News For Reasonable People

Seattle Public Schools says they believe a propped-open service door at Broadview Thomson K-8 is how a man got inside the school building on Wednesday, forcing a lockdown. It happened around 8:20 in the morning. “Our kids had an online class today and suddenly it was stopped and then later the teacher texted us that there was a lockdown,” said Jeremy Hubble, the parent of a student at the school....

The city of Portland announced Wednesday it will get more aggressive in removing what it deems the most problematic homeless encampments in the city. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the city had scaled back how many camps officials remove, and how quickly the removal process happens. The scale-back was an effort to limit COVID-19 transmission among people living on the streets and was in line...

The Seattle Police Department is struggling under the backlash of recent police reforms. The state of Washington has just enacted a dozen police reform laws, following nearly a year of protests over police brutality. According to one social justice group, more than $840 million were cut from U.S. police budgets in 2020. This has caused a shortage of police in Seattle. The police chief tells CBS Ne...

Supply for homes can't keep up with demand. At a point when the country badly needs more houses, housing starts fell 9.5% in April, and Goldman Sachs doesn't see the cavalry arriving soon. A May 2 note from Goldman's Ronnie Walker found that new home sales and housing starts have reached their highest levels since 2006, and housing supply is at its lowest level since the 1970s. But...

The Seattle Parks department is offering planning and and funding help for events in Cal Anderson, one year after the Capitol Hill occupied protest that filled the park and nearby blocks became a center of the Black Lives Matter movement in Seattle. Meanwhile, an organizer who has focused on the art of the protests, has announced a CHOP Block Party weekend next month to mark the one-year anniversa...

Yet another Walgreens will shut its doors permanently this month. The store at the corner of Bush and Larkin streets posted signs in its windows last week announcing the closure, which will happen March 17. But community members are so concerned about the closure, they’ve started an online petition hoping to stop it. The Change.org petition had 179 signatures as of publication and emphasizes the i...

Finally, some good news for home buyers! Sizeable increases in new listings compared to a year ago and reports of moderating prices "might mean we are seeing some relief for buyers," suggested John Deely, a board member at Northwest Multiple Listing Service. In commenting on the latest statistics from Northwest MLS summarizing April activity, Deely said the market remains hot while empha...

Police in Bellevue were on high alert Tuesday night as several planned protests took place and a group marched in the streets of downtown.  The activity was initially in response to a law enforcement appreciation dinner that was hosted by Reverend Franklin Graham, the son of evangelist Billy Graham, who has become a controversial figure for making anti-LGBTQ rights statements in the past. Seattle...

The public expression of objection — otherwise known as a protest — is woven into the very fabric of Portland’s culture. After George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis in May of 2020, Portlanders took to the streets every day for weeks that stretched into months, capturing the nation’s attention even during a pandemic. Shortly after Derrick Chauvin was convicted of the murder, George’s brother Rod...

One afternoon last August, Jeanne Tiscareno returned to her Capitol Hill home to find the front door open and the house ransacked. She called 911 and waited on a nearby sidewalk for Seattle police to arrive. One hour passed, then two, with no sign of an officer. When Tiscareno phoned again, a dispatcher told her the call wasn’t a priority. After three-and-a-half hours, a detective working overtime...

The late-pandemic supply chain crisis never smelled quite as good as it did on Wednesday morning in Searsmont, Maine. The air on the 80-acre campus of Robbins Lumber was thick with the scent of eastern white pine—the tallest trees in the Maine forest—being sliced into boards. Yet the warehouse, a cavernous hangar designed to store pallets of finished lumber for shipment, was virtually empty. The c...

Gun violence is up dramatically in Central Puget Sound, according to the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office Crime Strategies Unit report released Tuesday. In the first three months of this year, fatal shootings have increased 34% compared to the last four years, the report found.  Black or African American victims were the most predominant, vastly outnumbering all the other demographics. In...

