A collision on Interstate 5 just north of Everett has caused a 6-mile backup for drivers traveling south, the Washington State Department of Transportation said Monday morning.

The department first posted about the closure on X shortly before 7 a.m. WSDOT’s real-time traffic map showed the backup stretching through Marysville around 8 a.m.

Drivers should avoid the area if possible or prepare for delays, the department said.

A Washington State Ferries crew on Saturday helped the Coast Guard rescue six people and two dogs from a boat in Rosario Strait.

A 37-foot cabin cruiser called for assistance during “nasty weather” near Decatur Island just before 1 p.m., the Coast Guard station in Bellingham said. A wave over the bow shattered the boat’s front windshield, injuring some of the boaters and causing the vessel to take on water.

The boaters shared their GPS position before their radio shorted out and they lost communications. The Coast Guard issued an Urgent Marine Information Broadcast — a radio message for all boaters in the area — and dispatched vessels and a helicopter.

Democratic lawmakers are probing SpaceX over Russia's reported use of Starlink in Ukraine, saying that recent developments raise questions about SpaceX's "compliance with US sanctions and export controls."

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk last month denied what he called "false news reports [that] claim that SpaceX is selling Starlink terminals to Russia," saying that, "to the best of our knowledge, no Starlinks have been sold directly or indirectly to Russia." But Musk's statement didn't satisfy US Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), who sent a letter to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell yesterday.

"Starlink is an invaluable resource for Ukrainians in their fight against Russia's brutal and illegitimate invasion. It is alarming that Russia may be obtaining and using your technology to coordinate attacks against Ukrainian troops in illegally occupied regions in Eastern and Southern Ukraine, potentially in violation of US sanctions and export controls," Raskin and Garcia wrote.

Musk has also stated that "Starlink satellites will not close the link in Russia." However, the concerns raised by Rankin and Garcia are about whether Russia used the broadband service in Ukraine. Their letter said that Ukraine last month "released intercepted audio communications between Russian soldiers that indicated Russian forces had illegally deployed and activated Starlink terminals in certain Russian-occupied areas in Eastern Ukraine."

Astra's long, strange trip in the space business is taking another turn. The company announced Thursday that it is going private at an extremely low valuation.

Four years ago, the rocket company, based in Alameda, California, emerged from stealth with grand plans to develop a no-frills rocket that could launch frequently. "The theme that really makes this company stand out, which will capture the imagination of our customers, our investors, and our employees, is the idea that every day we will produce and launch a rocket," Astra co-founder Chris Kemp said during a tour of the factory in February 2020.

Almost exactly a year later, on February 2, 2021, Astra went public via a special purpose acquisition company (or SPAC). "The transaction reflects an implied pro-forma enterprise value for Astra of approximately $2.1 billion," the company stated at the time. For a time, the company's stock even traded above this valuation.

But then, rockets started failing. Only two of the seven launches of the company's "Rocket 3" vehicle were successful. In August 2022, the company announced a pivot to the larger Rocket 4 vehicle. It planned to begin conducting test launches in 2023, but that did not happen. Accordingly, the company's stock price plummeted.

Last November Kemp and the company's co-founder, Adam London, proposed to buy Astra shares at $1.50, approximately double their price. The company's board of directors did not accept the deal. Then, in late February, Kemp and London sharply cut their offer to take the company private, warning of "imminent bankruptcy" if the company doesn’t accept their new proposal. They offered $0.50 a share, well below the trading value of approximately $0.80 a share

On Thursday, Astra said that this deal was being consummated.

Attackers have transformed hundreds of hacked sites running WordPress software into command-and-control servers that force visitors’ browsers to perform password-cracking attacks.

A web search for the JavaScript that performs the attack showed it was hosted on 708 sites at the time this post went live on Ars, up from 500 two days ago. Denis Sinegubko, the researcher who spotted the campaign, said at the time that he had seen thousands of visitor computers running the script, which caused them to reach out to thousands of domains in an attempt to guess the passwords of usernames with accounts on them.

Visitors unwittingly recruited

“This is how thousands of visitors across hundreds of infected websites unknowingly and simultaneously try to bruteforce thousands of other third-party WordPress sites,” Sinegubko wrote. “And since the requests come from the browsers of real visitors, you can imagine this is a challenge to filter and block such requests.”

Like the hacked websites hosting the malicious JavaScript, all the targeted domains are running the WordPress content management system. The script—just 3 kilobits in size—reaches out to an attacker-controlled getTaskURL, which in turn provides the name of a specific user on a specific WordPress site, along with 100 common passwords. When this data is fed into the browser visiting the hacked site, it attempts to log into the targeted user account using the candidate passwords. The JavaScript operates in a loop, requesting tasks from the getTaskURL reporting the results to the completeTaskURL, and then performing the steps again and again.

China’s hackers-for-hire take government officials out for lavish banquets, binge drinking and late-night karaoke with young women in a bid to win favor and business, as revealed in a highly unusual leak last month of internal documents from a private contractor linked to Chinese police.

