Tagged: Northwest News Network

The automaker Nissan says sales of its fully electric Leaf compact surpassed all other Nissan models at dealers in the Seattle and Portland areas this spring. Wednesday's announcement runs counter to the prevailing wisdom that adoption of plug-in cars has been sluggish.

The U.S. Army will seek the death penalty against Staff Sgt. Robert Bales. The Army announced Wednesday the Washington-based soldier will face a general court-martial for allegedly killing 16 Afghan civilians – mostly women and children – earlier this year. 

The Army’s decision to put Bales before a court-martial that has the authority to impose capital punishment follows the recommendation of a pre-trial hearing officer. Bales is charged with 16 counts of premeditated murder as well as other crimes.

Police say three people are dead, including the gunman, after a shooting at a shopping mall in suburban Portland, Oregon.

Clackamas County sheriff's Lt. James Rhodes says the gunman fatally shot two people, and wounded at least one other person at the Clackamas Town Center mall Tuesday afternoon. Rhodes confirms the gunman is dead but he did not say how he died.

The kind of finely tuned data crunching that fueled the 2012 election is spreading to another venue: the classroom. You might have heard that campaign analysts can predict who you're likely vote for based on the magazines you read and the car you drive. Now, researchers are finding ways to predict who's likely to drop out of high school based on, say, a third grade attendance record. Schools hope a computer program will help them reach kids before it's too late.

A tribal court on the Umatilla Indian Reservation is one of the first to hand-down a long prison term under new tougher criminal sentencing laws enacted by Congress in 2010.

It used to be that tribes could only sentence a Native American criminal to up to one year of jail time -- no matter the crime. Typically the U.S. Justice Department was called in for everything else -– but many cases were dropped.

Now, tribal courts have the power to sentence native criminals who commit crimes on a reservation up to three years per count, for up to nine years.