Everywhere you look, the City of Roses has become the city of trash and filth. Portland may be slowly emerging from the pandemic but the downtown district is fenced off, boarded up and dying. The city’s homeless problem has worsened. Violent protests have damaged the heart of the city and continue to destroy its reputation. And the mayor and other leaders seem overwhelmed, ineffective and ill-equi...

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office mishandled a series of public records requests after discovering that about 10 months of Durkan’s text messages were missing, a whistleblower investigation has determined. The mayor’s legal counsel, Michelle Chen, engaged in improper governmental action when she decided to exclude Durkan’s missing texts from certain requests, violating the state Public Records A...

As Henry Bridger arrived on Capitol Hill on Saturday to gather signatures for a ballot initiative to recall Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, he trumpeted an admission by the politician that he predicts will help persuade voters to oust her. In a Friday settlement agreement with the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, Sawant admitted to improperly using city money, employees and other...

The largest business lobbying group in America on Friday blamed a $300-per-week federal jobless benefit for enticing Americans to stay at home and April’s far-weaker-than-expected jobs report. “The disappointing jobs report makes it clear that paying people not to work is dampening what should be a stronger jobs market,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said in the hours after the Labor Department rel...

Rose City Antifa is one of the nation's oldest active antifa groups. Members rarely give interviews, but two who say they are part of antifa agreed to speak to "Nightline" as the situation in their city of Portland, Oregon, has become a prolonged and destructive stalemate. Rose City Antifa members "Milo" and "Ace" use pseudonyms and they asked that their faces an...

A Long Island man who only ever made one mortgage payment has deftly used the courts to stay in the house for 23 years — for free, according to legal papers. Guramrit Hanspal, 52, has filed four lawsuits and claimed bankruptcy seven times to avoid being booted from the 2,081-square-foot East Meadow home he “bought” for $290,000 in 1998. So far, it’s worked: Two different banks and a real estate co...

Montana plans to stop some of its federally-funded unemployment benefits to address “the state’s severe workforce shortage,” according to its labor department, which will leave many out-of-work residents without any support at all. “Nearly every sector in our economy faces a labor shortage,” Governor Greg Gianforte said in a statement on Tuesday. “The vast expansion of federal unemployment benefit...

Cal Brockman has spent the last 46 years designing and creating custom jewelry at his downtown Portland store, Goldmark Jewelers. Until last year, he had no plans of vacating his longtime storefront at the corner of Southwest 10th Avenue and Southwest Taylor Street. But foot traffic plummeted downtown after the start of the coronavirus pandemic, while vandalism spiked as nightly protests consumed...

It’s been a troubling past week at Albert Davis Park in Seattle’s Lake City neighborhood. Two people were shot at a homeless encampment on Thursday. Then Friday, a series of propane explosions led to a fire at the park, burning up a tree and several tents. The city of Seattle stated the fire department has responded to the park six times over the course of a single week. “I woke up to my husband y...

A federal judge on Wednesday invalidated a national eviction moratorium after finding that the COVID-19 pandemic policy exceeded the authority of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Dabney Friedrich threw out the measure, which was enacted by Congress in March 2020 as part of the CARES Act and later extended by President Biden unti...

King County Executive Dow Constantine announced a $100 million plan Thursday to bring at least 500 people in off the streets of Seattle by the end of the year — one of the most ambitious local plans in scale and timeline announced in a year of big promises to expand housing and shelter. To hit the large target on a short timeline, Constantine said the county plans to use more than $100 million fro...

Jamie Dimon is no fan of the new remote work structure that has taken hold during the coronavirus pandemic. The JPMorgan Chase chairman and CEO has already told his U.S. employees they should begin getting used to returning this month with the goal of having 50% of workers rotating through offices by July. While he’s fine with the greater flexibility allowed by employees working from home part tim...

On April 11 Daunte Wright was pulled over by officers from the Brooklyn Center Police in Minnesota because he was driving with an expired vehicle registration. In Minnesota, having expired vehicle registration is a misdemeanor offense.  When officers approached Mr. Wright’s car, they observed an object hanging from his rearview mirror. In Minnesota, driving a vehicle with an object suspended from...