chief supported.
A bright, emotionally charged statement about Pluto's reinstatement can temporarily shift the attention of the press and congressmen from unpleasant questions about budget cuts to another high-profile topic.
LIMIT OF AUTHORITY
The question now is whether the American campaign to "rehabilitate" Pluto has a realistic chance of success. NASA cannot rename celestial bodies or change their classifications at will. The final say in such matters always rests with the International Astronomical Union, whose position remains unwavering to date.
IAU spokesman Ramasamy Venugopal told The Independent that the organization understands the emotions that many people feel about Pluto, but stressed that the 2006 decision was not a "demotion" but a scientific refinement that made Pluto the centerpiece of a new family of celestial bodies.
The problem is that if we follow the lead of the "rehabilitation" proponents and start considering any object massive enough to take the shape of a sphere and with its own geology as a planet, then the Solar System will be replenished not with just Pluto, but with dozens, if not hundreds, of new planets.
Ceres, Eris, and perhaps many undiscovered Kuiper Belt objects will be eligible to claim this status, and this could only deepen the rift in the scientific community, generating even more controversy and conflict.
Therefore, NASA is unlikely to be able to return Pluto to its “former glory” in the near future, which, however, does not in any way diminish the merits of the American Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered the dwarf planet.
#8
I still consider Pluto to be a planet. If Tim McBride can pretend to be a woman, I get to define my reality as Pluto being a planet. Now I will go down to my living room and build a fort out of cushions, pillows and blankets.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
05/03/2026 9:27 Comments ||
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#9
/\ How can one be certain ?
One would need a great many elephants to test that hypothesis.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
