Dexter, Oregon -- A cougar entered a Dexter-area home through a dog door last month, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife said.

The homeowner called her dog, and the cougar left the house, said Brian Wolfer with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The homeowner wasn't too concerned about the late October incident and planned to lock the pet door when not in use, Wolfer said.

However, Wolfer called it "kind of concerning" that a cougar would enter a home that way. He advised homeowners to lock doors and keep pet food secure, even inside the house.

Ed Thompson, who lives in the area, said the incident illustrates the conflict between rural Lane County residents and the cougar population.

"I'm afraid that many people don't understand the breadth of the cougar problem right in Lane County's backyards," Thompson said. "In the Dexter/Pleasant Hill area alone there have been well more than a dozen livestock killings including sheep (two of which were ours), goats and an alpaca just this year."

After nearly 17 years of courtroom arguments, congressional negotiations and Indian Country bickering, hundreds of thousands of Native Americans could see the first payments of a $3.4 billion U.S. government settlement by the end of the year, plaintiffs' attorneys said Monday.

The settlement between American Indians across the nation and the government over more than a century's worth of squandered and mismanaged land trust royalties became final on Friday, when the appeal period expired.

One of the largest U.S. government settlements in history began with a lawsuit filed in 1996 by Elouise Cobell of Browning, Mont. The Blackfeet leader observed that those who leased Indian land made money from its natural resources, while the Indians themselves remained in poverty with no accounting of the royalties from that land that were held in trust for them by the government

Cobell herself led the fight against the government for more than 15 years before she died of cancer last year.

"We all are happy that this settlement can finally be implemented," lead attorney Dennis Gingold said in a statement Monday. "We deeply regret that Ms. Cobell did not live to see this day."

On 26th November 2010 - Black Friday - as the bankers and government officials planned the final demise of the US economy and the destruction of American society, millions of citizens across the US fought and trampled each other at thousands of stores for the privilege of buying insignificant consumer items made by virtual slave-workers in far off lands. This is the madness of a lost society on the brink of collapse.

Part 1

Mass Protests Across Egypt demand President Morsi reverse power grabbing decree and many call for his resignation.

The competition to frame the Black Friday Walmart protests continues. Walmart, of course, has every reason to minimize the protests and OUR Walmart, the group organizing the protests, has every reason to exaggerate them. Since protests were basically crowd-sourced and ranged from tiny to big, it's probably impossible to determine the truth. No one is claiming that anything but a small fraction of Walmart's massive number of employees took part; on the other hand, it's a new thing that any Walmart employees are protesting, and these terribly underpaid workers do so at the risk of their jobs.

Walmart says it had the most awesomest Black Friday ever (we'll wait for revised sales figures in a couple months to find out the truth there), and there weren't very many protests at all and almost no actual Walmart employees took part: "Wal-Mart said roughly 50 employees participated in the events Thursday and a 'few dozen' took part Friday." (Except that that's not actually a small number in the history of Walmart worker activism - even if we take the company's low-ball number, it's probably the most Walmart workers ever to strike in a 24-hour period prior to 2012.)

But we know Walmart is engaging in serious understatement. A protest in Dallas reportedly involved 40 workers; one in Miami involved 70 workers. Already that's the number Walmart wants you to believe participated across the entire country. Add to that the 17 in Paramount, California. Diarist Bobbosphere says that in Chicago, "only a few [media] outlets actually quoted Walmart employees who were present," making it harder to know how many turned out. But he found at least four Chicago workers quoted, like:

WGN TV: "They retaliate by black listing us, telling other associates not to associate with us, shortening our working hours, all the way up to termination." - Walmart employee Charmaine Gibens Thomas.

There were strikers in Duarte, California, and in the Washington, DC, area, and even one guy in Oklahoma who hadn't planned to strike until a captive audience meeting held by his store's management to scare workers out of protesting changed his mind. Small numbers of workers, but more than Walmart wants us to believe existed, and each one of them an act of courage unimaginable for most of us. These are people who can't afford to lose their jobs, but they risked that for justice.

As this Daily Show clip amply demonstrates, right wing media has abandoned any pretense that they object to contraception coverage for noble reasons, and have instead just moved on to talking about women who use contraception (aka, nearly all women at some point in their lives) as if they're oversexed morons who contribute nothing of value to society.

