News For Reasonable People

A giant ship wedged across the Suez canal, record-breaking shipping rates, armadas of vessels waiting outside ports, covid-induced shutdowns: container shipping has rarely been as dramatic as it has in 2021.  The average cost of shipping a standard large container (a 40-foot-equivalent unit, or feu) has surpassed $10,000, some four times higher than a year ago (see chart).  The spot price for send...

Some community activists are not happy after the Seattle City Council rejected a plan to spend millions of dollars to pay officers 'not' to leave the police department. The incentives to recruit and retain officers comes as SPD is going through a major staffing crisis. Some activists said the council’s actions fall short of what the City of Seattle needs now. “We won’t have a department,...

As Chicago's gang violence spirals out of control, Mayor Lori Lightfoot is coming up with a new plan to fight back. Lightfoot wants to hold the gangs accountable by allowing the city to sue the very people who are pulling the trigger. Authorities want to take away the guns, cars, jewelry and money from gangs to eliminate their profit motive. Lightfoot is introducing an ordinance on Tuesday th...

The estate of the man fatally shot in downtown Portland after a pro-Trump car rally last year is suing the city of Portland, the mayor and the county district attorney, claiming their alleged negligence contributed to his violent death. The suit, filed Friday in federal court in Portland, contends a “hands-off approach” to political demonstrations and counter-protests in Portland fostered a “cultu...

It's been one week since federal pandemic unemployment benefits ended. In the days following, restaurants across Portland tell KATU News they saw a spike in people looking for work. The owner at Chef's Table said his team is seeing about 50% more applicants, but this comes at a time when there are still many jobs to fill. "This is a welcome influx, but I think the people that are co...

In the wake of several shootings, including one involving two teens, Lenox Square will begin requiring visitors under 18 to be accompanied at all times by an adult. A Wednesday afternoon news release detailed the new policy, which is called the “youth supervision program.” Any youth will have to be accompanied by their parent or an adult who is 21 or older after 3 p.m. each day, starting September...

A mansion developer claims he's ready to test the market with his $500 million Bel-Air super pad, seven years after building began.   What would be America's most expensive home is to hit the market for a cool half a billion dollars; complete with a nightclub, beauty salon, 20 bedrooms and sweeping views of LA and the Pacific Ocean. The mansion, dubbed 'The One' and developed b...

No bags, no boxes and no lids. Those are three items the owner of West Seattle's Great American Diner said he has not been able to find. "Someone (in government) needs to come forward to help small businesses," said Sarbjit Singh, owner of the Great American Diner. "We still need help." Local businesses said they are dealing with supply shortages on the regular. The pandem...

Rolling Stone was forced to issue an update to its viral story about Oklahoma hospitals being overwhelmed by patients who overdosed on the drug ivermectin after the doctor it cited was contradicted by the hospitals he referenced. On Friday, the liberal magazine published testimony from Dr. Jason McElyea, who told a local news station that hospitals were being overrun from patients overdosing on iv...

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick lambasted Portland leaders as “depraved” and accused them of putting residents in “grave danger” in response to the city’s plan to ban buying goods and services from the Lone Star State over its new law restricting access to abortions. “Portland boycotting Texas is a complete joke,” sniped Patrick, a conservative-talk-radio-host-turned-politician, on Twitter Monday. “A c...

New York has extended eviction protections for tenants through January. Yet there's a gaping hole involving landlords. Some are now falling behind in property taxes and that could ultimately fall back on the people who rent from them - and on the neighborhoods. "I don't make enough to subsidize city rental properties," said Rich Tyson. Join your host Sean Reynolds, owner of Sum...

It’s been nearly two weeks since a federal eviction moratorium protecting renters was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, but the ruling doesn’t appear to have triggered a wave of eviction notices in Hawaii — yet. In April 2020, Gov. David Ige instituted a statewide eviction moratorium in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and Hawaii’s resulting economic shutdown, which left many residents witho...

