With the state Legislature back in session for a 30-day extra inning, Gov. Jay Inslee on Monday narrowed his agenda to three key items: the budget, a roads-and-transit funding package, and a crackdown on impaired drivers.

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.

A military judge has found Army Sgt. John Russell guilty of premeditated murder in the 2009 killings of five fellow service members at a combat stress clinic in Iraq.

Russell now faces a sentencing phase to determine whether he will face life in prison with or without the possibility of release.

Seattle has been in the spotlight lately as the home to the world’s greenest new office building, the Bullitt Center. Also under construction is the headquarters of Brooks Sports in Fremont, which promises to be “deep green.”

But what about all the buildings that are already standing?

The same jury that convicted a Monroe Reformatory inmate of aggravated murder for strangling a prison guard starts work Monday in Everett on the penalty stage of the trial to determine whether Byron Scherf will be executed.

Snohomish County jurors were told during the trial that the convicted rapist was already serving a sentence of life without parole in 2011 when he strangled Jayme Biendl in the prison chapel.

The great blue heron is one of Washington’s most iconic birds, as is the bald eagle. Now, it seems eagle attacks on heron nests are driving herons to abandon the largest colony in Seattle. And volunteers are asking local residents to help them figure out where the herons have gone.

For more than a decade, Pam Cahn has monitored the dozens of heron nests at Kiwanis Ravine near Discovery Park in northwest Seattle. The volunteer citizen-scientist has kept track of eggs laid, chicks hatched and fledglings flown, then sent the data to the state Department of Fish and Wildlife for record-keeping.

But Cahn says this season, eagles have wreaked havoc on the approximately 90 heron nests in Kiwanis Ravine.

Some freshmen engineering students at Washington’s largest universities will get an extra year to find their footing, thanks to a new “academic redshirting” program.  

The idea of redshirting comes from college sports, and here’s how it works: When Huskies quarterback Keith Price joined up as a freshman in 2009, he didn’t take the field. Instead he got a year of practice and workouts to acclimate before starting his four years of eligibility.

Now the University of Washington, along with Washington State University, want to apply that to academics.

Several inmates at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla are taking part in a new program to try to ease violence and reduce the number of inmates in solitary confinement.

So far, the program is voluntary, and it targets dangerous, confrontational inmates who have been locked away in isolation.

Seattle's own Roosevelt High School's jazz band took third place at the prestigious Essentially Ellington festival in New York this weekend. 

The Tucson Jazz Institute placed first, and Jazz House Kids of Montclair, New Jersey came in second. 

"In the Rain Shadow," a new release by trombonist Chris Amemiya & Jazz Coalescence is one of the features on this week's Jazz Northwest. This sextet includes several top Northwest jazz musicians, including Jay Thomas, Travis Ranney, John Hansen, Jon Hamar and Steve Korn in a live studio session at Music Works Northwest.  The CD has the benefit of imaginative arrangements as well as  the immediacy of a live performance and the quality of a studio recording.  The individual musicians are all at the top of their game.

Gunmen opened fire on people marching in a neighborhood Mother's Day parade in New Orleans on Sunday, wounding at least 19.

The shooting — described by the FBI as a flare-up of street violence — shattered the festive mood surrounding the parade that drew hundreds of people to the 7th Ward neighborhood of modest row houses not far from the French Quarter. Cell phone video taken in the aftermath of the shooting shows victims lying on the ground, blood on the pavement and others bending over to comfort them.