Facebook Is Coming to South Lake Union (Of Course): They're setting up shop in an office building at Dexter Station to "attract the best workers and poach employees from large tech firms based here, like Amazon," the Seattle Times reports.
How Do You Explain Deportation to a 6-Year-Old? A Seattle mom is grappling with that question, in the wake of a federal judge's move to block the Obama administration's immigration reforms.
Mayor Ed Murray Gave His "State of the City" Address on Tuesday: Heidi Groover has the lowdown. The mayor announced $35 million for affordable housing (that's about 10 percent of the SPD budget) and a slate of upcoming summits. The lamentation of racial and economic inequalities, absent any specific plans for bold actions to undo them, felt like a rerun of last year's speech.
Some New Buildings Don't Come with New Parking: Oh. KING 5 seems to think that's a bad thing.
Is the Pasco Police Shooting Washington's Ferguson Moment? Some protesters against a recent police killing drove out from Seattle (it's a three-and-a-half-hour trip), according to KUOW. Zambrano-Montes was gunned down by police while running away, after throwing rocks in a parking lot. As the New York Times explains, his killing has drawn parallels to the death of Mike Brown because of the racial makeup of Pasco—56 percent of its 68,000 population is Hispanic. The killing, the Times reports, "has pierced the immigrant enclave, spurring protests that have attracted hundreds and highlighting a division between the city’s increasingly Latino populace and its power structure—the police, the city government—which remains largely white." Zambrano-Montes came from a family of immigrant farmworkers. He was 35. Mexico has condemned the killing. If you haven't seen the video of the shooting yet, it's here.
New Estimates Double the Cost of Fixing Education in Washington: In order to comply with the state Supreme Court's McCleary ruling, the state needs to come up with $6 billion—not $3 billion—in funding for the public school system, according to the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. (Still less than the $8.7 billion in tax breaks the legislature dished out to Boeing.)
UW Researchers Think Our Microbial Scum Ancestors Are Even Older Than Expected: Professor Roger Buick studied ancient rocks from South Africa and Australia and found a "relative bonanza of nitrogen," KPLU reports. That means early single-celled life forms who subsisted on the stuff may have been around "a good billion years earlier than thought."
The Obama Administration Hates the Free Press: Since the Obama presidency began, the United States has slunk to number 49 in world press freedom rankings. That's because of the prosecution of people like NYT national security reporter James Risen and Stephen Kim, a mid-level State Department bureaucrat who's in jail—this is a must-read, by the way—because he supplied classified information (it was fairly innocuous stuff, as classified information often is) to a Fox News reporter.
In a previous morning news, I posted a video of orcas chilling at the beach. Here they are killing a baby humpback whale:
