BUSD
  • Ansel Herz
  • On buses like these, there were far fewer assaults among riders and on drivers in 2014 than in the previous year.

Metro Buses Were Safer in 2014 Than in 2013: Assaults among bus riders are down about 34 percent and attacks on bus drivers are down 15 percent from 2013,
according to police. The King County Sheriff's Office attributes the downturn to more onboard cameras—which capture incidents like this famous one, where passengers disarmed a man waving a gun in 2013—and a higher rate of arrests.

Man Swinging Baseball Bat Seriously Injures Local Comedian: Dylan Avila, a Seattle-area comedian, was accosted by a man who hit him twice in the head with a baseball bat at a show in Renton on Monday, according to his wife. Witnesses said the man was angry he wasn't allowed to perform. The man is in jail on investigation of assault. Avila is in the hospital; his GoFundMe page has raised some $11,000.

Does Chris Hansen Want to Bring the Atlanta Hawks to Seattle? We haven't heard much from the basketball-obsessed billionaire lately, but according to an ESPN reporter, Hansen now wants to buy the Hawks team, which is up for sale. In May, his bid to relocate the Sacramento Kings failed.

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  • S.Borisov/Shutterstock
  • France is in a state of high alert after a deadly attack on a Paris newspaper.

Gunmen Shouting "Allah Akhbar" Attack Satirical Newspaper in Paris: The attackers are reportedly still at large after they opened fire on the offices of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people, including four cartoonists and two police officers. The AP reports the staff were in an editorial meeting at the time.

This Is the Cartoon the Newspaper Published Last Week: "Still no attack in France," it says. "Wait!" exclaims the figure. "We have until the end of January to give our best wishes."

More on the newspaper's history of poking fun at religion—and attempts to silence it—here.

Explosion Near Colorado NAACP: "Investigators were looking for a balding white man in his 40s who may be driving a dirty pickup truck," who may have set off an improvised explosive device, the Guardian reports.

FBI Says It Doesn't Need Search Warrants to Collect Cell Phone Data in Public Places: Remember the so-called "Stingray" device that Tacoma police were using in ways no one suspected? (Seattle police say they don't have one.) The FBI says it will use such devices, which pretend to be cell phone towers in order to suck up surrounding phone data, in public places where "the FBI deems there is no reasonable expectation of privacy."

Kendrick Lamar in His Own Words: "The more somebody opens the door for me and I walk through without acknowledging that they opened the door for me, the more I become separate from others," he writes in XXL.

What Was That Weird Fog That Settled in Seattle Last Night? A lot of people said it smelled like shit—garbage shit, or fishy shit, perhaps. Here's a time-lapse of it starting to roll in: