KUOW Blog
News, factoids, and insights from KUOW's newsroom. And maybe some peeks behind the scenes. Check back daily for updates.
Have any leads or feedback for the KUOW Blog? Contact Dyer Oxley at dyer@kuow.org.
Stories
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Bellevue 7th grader wins national Doodle for Google competition
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Bellevue's Rebecca Wu holds her winning illustration for the national Doodle for Google competition, along with her two sisters.
Courtesy of C+CIf you log into Google this week, you'll notice the banner at the top of the page features a drawing of three sisters sipping hot chocolate in a field of flowers. The feel-good illustration is the product of a Bellevue seventh grader who won the national Doodle for Google competition.
Rebecca Wu beat out tens of thousands of submissions with her artwork depicting her sipping hot chocolate with her two sisters. Rebecca's Doodle went live on Google's homepage at 9 p.m. Monday, June 5.
As part of the prize, she's receiving a $30,000 college scholarship, and $50,000 worth of technology for the International School of Bellevue, which she attends.
In a statement that accompanied the entry, Rebecca said she made the drawing to honor her connection to her sisters.
“Sometimes I love them, and sometimes I dislike them very much, but I can't imagine my life without my sisters," she said. "I have learned to be a little bit more patient with them, and they have had an enormous impact on me. We help to inspire each other and to help each other grow like the vines and flowers in my picture. I am never lonely with them, and they can cheer me up. I am grateful for them and all that they have done for me. In this drawing, we are having a fun time drinking hot chocolate, which is one of my fondest memories. The rainbow in the background symbolizes one of the first things I helped one of my sisters draw…My drawing is composed of all our happiest memories to show just how grateful I am for them.”
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Washington state GOP chair Caleb Heimlich is stepping down
KUOW Blog
Caleb Heimlich, chairman of the Washington State Republican Party, views early primary returns from the state's 3rd Congressional District race, Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2022, at a party event on Election Day in Issaquah, Wash., east of Seattle. In the race, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Wash., is facing eight challengers, four of whom are Republicans.Ted S. Warren / Associated PressThe head of the Washington State Republican Party is stepping down. Caleb Heimlich announced this week that he is leaving the role after five years, and a total of 12 years working for the state party.
He plans to officially step down on Aug. 12, when the GOP committee will meet to elect a new chair.
“Serving as the Chairman of the WSRP has been one of the highest honors of my life," Heimlich said in a statement. "Traveling this great state, meeting thousands of committed people, working tirelessly with them to help elect great candidates, each moment has been both challenging and rewarding. However, for the purpose of being more present in my family’s life, it’s time for a change.”
Read Heimlich's full statement below.
The change Heimlich refers to will include working for an unnamed national grassroots organization, according to The Seattle Times. He said the new job will provide a better quality of life for his family — he lives in Pierce County with his wife Mackenzie and three kids. Heimlich also told the Center Square that poor, sluggish traffic between his Puyallup home and the state GOP's office in Bellevue contributed to the decision.
At 37, Heimlich has been one of the youngest state party chairs in the United States. Washington's GOP notes that he has also been the longest-serving state party chair since Jennifer Dunn in the 1980s. Heimlich took over as state chair in 2018, after former TV broadcaster Susan Hutchison left the job. Before that, Heimlich became its political director in 2011, and its executive director in 2013.
It's been a difficult slog for Washington's Republican Party for at least the last three election cycles. Washington's GOP is in the minority in both the state House and the state Senate. In 2022, Republicans lost their hold on the 3rd Congressional District in southwest Washington. Republicans also do not hold any statewide offices.
In a statement about his exit, Heimlich said:
Serving as the Chairman of the WSRP has been one of the highest honors of my life. Traveling this great state, meeting thousands of committed people, working tirelessly with them to help elect great candidates, each moment has been both challenging and rewarding. However, for the purpose of being more present in my family’s life, it’s time for a change.
While I will be working for a different organization and engaged in a different capacity, I will continue to advocate for common-sense solutions, constitutionally limited government, and more freedom. I am committed to restoring balance to Washington state government and believe our citizens would be better served by more representation of diverse views than we currently see from the majority party in Olympia.
