More than 800 law enforcement officers oversaw the parade, but none of them prevented a mass shooting. Credit: Jamie Squire / GETTY

Renton will probably raise the minimum wage: Early returns from a special election show a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage in Renton to $19 leading by 15 points, 57% to 42%. Nineteen percent of Renton’s voters, or 11,650 people, had returned their ballots as of Wednesday afternoon. We’ll know more on the next ballot drop at 4 pm.

Spokane lawyers up: Far-right evangelist musician Sean Feucht is claiming damages after Spokane City Council passed a resolution condemning then-Mayor Nadine Woodard for appearing on stage with former State Rep. Matt Shea at one of Feucht’s concerts. Feucht, an anti-queer patriot pastor, claims the resolution signaled to elected leaders in Spokane that if they gathered with him or anyone who worshiped like him, then they’d receive an official condemnation. He rose to prominence during the pandemic, when he defied restrictions, and he’s since embraced the groomer conspiracy theory and the term Christian nationalism, according to reporting from the Inlander. 

Jeff Bezos made a killing with the new Florida tax break: He didn’t say he was moving to Florida for tax reasons, but c’mon. Leaving right after Washington introduced a 7% capital gain tax is a little obvious. The week after he announced that move, he put a plan in place to sell $8 billion in Amazon shares. Bloomberg reported that last week he unloaded half of that sum, a transaction that would’ve cost him $288 million for public education funding here.

Alaska Airlines flight attendants authorize strike: They haven’t done this in more than 30 years. A vote doesn’t mean a strike will happen, but it raises the stakes in contract talks that’ve dragged on for more than a year. The flight attendants say Alaska doesn’t provide a livable wage for them, despite authorizing large pay increases for pilots.

Yikes: The former executive director of Kitsap County’s 911 service pled not guilty to the attempted criminal sexual abuse of a minor on Wednesday. Police in King County arrested Richard Kirton as part of a sting operation last month. He allegedly messaged an undercover cop’s fake profile and agreed to pay the 16-year-old they were pretending to be for sex. When the detective told Kirton he was 16, he allegedly wrote “that works for me.” He voluntarily resigned after his arrest.

IDF special forces raid Gaza hospital: The IDF claim the raid is a “precise and limited mission” to recover the bodies of hostages it believes are inside Nasser hospital. The Gazan Health Ministry said the raid is endangering the lives of intensive care patients, but the IDF says nobody is obligated to evacuate. Reporters for Al Jazeera said those inside don’t have a choice and are fleeing for their lives under heavy tank and machine gun fire. Correspondents are reporting Israeli forces attacking people inside and outside of the hospital. This is a developing story.

Shooting at Chiefs Parade: One person is dead and at least 22 are injured after a shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl victory parade around Union Station Wednesday afternoon. Three people are in custody. The woman shot dead was a local radio DJ named Lisa Lopez-Galvan. Police have not identified any other victims, though nine were children. Officials say the shooting was criminal in nature and not an act of terrorism, but people sure felt terrorized.

Jump-scare: Nkechi Amare Diallo, better known as Rachel Anne Dolezal before a legal name change, lost her job at an Arizona public school after the district found out about her OnlyFans. It’s probably the second-worst way she’s lost a job. District records show Diallo was hired as an after-school instructor in August of last year. This headline may be the most buried of all ledes.

Star Wars: Russia wants to deploy some kind of nuclear anti-satellite system in space, according to US intelligence. We don’t know a ton because it hasn’t been declassified. Some members of Congress say the information should be, while senior leaders say the system does not pose an immediate threat and would be used to attack human beings. The US has made clear it would react “very forcefully” to an attack on its nuclear command and control satellites, which the government relies on for seamless control over our nuclear weapons. As far as we know, it is not clear how far the technology has progressed.

Who let this guy in: Eric Parker, the head of the Idaho Three Percenters, says he’s the leading force behind a bill that could gut the state’s terrorist control act. If passed, terrorism laws would only apply to federally designated foreign organizations like ISIS, and not homegrown extremists. The law originally passed nearly 40 years ago, after domestic white supremacists bombed a priest’s home in North Idaho.

Parker became famous on the far-right during the Cliven Bundy standoff in 2014 when a Reuters journalist snapped a photo of him pointing a semi-automatic rifle at federal agents. The photo got him accused of domestic terrorism by the FBI, and he spent 19 months in prison. He’s pretty cozy with some powerful elected officials. Investigate West has more here.

We’re seeing the effect of all those transphobic laws: For those able to flee their homes in Texas and Florida, states like Minnesota became hopeful destinations after lawmakers there passed a law that made the state a refuge for gender-affirming care. But providers are struggling to meet the new demand. For example, Children’s Minnesota saw a 30% increase in calls last year. Now the waitlist is between a year and 15 months. Family Tree Clinic in Minneapolis now sees 3,000 patients a year, and 225 of them came from out of state. 

So, are oysters good for sex? Maybe you figured this out last night. The Washington Post dug into the science of the supposed aphrodisiac. Experts said the briny mollusk contained elements that theoretically could enhance a person’s sex drive, but there is no scientific evidence supporting it. Raw oysters are high in zinc–one is about five times the recommended daily amount for men, and seven times the daily amount for women–an element associated with improved testosterone levels and horniness. Oysters also contain an amino acid called D-aspartic acid, which also supports t-levels in animals. The jury’s out on what the chemical does for us.

Vivian McCall is The Stranger's interim Editor-in-Chief. In her private life, she is a musician and Wii U apologist. If you’re reading this, you either love her or hate her.

