EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes discussion of suicide. The national suicide and crisis lifeline is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org.

CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — The family of a former Boeing quality control manager who police say killed himself after lawyers questioned him for days about his whistleblowing on alleged jumbo jet defects sued the airplane maker Thursday.

Boeing subjected John Barnett to a “campaign of harassment, abuse and intimidation intended to discourage, discredit and humiliate him until he would either give up or be discredited,” lawyers for the family wrote in a wrongful death lawsuit filed in federal court in South Carolina.

Barnett, 62, shot himself March 9, 2024, in Charleston after answering questions from attorneys for several days. He lived in Louisiana.

“Boeing had threatened to break John, and break him it did,” the attorneys wrote in court papers.

Boeing has not yet responded in court filings.

“We are saddened by John Barnett’s death and extend our condolences to his family,” the company said in a statement this week.

Barnett was a longtime Boeing employee and worked as a quality-control manager before he retired in 2017. In the years after that, he shared his concerns with journalists and became a whistleblower.

Barnett said he once saw discarded metal shavings near wiring for the flight controls that could have cut wiring and caused a catastrophe. He also noted problems with up to a quarter of the oxygen systems on Boeing’s 787 planes.

Barnett shared his concerns with his supervisors and others before leaving Boeing, but according to the lawsuit they responded by ignoring him and then harassing him.

Boeing intentionally gave Barnett inaccurate, poor job reviews and less desirable shifts, according to the lawsuit. Barnett’s family argues the company publicly blamed him for delays that angered his co-workers and prevented him from transferring to another plant.

Barnett eventually was diagnosed with PTSD and his mental condition deteriorated, his family said.

“Whether or not Boeing intended to drive John to his death or merely destroy his ability to function, it was absolutely foreseeable that PTSD and John’s unbearable depression, panic attacks, and anxiety, which would in turn lead to an elevated risk of suicide,” the lawsuit said. “Boeing may not have pulled the trigger, but Boeing’s conduct was the clear cause, and the clear foreseeable cause, of John’s death.”

The lawsuit doesn’t specify the amount of damages sought by Barnett’s family but asks for compensation for emotional distress and mental anguish, back pay, 10 years of lost future earnings as well as bonuses, health expenses and his lost life insurance benefits.

NEW YORK (AP) — An FBI agent who publicly accused the agency of a pro-Trump bias has been arrested and charged with disclosing confidential records after authorities say he included sensitive material about investigations and informants into a draft of his memoir.

Johnathan Buma, who claimed in 2023 that the FBI went after President Joe Biden’s son Hunter while stifling his own investigation of President Donald Trump’s ally Rudy Giuliani, was arrested Monday evening at Kennedy Airport in New York as he was about to board a flight out of the country, authorities said.

In the draft of his book, Buma described himself as “the most significant whistleblower in FBI history.”

Federal prosecutors in California, where Buma had worked as a counterintelligence and counterproliferation agent, charged him on Tuesday with a single count of disclosure of confidential information. The charge is punishable by up to one year in prison.

Buma submitted a letter of resignation Sunday, according to an affidavit prepared by an FBI agent involved in the investigation. The probe into Buma’s conduct began well before Trump took office for his second term. The FBI searched Buma’s home in November 2023, when Biden was in office.

Messages seeking comment were left with Buma’s lawyer.

After filing a whistleblower complaint and testifying before Congress, the court affidavit said Buma went to his FBI office in Orange County, California, in October 2023 and printed copies of about 130 confidential files. The files included summaries of information provided by confidential informants, the identity of an informant and screenshots of text messages he exchanged with an informant, the affidavit said.

Some of that information also appeared in a draft of Buma’s book, the affidavit said.

After emailing his bosses that he was taking an unpaid leave of absence, Buma posted excerpts of the draft on social media and emailed copies to various people, some of whom were helping him negotiate a publishing deal, according to the affidavit. Among other things, the book contained information about an FBI investigation into a foreign country’s weapons of mass destruction program, the affidavit said.

The unofficial start of the Mississippi River navigation season has begun.

The Motor Vessel Neil N. Diehl went through Lock and Dam 2, in Hastings on Wednesday, with nine barges.

Reaching Hasting and having access to St. Paul marks the unofficial start to the navigation season as it is the last port on the Upper Mississippi River to open. This year ice in Lake Pepin caused a delay, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

On average the first tow reaches St. Paul in the third week in March. The Motor Vessel Joseph Patrick Eckstein was the first tow of the 2024 to reach St. Paul, arriving on March 17, 2024. The earliest date for a tow getting to St. Paul occurred on March 4 in the years of 1983, 1984 and 2000.

The river channel provides transportation for fertilizers farmers need to produce corn and soybeans. The St. Paul District maintains the 9-foot-deep navigation channel and operates 12 locks and dams that support boat traffic from Minneapolis to Guttenberg, Iowa.