China’s hacking industry is vast in size and scope but also suffers from shady business practices, disgruntlement over pay and work quality, and poor security protocols, the documents show.

Private hacking contractors are companies that steal data from other countries to sell to the Chinese authorities. Over the past two decades, Chinese state security’s demand for overseas intelligence has soared, giving rise to a vast network of these private hackers-for-hire companies that have infiltrated hundreds of systems outside China.

Though the existence of these hacking contractors is an open secret in China, little was known about how they operate. But the leaked documents from a firm called I-Soon have pulled back the curtain, revealing a seedy, sprawling industry where corners are cut and rules are murky and poorly enforced in the quest to make money.

The federal judge who oversaw a New York defamation trial that resulted in an $83.3 million award to a longtime magazine columnist who says Donald Trump raped her in the 1990s refused Thursday to relieve the ex-president from the verdict's financial pinch.

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan told Trump's attorney in a written order that he won't delay deadlines for posting a bond that would ensure 80-year-old writer E. Jean Carroll can be paid the award if the judgment survives appeals.

The judge said any financial harm to the Republican front-runner for the presidency results from his slow response to the late-January verdict in the defamation case resulting from statements Trump made about Carroll while he was president in 2019 after she revealed her claims against him in a memoir.

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Republicans in Iowa’s House of Representatives approved a bill Thursday that would criminalize the death of an “unborn person” — over Democrats’ concerns about how it might apply to in vitro fertilization, after an Alabama court found frozen embryos can be considered children.

Iowa’s law currently outlines penalties for termination or serious injury to a “human pregnancy,” but the proposed bill would amend the language to pertain to “causing of death of, or serious injury to, an unborn person,” defined as “an individual organism … from fertilization to live birth.”

It’s one of many bills being considered by state Legislatures around the country that would expand legal and constitutional protections for embryos and fetuses, a long-time goal of the anti-abortion movement.

The bill still would need to pass the state Senate and be signed by Gov. Kim Reynolds to become law.

Tuesday marked a sure sign of the approach of the forthcoming season: For the first time this year, the sun set after 6 p.m. in Seattle.

As things outside are blooming and brightening, we’ll continue our ride of increasing daylight through June 21, when we’ll have nearly 16 hours of daylight and a 9:11 p.m. sunset.

But if you can’t wait until June for later sunsets, you’re in luck. Just around the corner, on Sunday, we’ll all spin our clocks one hour forward due to daylight saving time. The sun will set that day at 7:08 p.m., according to Time and Date.

Winter will have us in its frigid grasp a little longer this week before making room for springlike conditions.

It will be a “very quiet” start to the day Wednesday in Western Washington, according to the National Weather Service, although a large swatch of clouds over the Olympic Peninsula may seep eastward into the Interstate 5 corridor by the morning commute.

The gnarled icon of the Old West — ominously featured in movies as gunslingers square off on dusty streets and townsfolk shake behind curtained windows — rolled in over the weekend and kept rolling until blanketing some homes and streets in suburban Salt Lake City.

Crews on Tuesday continued to plow, load and haul carcasses of twisted and dried tumbleweeds from neighborhoods in South Jordan, Utah, four days after scores of the beachball-sized plants were bounced in by heavy winds.

“People woke up Saturday morning and it looked like these huge walls had been erected made of tumbleweed,” said Dawn Ramsey, South Jordan’s mayor. “We had entire streets in some of our neighborhoods completely blocked. They wrapped around homes.”

Renton police said Tuesday that detectives suspect foul play in the disappearance of Reyna Hernandez, who was last seen Feb. 26. Friends reported two days later that Hernandez hadn’t returned home, answered her phone or shown up to work at her hair salon in the Renton Highlands.

Detectives found evidence indicating Hernandez was taken against her will, according to police.

A friend told police he spoke with Hernandez as she was running errands the morning of Feb. 26 and told him she was going to a home in south Renton.

Police said family and friends still hadn’t heard from Hernandez on Tuesday, which is highly unusual. She isn’t answering her phone.

Hernandez has black hair and hazel eyes, and she stands 6 feet tall and 210 pounds, according to police. Detectives are also searching for her car, a white and maroon Ford Flex with Washington plates APR9503, though they don’t believe the vehicle is in the area.

Police ask anyone who sees Hernandez or her vehicle to call 911 immediately.

A federal appeals court on Monday upheld a ruling that blocked Florida from enforcing a law, backed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, that restricts how private companies teach diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled Monday that the “Stop Woke Act” “exceeds the bounds” of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression in its attempts to regulate workplace trainings on race, color, sex and national origin. The appeals court upheld a federal judge’s August 2022 ruling that said the same.

“By limiting its restrictions to a list of ideas designated as offensive, the Act targets speech based on its content. And by barring only speech that endorses any of those ideas, it penalizes certain viewpoints — the greatest First Amendment sin,” Judge Britt C. Grant wrote in Monday’s opinion.

The “Stop Woke Act” was approved by the Republican-controlled Florida legislature in March 2022. The act was one of DeSantis’s top priorities, and before he dropped out as a possible candidate for president in 2024, it was a routine talking point on the campaign trail.