Seattle

This free event in Woodland Park is a great way to kick off Pride month and meet other members of Seattle's queer community.

Hundreds of Seattleites turned out Saturday to celebrate the start of the 2026 Bicycle Weekend schedule, scaled back up by Mayor Katie Wilson after being stifled under the previous administration.

Mutual aid networks are stressed and breaking, with no sign the influx of internal refugees is slowing.

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.

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.

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.

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.