19 replies on “Slog AM: IDF Raids Gaza Hospital, Renton Minimum Wage Measure Leading, Alaska Airlines Flight Attendants Authorize Strike”

  2. I empathize with the flight attendants, but pilots got large increases because there is a pilot shortage and the market demanded it. The hours requirement to be a commercial pilot increased significantly since 2009, pilots have a mandatory retirement age, many left the industry during COVID, and the cost of training and getting the needed hours is in the hundreds of thousands. Those same realities don’t exist for flight attendants. I think it’s important for them to get a living wage, but they just aren’t going to get the increases that pilots, mechanics, and technical licensed positions got. Thanks to their merger sprees in the last 20 years most airlines are now too big for the government to even allow to go on strike and like railroads, the feds have to authorize and can block airline strikes.

  4. Are there hostage corpses in the hospital? If so, seems like staff might want to wheel them out and turn them over to the IDF – unless there’s some other military force embedded in the hospital preventing that?

    Tra la la another mass shooting, this one gangster-running-street-battle style. No doubt an armed young male “disrespected” another armed young male whose compatriots were also armed. Throw the DJ in the trench with the others. Nothing will change.

  6. “…senior leaders say the system does not pose an immediate threat and would be used to attack human beings.”

    Is that suppose to be “wouldn’t”? Did the Stranger actually make a mistake??

  7. @5, here’s my take on “Jeff Bezos made a killing with the new Florida tax break:”.

    Individuals like Jeff Bezos are always going to game the system to the full extent possible. Whether or not they are horrible people for doing so is beside the point; the billionaires out there are gonna do what the billionaires are gonna do.

    The question we have to ask is, is the new capital gains tax going to end up doing more harm than good by driving out the billionaire class? Would our state have been better off if they had stayed but at the cost of missing out on that tax source?

    I don’t have the answer to this question. Goodness knows, if it’s a race to the bottom, Washington is never going to be able to compete with Florida.

  9. @5 Bezos does this every year like clockwork. He cashes out a big chunk of Amazon shares to continue paying for his dick measuring contest of a hob- I mean to pay Blue Origin’s operating expenses.

    Catalina my dear, I think we all know TS staff will bend over backwards to blame the police for everything. Your dog ran away? Blame the police. Your significant other broke up with you? Cop’s fault.

  10. @8, 9: i took the photo caption (More than 800 law enforcement officers oversaw the parade, but none of them prevented a mass shooting) as a little snark on the well-worn gunner logic of “a good guy with a gun blah blah blah…”.

    there’s no one that realistically thinks cops can stop a mass shooting before it occurs. cops don’t. semi-automatics are too concealable, too fast, and spray too many bullets. what this shooting shows is that they don’t even act as a deterrent anymore – even en masse. at least one of the rude boys who shot up the parade had an MSSA.

  11. Why can’t all the corrupt billionaires, hellbent on owning everyone and everything at the expense of the Earth and all her inhabitants, and batshit crazy gun nutzies just shoot THEMSELVES first, BEFORE taking the lives of innocent people?

    And while we’re at it…………………

    Why isn’t the Orange Turd rotting in the federal pigpen, or, better yet, facing death by electrocution if not a firing squad? The rest of us would be getting cornholed in General Population for having committed one TENTH of its heinous crimes by now. And this toxic, white collar criminal shitwipe is on the 2024 ballot whether any of us who have a fucking clue how to vote WISELY FOR DEMOCRACY AND THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY LIKE IT OR NOT??

  12. @11: Vote Democrat, everybody. Period. The future of our democracy, health, well being, sanity, and preservation of what’s left of our dying planet all depends on it. You don’t want dystopian neofascism. The Divided States would be immediately handed over to Vladimir Putin otherwise!

    An independent vote is just another vote for the Orange Turd.

    Not voting at all and saying, “Meh” is another vote for the Orange Turd.

    Diehard MAGA skeptics of the Biden / Harris Administration pull your heads out and wake the fuck UP!

    The Orange Turd is laughing at you, just as it is at all the insurrectionists doing prison time for doing its January 6, 2021 dirty work.

  14. The grifter formerly known as Dolezal didn’t just choose an African surname to evade pre-employment Google searches — she appears to have deliberately adopted the surname of Amadou Diallo, the Guinean student murdered by NYPD in 1999. Stay classy, Ms. Not-Dolezal.

  15. Kind of unsurprising that that a defender of war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide (per the ICJ) is also a rabid an intelletctually dishonest gun nut.

    After all, the two go hand in hand.

  17. @20,

    That’s Neale Frothinghamme, who’s been revealing himself to be a comically stupid gun-nut on these pages for the better part of a decade. He’s always claiming that knives are just as deadly as guns, and he’s cycled through several dozen profiles, as every one he creates eventually gets banned for posting blatantly false and widely disproven information as factual. Here’s a link to a thread where Morty, a former cop whom Neale has gone on record as stating he likes and respects, calls him a freaking dumbass.

    https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2021/06/29/58626158/slog-am-king-county-ditches-mask-mandate-some-reprieve-from-triple-digit-weather-you-should-give-blood/comments/34

    Here’s Morty’s quoted comment

    “@1 – I read a lot of stupid things on the internet, but this the most stupid thing in quite a while. I cannot count how many shooting deaths I responded to as a Dallas cop, but I can count the stabbing deaths on hand.

    Also how many mass stabbing events with multiple deaths have occurred compared to mass shooting events? Fuck, it’s as if you assume people are as stupid as you!”

    Morty recently stopped posting here unfortunately, though Neale’s dumbassery is eternal.

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