It’s Really Almost Over: We’ve got one more day of this heatwave, and then tomorrow we’re back to our perfect, mid-70s Seattle summer. In the meantime, make like a vampire: close the blinds, pull the curtains, find the nearest working AC, and wait for the sun to go down.
And while you’re sitting there, let’s do the news.
The FBI Is Still Looking for Travis Decker: Almost three months into this manhunt, 100 federal agents are bushwhacking through Eastern Washington to try to find one former Army ranger. They started an intensive two-day search on Monday for Travis Decker, the sole suspect in the June 2 suffocations of his three young daughters near a Leavenworth campground. Agents emphasized they still have no idea where he is, or if he’s even still alive. “You can’t be too thorough in a search like this,” the FBI’s Peter Orth said. “It is such incredibly dense vegetation that anybody who walks down one of these trails could walk 10 meters off the trail and no one would ever know they’re there.” US Marshals are offering a $20,000 reward for information that leads to his capture.
Trump Is Obsessed with Us: Trump is threatening to withhold more than $10 million in federal funding to Washington State if we don’t comply with his racist demand that truck drivers pass an English proficiency test that he himself probably can’t pass. The thing is, though, according to the fed’s investigation, we actually are enforcing his obviously racist policy: of the 6,000 safety violations Washington State’s Department of Transportation found since the new language rules were instated in June, four drivers have been taken off the road for their lack of English proficiency. He’s just throwing a fit because we haven’t screwed enough people over with his racist rule.
UberEats Eats Crow: Remember when City Council tried to undermine laws that protect delivery drivers? Well this morning, thousands of them are probably grateful that they couldn’t stick the landing. The food delivery app has agreed to pay more than $15 million to 16,120 Seattle drivers over (alleged) violations of the city’s pay transparency law. It’s less than $1,000 per driver, but it’s the largest ever reached by Seattle’s Office of Labor Standards.
Introducing the SS Good Boy: Seattle has way more dogs than it has kids, and Washington State Ferries finally got the message. Starting today, passengers can bring their leashed dogs into any of the passenger areas of the ferry (except the galley, they don’t serve kibbles, or bits). Because all dogs deserve to munch on a warm pretzel while taking in the views of the Sound without being blown in by the sea breeze. Just remember that it’s still your responsibility to clean up after them and do keep reactive dogs in their own little corner. This is just a pilot program through February, but if all our pups are Good Boys, they might get to be permanent indoor passengers.
Some Housekeeping News! The Stranger has a new sibling: the famous Chicago Reader. Our parent company, Noisy Creek, has acquired the Reader, the country’s oldest and longest-running alt weekly, and we’re so excited to welcome them into the family. If you’re not familiar with the Reader‘s work, you’re missing out: here’s their recent feature about trans guys getting acquainted with their new dicks, their investigation into a lab that misled courts on cannabis DUI cases, or if you want to go back in time, their award-winning 1992 feature, “A Simple Game,” which is some of the best writing you’ll ever find about high school basketball. And you can read more about this news here!
Israel Strikes Hospital Twice, Calls It a “Tragic Mishap”: At least 20 people were killed, including five journalists, members of the medical staff, rescue workers and patients. Dozens more were injured. Netanyahu’s office tried to frame the attack—two strikes on a hospital—as a mistake. “Israel deeply regrets the tragic mishap that occurred today at the Nasser Hospital,” the office said in a statement. It went on to lie that “Israel values the work of journalists, medical staff and all civilians.” At least 192 journalists have been killed in Gaza. Over 1,000 healthcare workers have been killed. And by Israel’s own estimate, more than 80 percent of everyone killed in their ongoing siege of Gaza have been civilians.
Microsoft Struggles to Understand How Consequences Work: The Redmond-based company, and the world’s largest software maker, has provided Israel with technology to surveil Palestinians throughout the genocide in Gaza, and now they’re really bummed that they keep dealing with pro-Palestinian protests at their conferences and on their campuses. It hurt their feelings enough that they asked for the FBI’s help tracking the protests. (Microsoft has announced that their investigating how Israel is using their tech.) They’ve also worked with local authorities to try and prevent them, fired employees staging disruptive events, flagged internal emails containing keywords like “Gaza” and deleted some internal posts about the protests, according to Bloomberg’s reporting. I know an easier way to get these protests to stop.
Utah Republicans Try to Steal Some Congressional Seats, Fails (for Now): A district court judge (respectfully) told the Utah legislature where to put their gerrymandered congressional map on Monday. The current map, which the Republican-run legislature adopted in 2021, divides Salt Lake County—Utah’s Democratic stronghold—between the state’s four congressional districts, all of which have since elected Republicans by wide margins. Who could have expected such an outcome? The judge ordered the state legislature to redraw the maps by November, because they had circumvented the independent commission that’s meant to keep the state legislature from doing, well, exactly this. With a slim margin in the US House, Republicans’ only chance of holding onto all of Utah’s seats is to appeal this decision to death, in the hopes of delaying it until the 2028 elections.
Meet the Pygmy Seahorse: They’re an inch long. They have a stubby nose like a pug. They’ve evolved to look like the poisonous coral they live in, either pink or yellow. The males carry the fertilized eggs until they mature. “All seahorses do that,” you say? Sure, but these guys one upped them: They tuck them into their lil quasi-uteruses, and give birth to them out of a little slit. Chinese and German scientists wanted to understand how these little guys evolved, so they sequenced their genome, and found out that they diverged from average-sized seahorses 18 million years ago, when our continents were still drifting toward their current positions and Africa and Eurasia were starting to crash together. “But most striking was how much DNA had gone missing from the pygmy sea horse’s genome,” the New York Times wrote. “Pygmy sea horses had lost 438 entire genes that are found in other sea horses. Another 635 genes have lost enough DNA that they no longer work, and 5,135 genes have lost nearby genetic switches, so that they no longer turn on in response to certain signals.”
Pygmy Seahorse 🩷
super macro photography
📷: Álvaro Herrero
— america.is.not.free (@antifapatriot.bsky.social) August 23, 2025 at 1:01 PM
Bumbershoot is almost upon us, and we’re giving you previews of the artists we’re stoked about throughout the week (don’t sleep on Stranger Arts Editor Emily Nokes’s interview with Fleetwood Snack). But consider this your essential reminder that Janelle Monae will be performing this weekend. I’m going to assume Dirty Computer is still recent enough in your memory (if it’s not, allow me to direct you to “Django Jane” and” Make Me Feel,” you heathen), so for your song this morning, let’s go back to 2010, for “Tightrope.” I saw Monae live the year this came out (back when she was opening for Of Montreal), and it was easily one of the best shows I’ve ever been to. Don’t miss it.
50: To pair with a thought experiment for progressives – which do you hate most: restrictions on transitioning kids, restrictions on trans women playing in women’s sports, restrictions on abortion, the second amendment, or white people?
“As seen at Easy Street Records & Cafe”
Wow, now even Easy Street, long my favorite record store in all of Seattle, has fallen behind the times. Federal agents no longer need be present to arrest suspected illegal immigrants:
“The Florida Highway Patrol has taken up the Trump administration’s call for state and local law enforcement to play a bigger role in the crackdown. It is the first state agency in the country to have had virtually all its officers trained to participate in a controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement program that deputizes police to perform some of the duties of federal immigration officers.”
(https://www.wsj.com/us-news/florida-traffic-stops-immigration-deportations-5c5cabc2?mod=Searchresults&pos=1&page=1)
@2 I don’t know if I would call 3 attempts and losses to become French president and electoral success.
And bragging about any government in Italy as a success is a joke if you know anything about the history of the Italian Parliament.
Maybe next time use examples that make more sense, like Orban (whose popularity is waning), Bolsonaro (who’s likely going to jail lol) or Putin (who has been in power for 25 years aka a dictator)
1) The idea that one needs to be proficient in English to drive a truck is just stupid. There’s a big segment of Americans who are not proficient in English, and yet commerce goes on.
2) I’m sure that Our Dear Purity Voters (at least one of whom insists that the “conservative” Seattle City Council has imposed “austerity” on the citizens of Our Fair City) are channeling Condoleezza Rice, and asserting that no one could have predicted that the trump administration would be working with Israel’s government to clear all the real estate in Gaza.
3) The spectre of transwomen overtaking women’s sports is just as delusional as Our Dear Purity Voters in point number two, and the people wringing their hands about non-proficient English speakers driving trucks in point one.
4) Abort early and abort often. When in doubt, cut it out.
@54: Obviously Mama Vel-DuRay didn’t have such guidance.
@50 lol, no I was merely pointing out how inane your suggestion was by saying something even loonier. Trying to distract from the main point by saying something completely tangential is usually a sign you’ve lost the debate. Thanks for playing.
@49 all good but it is a safety issue regardless of the administrations motives behind the enforcement. It should be enforced.
@54 with all due respect there is more to driving a commercial truck than just driving.
@56 “I was merely pointing out how inane your suggestion was by saying something even loonier”
Samesies
“…now they’re really bummed that they keep dealing with pro-Palestinian protests at their conferences and on their campuses.”
When persons go tell Microsoft that it is complicit in “genocide,” well then, the Stranger praises those persons, applauds their words, and says Microsoft should just suck it up and admit it.