Ben Dugan sat in an unmarked sedan in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood one day last September waiting for the CVS to be robbed. He tracked a man entering the store and watched as the thief stuffed more than $1,000 of allergy medicine into a trash bag, walked out and did the same at two other nearby stores, before loading them into a waiting van, Mr. Dugan recalled. Join your host Sean Reyno...

Amazon.com Inc. has a solution for a potentially crippling shortage of delivery drivers: Recruit pot smokers. The company is advising its delivery partners — the mom-and-pops that operate the ubiquitous blue Amazon vans — to prominently advertise that they don’t screen applicants for marijuana use, according to correspondence reviewed by Bloomberg and interviews with four business owners. Doing so...

The divorce rate in the United State dropped about 20% over the last decade, according to data from the latest U.S. Census. But what about during the COVID-19 pandemic? Did the added stress affect marriages? Have divorce rates actually risen since the coronavirus entered our lives? To find out, KING 5 combed through the last 20 months of caseloads in Washington State’s Superior Courts where divorc...

“We continue to see more victims being shot each year,” Interim Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz said. A few Seattle leaders held a news conference Tuesday morning to address the recent surge in gun violence. This conference came after six shootings took place across Seattle over the weekend, one of which left two people dead at a North Seattle apartment building. But Diaz says that’s just the lat...

The investment form in a report, said as many as 750,000 households could face eviction before the end of the year —and that as many as 3.5 million households nationwide are behind in their rent payments. At this point, the only thing stopping that would be an eviction moratorium from Congress, which has been hesitant to agree to such a policy so far. The Biden Administration ordered one previousl...

When Rebecca DiLorenzo’s landlord of 14 months informed her that he would be raising the rent by $300 a month on the apartment in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, she shares with her fiancé, Kyle, she started to look around for a place to buy.  “Our mindset last spring was, ‘We’re getting married, we need to buy a house’ and for a while we were going to open houses every weekend, but the market was j...

The Supreme Court on Thursday lifted the Biden administration's newest federal ban on evictions, granting a bid from a group of landlords to block the pandemic-related protections for renters facing eviction in most of the country. In an unsigned opinion with the three liberal justices in dissent, the divided court said that "careful review" of the case "makes clear that the ap...

At the beginning of the pandemic, Seattle and King County tried a new approach to get people living in homeless encampments into stable housing. They started putting people up in hotels, with the ultimate goal of keeping people off the streets. Some new data suggests that approach may not be a silver bullet in solving the issue. Seattle Times reporter Sydney Brownstone has been reporting on the ef...

The Democratic Party’s quest to defund police forces, an act in which it kowtowed to its hard-left-wing base, has come to a very bitter end. The resulting surge in violent crime has produced a massive public backlash that threatens the careers of elected Democrats throughout the nation. Naturally, the endangered species is trying to distance itself swiftly from the wreckage that “defund the police...

Multiple sources within SPD confirmed that officers from the former Navigation Team and North Precinct patrol provide 24/7 security outside of Mayor Jenny Durkan's multi-million dollar home in an upscale Seattle neighborhood. During cuts to the Seattle Police Department's budget last year in response to the "defund the police" movement, Seattle City Council voted to cut the Sea...

An iconic coffee shop in Lower Queen Anne has closed its doors. The owner of Uptown Espresso says homeless issues in the once-thriving neighborhood forced him out. He says the conversion of The Inn at Queen Anne from a hotel brought more formerly homeless people into the neighborhood. He and his neighbors, located around the corner from The Inn, say the impact of that decision is being felt right...

Far right-wing demonstrators and left-wing protesters clashed Sunday in Portland, a conflict that was punctuated with gunfire on a downtown street. Dustin Brandon Ferreira, 37, a left-wing activist, said he was with other activists Sunday evening when a man used a slur against a Black man in the group and fired multiple rounds in their direction. Portland police said in an email that “the entire i...

A federal appeals court on Friday said a pause on evictions designed to curb the spread of the coronavirus can remain in place for now, setting up a battle before the nation’s highest court. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected a bid by Alabama and Georgia landlords to block the eviction moratorium reinstated by the Centers for Disease Control and...