Gawker alerted us to what could be the most bizarre casualty of the slumping housing market yet: the owners of a Lord of the Rings-themed, 31-unit housing development in Bend, Ore., have defaulted on a $3.4 million dollar loan for the property.

Founder Ron Meyer sold “The Shire”—named for a fictional area of Middle Earth inhabited exclusively by hobbits in the J.R.R Tolkien novels—to Jan McDonald in June, after attracting a lot of media attention and tourists, but only one buyer since 2006.

The 6-acre community is built in an “English Country Village architectural style around contemporary floor plans," according to  read more »

The Democratic nomination? Barack Obama will have the delegates he needs to claim it. What hasn’t been resolved yet is how fiercely and for how long Hillary Clinton will challenge him. The outcome of Tuesday’s primaries could go a long way to determining this.

The votes in Kentucky and Oregon are the last Democratic contests scheduled before a May 31 meeting of the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, a panel that figures to return to the obscurity it richly deserves as soon as this campaign is over. At the May 31 session, the 30-member committee will hear challenges from Democrats in Michigan and Florida, who were stripped by the national party of their convention delegates for scheduling their primaries in violation of the D.N.C.’s calendar.  read more »

Among the shocking findings: One top county official was too wrapped up in an Oregon State football game to come in and look for the lost family, a week after they went missing. And for two days as James Kim staggered dying in the forest, and authorities knew his whereabouts, no one thought to deploy helicopters that were available that had heat-seeking equipment that might have located him. (The same technology used in the last couple days on Mt. Hood.)

Rubrecht, a 32-year-old former police dispatcher, was named Josephine County's search coordinator in 2001 with no prior experience in the field... "I'm not afraid to tell anybody that [this case] was overwhelming -- beyond anything I'd ever handled before," she said.

[Dec. 2] Rubrecht tried to phone her boss, Josephine County Undersheriff Brian Anderson, who was watching the Oregon State-Hawaii game. He said he chose not to take the call, noting that it was his day off.

[Dec. 3] As the authorities deliberated, a local helicopter pilot set out on his own... John Rachor grew ever more certain over the weekend where the Kim family was stranded. At 10:30 a.m., he lifted off in his own four-seat helicopter, convinced he could find them. Rachor, who runs a string of Burger Kings, asked no one where to look. He said he flew straight to Bear Camp Road and logging road 34-8-36.

Three days later, James Kim's body was found.

SUV ads treat the outdoors like a tame pussycat. SUVs can go anywhere off-road. No, the Saab 9-2X isn't an SUV, but All-Wheel-Drive for a family in San Francisco? Why did the Kims think that they could make it on a seasonal road approaching 4,000 feet in the Siskiyou National Forest? What ads had they been watching?