But if you'll recall, the initial objections to classifying contraception as preventive medicine, qualifying it as one of the many services that insurance plans must cover without a copay, were framed as religious objections. Religion, after all, is the go-to excuse conservatives whip out when they know they don't actually have an argument. Well, while the conservative media has dropped that somewhat in favor of just whipping up hysteria about those sexy young single women that you, the Fox viewer, will never get to fuck, the lawsuits trying to block the mandate are still being argued about on religious grounds. But, let's be clear, they are not being argued well.

© FORRESPECT / ATHENS TALKS.COM

Nationwide walkout emboldens America's labor movement.

In the radical spirit of Buy Nothing Day, thousands of Walmart workers are staging a nationwide walkout on Black Friday . . .

Walmart is notorious for forcing small retailers out of business, pushing suppliers to bankruptcy, depressing labor conditions and paying employees the barest minimum wage. And Walmart is a committed union buster - when workers in the USA and Canada tried to organize, Walmart closed entire stores to avoid setting a precedent. Now . . . finally . . . there's some blowback across the country, inspired by the workers at Walmart warehouses in southern California. "The warehouse workers did it," Walmart associate Dan Hindman explains, "if they can, we all can do it. We're protected by the law. We're doing it for our rights and to get the company to follow their own policies that they've broken."

An Alabama woman is recovering after allegedly being attacked by her girlfriend's brother over Thanksgiving weekend.

Though details of the case are continuing to emerge, NBC affiliate Local 15 reports that 23-year-old Mallory Owens is being treated for injuries following a Nov. 22 assault by Travis Hawkins Jr. Owens, who was reportedly attending Thanksgiving dinner at the family home of girlfriend Ally Hawkins (Travis' sister) at the time of the attack, suffered multiple skull fractures and crushed bones, and had metal plates put under her eyes because of her injuries, according to reports.

Hawkins, Local 15's report notes, has been charged with second degree assault, though it remains unclear what may have prompted the attack.

One of the most upsetting and disturbing developments in the past few years of wingnut propaganda is the attempt to define "religious freedom" as expanding the powers of the already-powerful over others, specifically with an eye towards coercing others to live by your religious rules. Even though the courts correctly (usually) see religious freedom being best protected by eliminating coercive prayer in schools, for instance, your average wingnut believes these rulings attack their religious freedom. After all, what's the point of religion if you can't impose it on others? Thus, the only way they can see to protect religious freedom is to give, say, schoolteachers the right to lead their class in prayer (as long as it's the correct Christian prayer, of course).

Same story with hollering "religious freedom" to justify giving your boss the right to impose his religious beliefs on your medical decision-making. Your insurance benefits you earn through work are yours, and no more belong to your boss than your paycheck does. Giving your boss a right to veto coverage of your contraception because he thinks vaginas are only for baby-making is a direct imposition on your religious freedom, a clear-cut example of your boss declaring he has a right to impose his religious values on you, even in a realm as private as your medical and sexual decision-making. (And since cost considerations exert a great deal of influence on how many women - say, someone making $10 an hour working the counter at Hobby Lobby - choose contraception, this boss's veto of coverage will actually change her choices.) But conservatives don't see employees as rights-bearing people. Just as with the "states rights" blather, the only rights they recognize are the "right" to exert power over those down the hierarchy from you.

Callaway - Libby Busbee pounded on the window of her son's maroon Dodge Charger as he sat in the driveway of their home on earlier this year. Locked inside his car, U.S. Army Spc. William Busbee sat with a .45-caliber gun pointed to the side of his head.

"Look at me," his mother cried out as she to tried and get her son's attention. "Look at me."

He wouldn't look.

He stared out the front windshield, distant, said Libby Busbee, relating the story from an apartment complex in Callaway.

"I kept yelling, 'Don't you do this. Don't do it.' He wouldn't turn his head to look at me," she said, looking down at the burning cigarette in her hand.

A 911 call was made. The police pulled her away from the car.

William, Libby Busbee's 23-year-old son, was talking with a police officer when he fired a shot through the front windshield of his car, according to the police report.

The police recoiled. William rapped on the window in apparent frustration, the report indicated.

Then the second shot was heard.

"I knew that was the one," said Libby Busbee.

William Busbee took his life in March with his mother and sisters looking on.