When persons go tell LGBTQIA+ residents on Capitol Hill that Jesus is the answer, the Stranger ragingly demands those persons’ First Amendment rights be either severely curtailed, or destroyed completely.
Will employees of the Chicago Reader receive proper training on who deserves basic human rights and who doesn’t? Because working at our country’s longest-standing alt-weekly, they might have unwittingly made some pretty untoward assumptions about Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and the First Amendment.
@58
I wonder what the Chicago Reader’s opinion on National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie is and whether it will change under the new ownership.
Calm yourself, district13 dear. That’s why we have CDL licenses. There are three different types, depending on what sort of load one aspires to be hauling, and one is required to take training and pass an examination and take examinations in both knowledge and skills to secure that license. Among other things, that is how we know that a driver is sufficiently proficient in English to operate that truck. Here in Washington, you can take the knowledge test in Spanish, but you must take the skills test in English.
Coolidge dollar dear, I am a very old person. When Mother Vel-DuRay found out she was expecting, Abortion was not legally available in my native state of Iowa. She was forty at the time, and one of her sisters, who alternated between hardcore Catholic and Evangelical, did suggest that she should get an abortion, given her age. Fortunately(?) she demurred, so you have me. When they told my uncle he exclaimed “I’ve been praying for this”, and mother replied “Why don’t you mind your own business?”
60: So let’s make that edit!
Abort early and abort often. When in doubt, cut it out. When in demure though, keep it.
That’s much too complicated dear. I stand by the original line.
Actually our nation and most of the world except Africa have a low fertility rate. Overpopulation is no longer a problem, underpopulation is.
a Population of
the insidiously Stupid/
Willfully Ignorant is our
Main Problem which’s holding back
Humanity & ensuring our Billionaires re-
Main comfortably seated at The Head of the Table
they fucking OWN
(nearly?) ALL of our major
Propaganda Outlets, keeping
their malignant narrative the Sole* one
and This is the Why of
why we Cannot
have Nice
things.
oh, and yet Another
Mass Shooting
today!
speaking of Symptoms
Causes and Cures.
*Soulless,
by Gawd.
Coolidge_dollar dear, have you been listening to Elon again? Just because he’s rich, that doesn’t mean he’s smart. One would think you people would have figured that out by now.
@60: OK, but how did someone who couldn’t pass the test — and who drove so poorly as to kill three persons — get a CDL from WA?
Perhaps a better question, tensorna dear, is who employed this driver, given his history?
However, as to how he obtained the license, I’m sure this will be investigated a cause will be determined, and then action will be taken. There’s no need for xenophobic hysteria. There are many American truck drivers, airline pilots, bus drivers, and train engineers/conductors who did heinous things that caused loss of life.
@67: One purpose of public licensing is to prevent unethical employers from hiring unqualified employees, dear. Hence my question — which you airily waved away as if it was “xenophobic hysteria” about a theoretical event which may or may not ever happen, not a real event which very much did happen, and in which several innocent persons died horribly and needlessly. Ignoring the needless deaths of innocent persons because unqualified illegal immigrants were allowed to run around with deadly effect merely emboldens Trump, and justifies his supporters’ xenophobic hysteria.
“There are many American truck drivers…”
‘Everybody else is doing it too!’ didn’t save you from getting grounded then, dear, and it won’t help address this issue now, either. (Just so you know, as you seem terribly confused on this point. You’re welcome.)
Oh tensorna dear. I can see you’re distraught. It’s just that You People always want to “make an example” of offenders rather than investigate and improve existing processes.
Whenever humans are involved, there’s going to be mistakes and – yes – corruption. You’re making this about “legal status” and “language proficiency” when the questions are 1) How did he get the license in the first place, and 2) Who hired him, given his record? (Florida is full of horrible and shady people, so that’s a particularly interesting question to me).
There are none so blind as those who will not see, dear.
@31: “They should really invent pictograph road signs”
How European of you. That kind of thinking just won’t cut it in ‘Murrica.
@69: “…rather than investigate and improve existing processes.”
Actually, part of my engineering career has been spent on improving “existing processes,” so you really should stop believing that nice man at the carnival who long ago told you of your clairvoyant powers.
Another concept we engineers use (a lot!) is “backup systems.” When one system (or process) fails, another catches the problem. Here, both federal and state processes failed, and innocent persons died as a result. So plenty of room for process improvements there.
“There are none so blind as those who will not see, dear.”
This from someone who repeatedly argues around a problem in a way which helps Trump. Priceless!
That’s Robert Duvall in the cavalry hat playing Kilgore, not Martin Sheen. Sheen portrayed Willard.