apnaSeattle.com

For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media.

A 27-year-old Bellevue man who worked at Microsoft faces 20 to 26 years in prison for impersonating a police officer to force a woman to have sex with him at an apartment in Redmond earlier this month.

The woman who was found murdered in her Redmond apartment recently moved to the area, loved to ride motorcycles and was a "shooting star," according to her supervisor at a Bellevue software-development company.