Thanks to a decision from a federal judge, some gray wolves can roam a little freer today. Credit: Joe McDonald / GETTY IMAGES
Thanks to a decision from a federal judge, some gray wolves can roam a little freer today.
Thanks to a decision from a federal judge, some gray wolves can roam a little freer today. I have no idea if this is a gray wolf. Joe McDonald / GETTY IMAGES

Seattle man pleads guilty to Jan. 6 charges: The U.S. Attorney’s Office for Western Washington says 52-year-old veteran Mark Leffingwell pleaded guilty after being arrested for allegedly punching a federal law enforcement officer, KOMO reports.

Mayor Harrell could make an announcement on the eviction moratorium today: The moratorium is set to expire Monday. Landlords told the mayor on Thursday they want him to end limits on kicking people to the curb in the middle of the pandemic because they’re struggling to pay rent. According to KING 5, he told them, “Bear with me. I’m working on where we’re going to end up on this.”

King County Public Health chief Dr. Jeff Duchin offers some thoughts on lifting mask mandates right now. In my read, he sounds skeptical of dropping them.

Vaccinated Amazon employees don’t have to wear masks at work anymore: “Amazon said it was following guidance from public health authorities and its own medical experts as COVID cases have seen a sharp decline across the U.S.,” Geekwire reports. Lol.

I want to taste this man’s maple syrup: In this wholesome breakfast story from KING 5, an Acme, WA man named Neil McLeod describes his bigleaf maple syrup operation, which could launch a west coast syrup industry to compete with the sugar maple guzzlers over on the east coast. Neil calls his tree juice “the rarest maple syrup available,” which may justify the $3.50 per oz price.

“Missing Middle” housing bill could see a floor vote soon: Matt has been writing about a bill that would gently sprinkle duplexes here and there about the state to help address Washington’s dire housing shortage, the root cause of the problem you all tell pollsters you care so much about. That bill may see a floor vote before Tuesday, which would be a good sign for a proposal that should have passed years ago.

Seattle woman killed in Greyhound bus in California: Karin Dalton’s cousin says her cousin was “protecting her children” when she was among five people shot on Feb. 2 inside a Greyhound bus in Oroville, California. Dalton and her two children had boarded the bus the day before in Spokane, headed for New Mexico, the Seattle Times reports.

Former rock-climbing coach charged with raping a child: Prosecutors say the 28-year-old who worked as a coach at Vertical World Climbing in Redmond raped a 15-year-old girl with whom he had an “inappropriate relationship,” the Seattle Times reports.

I, too, am waiting for Mudede’s take on inflation: In the meantime, the New York Times begins its inflation story with a scary-sounding data point about its rate increase (“the fastest pace in 40 years”), followed by a scary-sounding reaction from the thing its assumed readers care about the most (“markets tumbled”), followed by the presumed solution to the problem (“possibly a big interest rate increase at the central bank’s next gathering in March”), followed by a projection of things to come (“most economists still believe inflation will cool by year’s end”), followed by a list of items rising in price (“new and used cars” and “food, electricity and shelter costs”), followed, finally, by the cost to the average household (“$276 a month”).

Of course, prices don’t rise on their own: CEOs raise them:

The structure of the supply chain exacerbates problems, too: Over at the Prospect, David Dayden concludes his series on the broken supply chain with a bunch of proposed fixes, including “taking down the policy tyrannies that have forced reliance on faraway manufacturing plants, self-interested ocean shipping oligopolies, overwhelmed ports, deregulated trucking and rail systems, and retail giants and middlemen that see these cumulative problems as an opportunity to raise prices well above increased input costs.”

Gray wolves outside the Northern Rocky Mountains are safe again: After Trump knocked the animal off the endangered species list, yesterday a federal judge put them back on. “‘This is huge for wolves throughout much of the Lower 48,’ said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and chief executive of Defenders of Wildlife, one of the organizations that sued the Interior Department over the Trump-era policy,” according to the Washington Post. State law in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho lets people continue to hunt them for some reason.

Periodically, those of us who eat meat must occasionally look it in the eye: This New York Times video about the real costs of cheap chicken will do the trick.

Biden’s obsessed with earning bipartisan support for SCOTUS pick: A partisan president wants to fill an open seat on a partisan Court with a Black woman jurist who will draw bipartisan support, Politico reports, because polling shows this “bipartisan” stuff is the kind of thing he must say to slow bleeding in the midterms. In any event, he’s “thoroughly reviewed about four” candidates, including Judges J. Michelle Childs, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Leondra Kruger. Last I heard, the correct answer to the question was Jackson.

The UK and Russia aren’t getting along: Behold the shade Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov cast upon his British interlocutor, Liz Truss: “I’m honestly disappointed that what we have is a conversation between a mute and a deaf person … Our most detailed explanations fell on unprepared soil,” Al Jazeera reports him saying as he denied any plans to invade Ukraine. Truss threw Lavrov into his tizzy after saying something like, “Oi, roight then, why yous got 100,000 Tommys wif tanks n’that ridin’ up’n’down Ukraine’s wanker if y’ain’t plannin’ to bore in? Bit dodgy, innit?” Our pal BoJo, still steaming from the garden party scandal, visited NATO friends in Brussels and told reporters that he didn’t think Putin had made a decision about whether to invade or not, but he said “that doesn’t mean that it is impossible that something absolutely disastrous could happen very soon indeed.” Indeed.

Are you a US citizen in Ukraine? Then President Joe Biden would like you to leave. In an interview with NBC News, he said the US wouldn’t send in troops to scoop up stray Americans if Russia invaded, and warned that “‘things could go crazy quickly’ in the region,” the BBC reports.

Vanity Fair comes through with an exclusive on Amazon’s LOTR: The Rings of Power: Looks like the show, which will premiere on Prime Video on September 2, will tell a truncated history of the Second Age, which begins after the great alliance defeats the first Dark Lord, Morgoth, in the War of the Wrath. As everyone knows, the period that follows gives us the origin story of Sauron and the creation of his many rings of power, which of course includes the One Ring. We’ll also likely see the rise of Neumenor, the great isle of men, followed by its fall at the hands of faithless liberal progressives, which will probably serve as an easy conservative analogy for the decline of the American Empire in the show. The great city of the dwarves in the Misty Mountains, Khazad-dûm, has its heyday during this time, so all the dwarf scenes should be cute. Meanwhile, the elves are bulking up and battling the new Dark Lord. As you can tell, I really don’t care about this at all and will be doing other things this autumn.

I leave you with this old Hurray for the Riff Raff song that popped into my head after reading too much about gun stuff this week.

Rich Smith is The Stranger's former News Editor. He writes about politics, books, and performance. You can read his poems at www.richsmithpoetry.com