Soundside

After a four year hiatus, the reality television show “Cops” is returning to Spokane County. If you had a TV anytime in the last few decades, you know the show: shaky cameras following police busting drug deals, stopping thefts, chasing down the “bad boys”. Paramount canceled Cops in 2020, amid the George Floyd protests.  But it didn’t take long for the show to return. ‘Cops’ began airing again in...

After an 8 month search, the Seattle Art Museum has a new director and CEO: Scott Stulen comes to Seattle from Tulsa, Oklahoma where he led the Philbrook Museum. In their announcement, SAM touted Stulen’s work expanding the role of museums in civic life by using the Philbrook as a polling place and vegetable garden. Stulen’s hire comes at an important time for the SAM, arts organizations are still...

An influential research team with a focus on fighting false and misleading election information online has reportedly collapsed under pressure from conservative critics.  The Stanford Internet Observatory’s future is uncertain now that the team has lost most of its staff. While Stanford told reporters in a statement that the Observatory’s work will continue under new leadership, it appears the rap...

A King County Superior Court Judge has hit the pause button on a few elements of the Parents Bill of Rights, also known as I-2081. The Friday order comes in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of WA in May. LGBTQIA advocacy groups and civil liberties organizations raised concern about the legality of the Parents Bill of Rights and its effect on students. Jeanie Lindsay joined Soundside host Li...

Families of people who died on Boeing jets are renewing their calls for criminal prosecution of the company after Boeing’s CEO appeared before Congress this week. The families are asking the Justice Department to fine Boeing the maximum – 24 billion dollars – for the dual 737 Max 8 crashes in 2018 and 2019.  The letter to the DOJ comes the day after Boeing’s David Calhoun testified before on a ser...

For the first time in 25 years, the Makah Tribe of Neah Bay will once again be allowed to hunt the Eastern Pacific Gray Whale. The tribe, which is located in the northwest corner of the Olympic Peninsula, has the only treaty in the US that explicitly includes the right to hunt whales for cultural and sustenance purposes. But, in the past 90 years, they have only been allowed to exercise that right...

School is out for the summer, and when students of two Seattle schools return in the fall, there will be some changes. Cell phones will be banned at Robert Eagle Staff Elementary and Hamilton International Middle School.  Students will check their cell phone into a small lockable pouch when they arrive at school. Districts across the state and country have taken similar actions. Florida and Indian...

Employees of Everett’s Daily Herald are on strike today. They’re protesting the management decisions that led to a dozen staffers being laid off from the newspaper last Wednesday.  Back in March, Carpenter Media Group purchased Black Press Media, which owned 43 publications in Washington and Alaska, including the Herald. Carpenter says the restructuring is part of plans to improve the economics of...

$395 million -- that is one judge’s estimate of how much the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community should receive in a trespassing case. The judgment is not only a monetary victory for the tribe, but points to the legal leverage Tribal governments have when it comes to protecting their sovereignty. Guests: Isabella Breda, environment reporter at the Seattle Times Relevant Links: Seattle Times: Judge o...

To make room for the new Sageview High School, Pasco school board members needed to make a decision: which students would go to the shiny new school, and which would stay at one of the older schools: Pasco High School, or Chiawana High?  This isn’t the first time Pasco’s school board has had to make a decision like this. When Chiawana High opened in 2009, the district began busing some students ac...

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the WTO protests in Seattle, a raucous action by 50,000 protesters who descended on the city in the fall of 1999. Their aim? shutting down a conference of top decision makers at the World Trade Organization. When this coalition of activists succeeded in stopping the WTO’s opening ceremonies, the “Battle of Seattle” became an inflection point in a growing str...

The U.S. Coast guard says it is still investigating the cause of a catastrophic implosion that destroyed the Titan submersible on a dive in the North Atlantic, killing all five passengers onboard. Titan was built and operated by Everett-based OceanGate. The company was a player in the nascent deep sea tourism industry, shuttling people to the site of the Titanic wreck at a cost of $250,000 a ticke...

