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​Legislation that would allow authorities to block gang members from visiting certain neighborhoods gets a public hearing later this morning in Olympia, but King County prosecutor Dan Satterberg says the controversial law wouldn't be of much use here in Seattle.

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​With the nation mired in the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates to virtually zero in hopes of spurring economic growth. While generally regarded as a sensible and effective strategy, the tactic has had the unintended consequence of crippling hundreds of non-profit organizations that offer legal services for the needy.

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​Most movies and TV shows end with a disclaimer informing viewers that the story is fictitious and "any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental." But Gig Harbor's Michael Bertsch is convinced that the similarities between his life, Donnie Darko, The X-Files, and Burn Notice are more than just coincidences, and he has filed a lawsuit demanding a whopping $100 billion from Fox and Rupert Murdoch.

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​In this week's cover story, we write about the way flimsy domestic violence allegations can be used in family court to separate dads from their kids. Some dads' rights activists say that's just what happened in the case of Sky Metalwala's father.

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​After relinquishing control of his super PAC to his pal Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert is officially running for president...of South Carolina. The candidate must be busy, ahem, coordinating his campaign, because he ignored Occupy Seattle's request to appear at their demonstrations this weekend. But despite the cold shoulder from Colbert, the protest organizers say they are still following his lead and making a mockery of Citizens United.

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​When an attorney first talked to Seattle Weekly about an anti-male bias in family court, one of the striking things was her gender. This was not some embittered male extremist, but a mainstream female lawyer who represents both women and men. And she's not the only one who sees the problem, as this week's cover story relates.

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Chen

​As chief of Medina's nine-person police force, Jeff Chen kept four machine guns handy to protect Bill Gates and other one-percenters living on the Eastside's Gold Coast. But the real threat, at least to Chen, turns out to have come from within: The white lady who fired him and the "anti-Asian" residents who live there.

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Hummel

​As a small-town dinner-theater actor, Bruce Hummel once played a confessed murderer who told the audience: "I got my revenge. Tell that to the sheriff." To him, it was an inside joke: He'd actually murdered his wife in 1990 but had been acting the role of an innocent man for almost two decades. Just how sick this was finally emerged when he was convicted of the slaying in 2009: he had killed his spouse so he could continue molesting their daughter. But now he's gotten revenge once more: a new trial, in effect a new stage.

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​In October, a mysterious Asian-American actress filed a $1 million lawsuit against Amazon for disclosing details about her real name and age on the Internet Movie Database. Court documents once identified her only as Jane Doe, but she outed herself Friday, and it turns out she might been better off suing her agent for the roles she has been getting in movies like Gingerbread Man 3: Saturday Night Cleaver.

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​Education boosters are declaring victory in yesterday's massive state Supreme Court ruling on education funding. But while the court firmly takes the state to task for failing to meet its duty, the ruling's solution is less conclusive--a point underlined in a dissenting opinion by the chief justice.

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