Seattle

Seattle’s Community Assisted Response & Engagement (CARE) department is expanding, but it’s being blocked from doing its job by the conditions laid out in the new Seattle Police Officers Guild contract. CARE is looking to circumvent these obstacles.

Since December, renters in six apartment buildings in Tacoma have voted to form unions in an effort to negotiate better leases with their landlords.

These tenants represent just a small fraction of all renters in the city. But organizers say the movement is growing and that plans are underway to unionize more buildings and create an organized tenant movement in Tacoma.

“The end goal, and what we’re really striving towards, is showing landlords that Tacoma is a tenant union town,” said Isaac Galvon, who lives in the Marguerite Apartments in Tacoma, which recently voted to unionize along with two other buildings in the neighborhood. “If they want to be here, they’re going to have to deal with tenant unions.”

Of the six Tacoma buildings that have voted to unionize this year, five are owned by a couple that lives in California. The tenants cite numerous grievances related to maintenance and fees — many of which stem from what they describe as a sense of apathy from their "absentee landlords.”

“They only view us as a source of income, as a money pit,” Galvon said. “And we’re people. We live here, we work.”

The renters are demanding that their landlords standardize rent across all units; allow pets at no additional cost; freeze rent increases in all units for two years; respond to maintenance requests in a more timely manner; respect tenants’ right to organize; stop posting notices with renters’ private information on doors; and cease the collection of “extraneous management service fees and fines.”

The landlords have thus far refused to meet the tenants at the bargaining table.

Direct service between light rail stations in Seattle and Bellevue and several major Eastside trailheads starts Saturday, and runs on weekends and holidays through August 30. Seattle's transit funding measure provides a big source of the dollars to operate the shuttles.

Now, for the first time, a Planned Parenthood affiliate is offering what's called the "advance provision" of abortion medication. The initiative, shared exclusively with NPR, launched Thursday and is called "Just In Case Abortion Pills." It means people can have the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol on their shelf to be used in the future if they want to end an early pregnancy.

"As evidence supporting this model of care has continued to grow, and with supportive policy environments in Washington and in Hawai'i, this really is the right time for us to step into this space," says Rebecca Gibron, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawai'i, Alaska, Indiana and Kentucky.

Amazon, Facebook, ICE, and the FBI are among the members of an intelligence-sharing network called Seattle Shield.

University of Washington researchers planned to have preschool teachers wear cameras that would record everything they saw from a first-person perspective, including the children they were teaching, then use that footage to develop AI models. Crucially, the program was presented as opt-out, rather than opt-in, meaning that parents had to take steps to prevent recordings of their children being processed by AI.

“With your permission, your child’s lead teacher may wear a small teacher-worn camera that captures the teacher's approximate first-person perspective, and/or we may place a fixed video camera in the classroom,” a document given to parents and later shared with 404 Media reads. “These videos simply capture the normal interactions between teachers and children during regular classroom activities. Recordings occur during morning program hours up to 150 minutes, up to 4 visits in one month. Your child will not be asked to do anything new or different. Their daily routine will stay exactly the same.”

Slated to open in 2029, the new venue “will integrate” with the existing Victory Hall space, where Live Nation EDM subsidiary Insomniac Events has thrown a number of dance music shows.

With the price of a gallon of gas jumping two dollars in Washington state over the last few months, John Burbank argues it’s high time to institute a windfall profits tax on Big Oil, as they profiteer off Trump’s war in Iran with record revenue.

On Friday, the day before a planned protest in the neighborhood, Seattle Children’s Hospital and the Laurelhurst Community Council released a joint statement saying “the Laurelhurst Community Council (LCC) has agreed to fully support Seattle Children’s as it seeks city approval to end the Medical Review Committee for helicopter landings.”

Last week, the Seattle subreddit dredged up a long-time drama between the Laurelhurst neighborhood and Seattle Children’s Hospital about its helicopters.

Seattle Children’s is the go-to specialized pediatric care center for Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho. When children from near and far away need urgent treatment, they’ll get swooped up by a helicopter and taken to Seattle Children’s. This, the affluent North Seattle neighborhood will tell you, is quite the nuisance.

Such a nuisance that a neighborhood group wanted to make sure the hospital wasn’t landing flights on the helipad for non-emergency reasons, according to meeting minutes from 2021. “There needs to be a medical justification form for each flight (one was a broken leg for example),” said one member. In the six years of documented meetings The Stranger looked at, they had a lot more to say.

A sprawling child exploitation investigation by the Vancouver Police Department has resulted in the arrest of a Vancouver man and the death of a prominent local pediatrician, who was found deceased of an apparent suicide just a day after a felony warrant was issued for his arrest.

The investigation, which involves the Vancouver Police Department and the Clark County Sheriff’s Office, began in February 2026.

Authorities reported receiving a cyber tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children regarding child sex abuse material traced to a Vancouver IP address.