Since the Supreme Court struck down the right to an abortion in 2022, Idaho has enacted some of the strictest abortion laws in the country. For Idaho medical students at the University of Washington, the near total abortion ban creates uncertainty about whether they will go back home to practice. Guests: Dr. Sarah Villarreal, associate professor at the University of Washington and practicing OB/GY...

It’s been a tumultuous few years for rental laws in Washington state.  When the pandemic caused widespread job and income losses, state, county, and city governments passed a series of protections to keep tenants housed. That included funds for back-paying rent and moratoriums on evictions.  But many of those protections have ended, and over the last year, eviction cases have spiked in the state....

Microsoft continues to face tough questions about its security protocols and commitment to safety after a whistleblower says he warned the company about a serious vulnerability involving third party software years ahead of it being exploited in the infamous SolarWinds attack. Experts believe that it was in September of 2019 that Russian hackers gained access to SolarWinds - a network infrastructur...

At a time when many voters are deciding which candidate to support in the August primary, voters are also witnessing very public conflicts between Democratic candidates. Ethics and finance complaints filed by gubernatorial candidate Mark Mullet against front runner Bob Ferguson point to the gulf between moderates and progressives. Guests: Scott Greenstone, KUOW politics reporter Related Links: KUO...

Seattle Police say they have stepped up their presence today on the Garfield High School campus in the Central District. Interim Police Chief Sue Rahr told King 5 that Seattle Public Schools reached out to ask for the support – following the shooting of 17-year old Amarr Murphy-Paine on campus last week. Parents, teachers, and students gathered at Garfield on Tuesday to talk about what safety and...

An estimated 45% of riders paid to get on the light rail in Seattle according to Sound Transit estimates from 2023. When you tap your Orca card at one of those yellow stands, or maybe you don’t, you’re making a difference to Sound Transit’s bottom line because the organization has been hoping to rely on that revenue to make up 40% of light rail’s operating budget. Last year, only 14% of the budget...

It was Thanksgiving in 1996. Seattle newscasters are reporting that the “Hollywood” Bandit has locked himself in an old camper in a backyard in Ravenna after robbing the Lake City branch of Seafirst Bank of over 1 million dollars in cash.  The Seattle Police and FBI Task Force that’s been hunting him for years finally have him surrounded…  But to understand how we got here, like any good crime sto...

Western sandpipers migrate thousands of miles each year, from their breeding grounds in the upper reaches of Alaska to the coasts California and South America. One location, in particular, is an irresistible pit stop for sandpipers: a wide mud flat on the Fraser River Delta near the U.S./Canada border. Not far away from those mud flats is one of British Columbia’s most important shipping terminals...

Community members greeted kids on their way into Garfield High School in Seattle’s Central District, after Mt. Zion Baptist Church, and the organization 100 Black Parents organized a massive show of support. Classes started up again Tuesday morning after a shooting on campus that claimed the life of 17-year old student, Amarr Murphy-Paine.  The shooter, believed to be another high school aged boy,...

Most of us are familiar with how our food grows. Fruit trees, crop plants -- they all put out blossoms. From there, honeybees spread pollen and collect nectar to grow their local hives. That buzzy work is a critical piece of agriculture, because without bees, the food we'd like to grow... won't grow. But a recent glut of almonds in California is disrupting a bee renting ecosystem -- a "bee-cosyste...

Interim Seattle Police Chief Sue Rahr has a big mandate: Hire more officers, and clean up a department culture that has led to half a dozen lawsuits from high ranking SPD officers who say they were the victims of discrimination, harassment or retaliation.  Many parents and city leaders are also   asking what more can be done to protect kids in Seattle schools, following a shooting at Garfield High...

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) has a new leader: the agency’s board announced this week that starting Aug. 1, Kelly Kinnison will head the agency. Kinnison is a policy director at the US Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C. and takes over at an uncertain time for KCRHA. The agency has been without permanent leadership for more than a year after the a...

In 2013, Amazon founder and then CEO Jeff Bezos told 60 Minutes that his company would be delivering packages via DRONE within 5 years. It took a little bit longer… but not much. Since December 2022, customers in College Station, Texas have been able to get small packages delivered by unmanned Amazon aircrafts. And last week, Amazon announced that the FAA has authorized its drone program, called P...