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Editor’s note: This is the second installment of Conley’s Corner, Volume 2.

Over the past two months, Mike Conley has looked a lot like, well, Mike Conley. Without context, that wouldn’t be a newsworthy statement. But the floor general’s current form is a sharp contrast from the player he was to open this season.

Conley couldn’t hit a shot over the first three months of the campaign, and wasn’t moving well on either end of the floor. At age 37, the poor first half led many to wonder if Father Time had come for Conley. No shame in that, it happens to us all.

But Conley has rewritten the narrative over the past 10 weeks. Since Jan. 17, the point guard is hitting 51% of his 3-point attempts — the best mark in the NBA — and is tallying 5.18 assists per every turnover, seventh best in the Association.

Minnesota is outscoring opponents by 10.4 points per 100 possessions with Conley on the floor in that span. His current impact is what the team was accustomed to getting from him in each of the previous two campaigns. What sparked the guard’s revival?

Health.

A wrist injury prevented Conley from picking up a basketball for the two months prior to training camp. He can cite the day almost exactly — it was either September 18th or 19th — before the lefty could do anything with his dominant hand.

It’s always a bit of a ramp up to training camp for Conley, who has gotten knee injections ahead of the past five or so seasons to fend off the issues caused by the wear and tear of a lengthy basketball career. Those injections require a recovery process, and all of it was severely hampered by the wrist ailment.

“Day 1 of training camp, I was like, ‘I hope I’m ready,’ ” Conley said.

While knowing full well he wasn’t.

“I wasn’t able to work out how I normally do. I wasn’t able to do stuff on the court, conditioned. By the time I get to training camp, I’m (usually) in this shape (I’m in now),” Conley said. “I was trying to get that as we were in October, November, December — trying to build back up to who I can be. But you’re out there with young guys and you’re basically playing catch up.”

Conley noted he didn’t want to cut too hard on his knees, or flick his wrist too hard in fear of a reaggravation. He was nervous about falling incorrectly or even handling the ball in a certain way. He was growing more fatigued because his body was compensating for the parts that weren’t 100%.

He didn’t do anything with confidence.

“It affects the way you approach the game out there,” Conley said. “You’re not the same person.”

But he wasn’t going to sit out. Conley noted that he came into the league at a time when you didn’t want to miss games. If you could possibly play through an ailment, you did. He has loosened his grip on the ideology a bit recently. When the organization tells him it’s a game for him to sit, he doesn’t offer as much resistance.

Yet the moment he could somewhat grip a ball after dislocating his finger, he was back in action. Conley didn’t play well with his hand wrapped fresh out of the all-star break, but he preferred it to missing two to three weeks knowing the ramp-up period required for players his age after a lengthy absence.

Conley noted the wrist and his knees rounded into form just before the finger injury. So, once the digits were good, he was full go. Health generated confidence. He hasn’t looked back since.

Conley is not, in fact, washed up. He was aware that some people thought he was.

“In our line of work, man, people don’t care. And they shouldn’t. … They care about what you do on that court,” Conley said. “I learned about that a long time ago, and that’s part of the job. So, I go out there, and if I’m not playing well, I’m not playing well. That’s why I don’t say nothing about anything else like, ‘Man, I didn’t sleep well last night,’ or, ‘I had the flu.’ No, I didn’t play well. I get it.”

Conley only even mentioned the summer wrist injury when specifically asked about the tape job on the wrist one day after practice. The knee injections were never brought up during the struggles. Conley believes he still should’ve played better through it all.

And he never doubted that, even at his age, he would return to form.

“I just wanted to get healthy. I’m ready to get back to being myself,” Conley said.

There were times during his poor start that Conley went to Chris Finch and made it clear that the coach had license to bring the veteran off the bench, reduce his minutes, whatever Finch believed was necessary to help the team win.

“Trust me, I’m a realist,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Man, if I’m not helping, I shouldn’t be out there.’”

Finch wouldn’t bite. The furthest he went was moving Donte DiVincenzo into the starting lineup, a spot Conley has since reclaimed. But Conley’s minutes never dipped much below 20 a game.

Finch maintained a firm belief of how Conley could help the Wolves. The guard’s teammates felt the same.

“All that faith just gives you that much more motivation of, ‘You’re still that guy. Just go out and do it,’ ” Conley said.

That faith has been handsomely rewarded over the past two months, and any outside beliefs that Conley’s days of productive play were behind him have been proven incorrect.

“I just really enjoy being able to help the team how I know I can,” he said. “There’s games I feel like I dominate, and I look up and I had six points and five assists and I’m like, ‘Man, I dominated tonight.’ … I felt really great about the activity I put out on the court,” Conley said. “So, hopefully it’s just the beginning of more of that.”

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