Good morning! I’m not sure exactly when this happened, but it’s spring now. There are buds on every tree, tulips and daffodils are everywhere. I can keep my windows open without frosting over my apartment, and the sunlight is slowly curing the seasonal depression I was so certain I didn’t have until it started lifting. Today is more of that: sun, highs in the 60s. Go outside and defrost the SADs.
Let’s do the news.
Ceasefire Already Strained: A day and a half into the two-week ceasefire with Iran, there are already cracks in its shaky foundation. Iran believes that Israel has already violated the agreement by continuing to bomb Lebanon, but the Trump administration claims that was never part of the agreement. And meanwhile, commercial traffic doesn’t appear to be flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. VP JD Vance is leading a delegation to negotiate with Iran in Pakistan on Saturday. “It’s going to be a very messy, imperfect cease-fire,” Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert and vice president at the Brookings Institution, told the New York Times. “But my sense is that both sides want to at least test what’s possible at the negotiating table.”
The Pentagon Threatened the Pope: You read that right. According to a report from The New Republic, the Pentagon was deeply offended by Pope Leo’s State of the World speech at the top of the year (the one where he said that “war is back in vogue, and a zeal for war is spreading”). They took it as a hostile message from the Vatican, so Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s US representative, to a closed-door Pentagon meeting. “The United States,” Colby said, according to The Free Press, “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.” Someone at the meeting also allegedly mentioned the Avignon papacy, an era in the 14th century when the French ordered an attack on the Pope and took control of the papacy. The Pope took that as a sign to decline Trump’s invitation to attend any events in the US for the foreseeable future.
Trump Is One Step Closer to Getting His Grubby Little Hands on Our Voter Rolls: After the DOJ failed to properly subpoena Washington State officials for months, a judge is allowing the feds’ lawsuit to access to our voter rolls to move forward. Last year, Secretary of State Steve Hobbs replied to the Trump administration’s demand for voter information, saying he was willing to provide public information from voter records, but he wouldn’t hand over dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, or the last four digits of social security numbers, which are protected under Washington law. The feds sued, poorly, and it’s taken until now to finally get the case off the ground. Now Hobbs has until May 12 to reply.
Ferg’s Making New Enemies: Conner Edwards, who the Washington State Standard referred to as “an attorney known as a prodigious filer of campaign finance complaints,” has filed a petition to recall Governor Bob Ferguson for failing to fill the seats of the State’s campaign watchdog panel. The recall is probably dead in the water, but even the commissioners are frustrated with Ferguson. Right now, only three of the five seats are filled, which means they only have a quorum if everyone is at every meeting, so they’re stuck twiddling their thumbs in “informational meetings.” One of the commissioners politely called it “disappointing.”
Good News and Bad News: Let’s start with the bad. According to reporting from the Seattle Times, GEO Group, which runs the ICE detention facility in Tacoma, signed a contract with ICE this year that expands the capacity of the facility from 1,575 to 1,635 people. But the good news is, right now, they’re not using it. Back in June, the facility was so full that ICE was forced to transfer dozens of people to jails in Alaska. But today, the facility is only housing 919 people—the lowest it’s been since Trump launched his immigration program. And we have more good news to come with it: there’s a reason for that dip. ICE arrests in Washington have dropped by more than half since December. Deportations are down, too.
Want a little dose of hope in your morning? Immigrant workers in a Meta cafeteria in Bellevue made a pact last year: if any of them were affected by the Trump administration’s immigration program, they’d have each other’s back. So when one of their brothers was taken by ICE, they launched a fundraising campaign for his legal defense. In February, his brother was released. Read the full Wired report, a scathing story of how workers are able to do what execs simply won’t.
Artemis Landing: After going further into space than any other humans have, the lunar explorers are coming home tomorrow. Splashdown in the Pacific Ocean is expected to happen around 5:10 p.m. Pacific time. NASA is watching some iffy weather, but if all goes to plan, they’ll hit the water off the coast of San Diego.
Leaving the President on Read: If you want to watch a master class in quiet resistance, watch Trump’s call to the Artemis II astronauts. They listened to the man who gutted the NASA program ramble on about the Great Wayne Gretzky, and when he paused for his expected “thank you, Mr. President,” they let him sit in silence for almost a full minute while they played with their microphone hovering between them. Like Liz Plank wrote in her substack, watching these astronauts is the competency porn we need: “Four humans got into a rocket and went to the moon, farther from Earth than any humans have ever traveled in the history of our species. And they were so good at it, so genuinely moved by it, and so articulate about what they were seeing and feeling, that millions of people who have been running on anxiety and dread for the last eleven years just stopped for a moment and finally exhaled.”
That’s 75 Down, 425 to Go: Mayor Katie Wilson has promised 500 new shelter beds before FIFA comes to town for the World Cup, which is creeping up quickly. Yesterday, she announced the first location for a new tiny home village, an open lot in Interbay, between a Whole Foods, a storage facility, and the Seattle Animal Shelter. It’s expected to house 75 people in single-person 70-square-foot “microunits,” with access to case management, mental health services, and substance use treatment.
Some of you have noticed that our comment section is gone. Some of you hated the comment section for its trolls and chaos, and some of you loved it, probably for a lot of those same reasons. (One of you told us, “it’s hardly worth reading Slog AM without them.”) We get it! Some days, we miss Catalina, DOUG., Kristofarian, and even Phoebe from Wallingford, too. But don’t worry, you just have a new way to tell us what you hate (or love?) and why. We’re bringing back Letters to the Editor. Tell us your feelings about the stories you read here at letters@thestranger.com. Every week, we’ll publish a roundup of your thoughts and feelings. Feel like making them even more public? You can shout at us @thestranger.com on BlueSky and maybe we’ll even embed them in the roundup.
Come Visit Us Tonight! We’re opening up the Stranger offices for the Capitol Hill Art Walk. Curated by our photo director, Billie Winter, we’re remounting Brandon Bye’s More Paint exhibit, including new photos that were not exhibited at Vermillion earlier this year. You’ll also find two brand new original video pieces by Winter, and a display of some of our favorite original photography that’s appeared in The Stranger in the last year. We’re right next to Chop House Row, at 1101 E. Pike. You shouldn’t miss this one.