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Microsoft will pay $20M to settle U.S. charges of illegally collecting children’s data
KUOW Blog
Xbox controllers line a table at PAX in Seattle.Juan Pablo Chiquiza / KUOWSAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Microsoft will pay a fine of $20 million to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it illegally collected and retained the data of children who signed up to use its Xbox video game console.
The agency charged that Microsoft gathered the data without notifying parents or obtaining their consent, and that it also illegally held onto the data. Those actions violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, the FTC stated.
In a blog post, Microsoft corporate vice president for Xbox Dave McCarthy outlined additional steps the company is now taking to improve its age verification systems and to ensure that parents are involved in the creation of child accounts for the service. These mostly concern efforts to improve age verification technology and to educate children and parents about privacy issues.
McCarthy also said the company had identified and fixed a technical glitch that failed to delete child accounts in cases where the account creation process never finished. Microsoft policy was to hold that data no longer than 14 days in order to allow players to pick up account creation where they left off if they were interrupted.
The settlement must be approved by a federal court before it can go into effect, the FTC said.
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Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison says she's not leading a new 'war on drugs'
KUOW Newsroom
Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison speaks at a press event April 27, 2023, at City Hall.David Hyde / KUOWSeattle’s addiction crisis takes center stage at City Hall on Tuesday, as council members debate how to enforce a new state-level law that includes harsher penalties for public drug use and possession.
City Attorney Ann Davison wants her office to prosecute people arrested for drugs in Seattle under this law.
"For the past two years, it's been de-facto decriminalization here," she told KUOW's Morning Edition host Angela King. "So, what we're doing is acknowledging that that is not the way to go forward."
The City Council is considering an ordinance to align Seattle's municipal code with a new state law, which makes possessing small amounts of substances like fentanyl and methamphetamine a gross misdemeanor.
This law is the latest step in Washington's effort to regulate simple drug possession. Two years ago, the state Supreme Court struck down felony drug possession, and the state Legislature passed a stopgap measure making simple possession a misdemeanor. That temporary law, which expires this summer, was never aggressively enforced.
The state's new law, which carriers more jail time and larger fees than the stopgap measure, also encourages authorities to send more people into programs, like drug treatment or other diversion measures that are designed to keep people out of the criminal justice system.
But Davison's critics say Seattle does not yet have capacity to divert people into those services.
Davison's request — for the city to conform with the new state law and to give her office the authority to prosecute drug crimes — has been compared to the nation's so-called "war on drugs" policy. That policy prioritized jailing drug users, often people of color, and failing to solve underlying issues that lead to drug addiction.
Councilmember Tammy Morales says the new law will have "deadly consequences" for people struggling with addiction and that it will send a disproportionate number of Black, brown and unhouse people into the criminal justice system.
Councilmember Kshama Sawant also criticized the new law, saying, in part, that "half a century of the failed 'war on drugs' has proven one thing; criminalization of addiction will absolutely not address the nation's raging opioid crisis."
The Seattle Times published an op-ed this week that asked, "If we can agree the war on drugs was a destructive failure, why would we think a redux would yield a better result?"
Davison rejects these comparisons.
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How Seattle plans to ditch disposable coffee cups: Today So Far
KUOW Blog
- Would you take a free travel mug from your local coffee shop ... if you promised to return it?
- KUOW has a new podcast to help catch you up on the day's news.
- Our region is experiencing the lowest tides of the year right now.
This post originally appeared in KUOW's Today So Far newsletter for June 5, 2023.
Would you take a free travel mug from your local coffee shop ... if you promised to return it?
Keep in mind, the mug is stainless steel, so it will keep your drink hot longer. Also, you wouldn't be using a paper to-go cup, which, as I see it, has two benefits: less trash, and you won't have that issue where coffee slowly drips on you from that plastic lid ... no matter how tight it is. This is the main idea behind an emerging effort in Seattle to nix disposable coffee cups, and replace them with reusable travel mugs.
This is how it works. Participants put their card on file. At a coffee shop, they take their coffee order in a genuine, fully functional, stainless steel travel mug (that hopefully doesn't drip from the lid). They return the mug to any participating coffee shop, pick up another mug with a new order, and repeat. If they don't return the mug within two weeks, they get charged $15 and essentially have purchased it (though they can still get a refund if they return it within 45 days). The main idea is to just keep exchanging the mugs for free. The effort is the product of Seattle Public Utilities.
Seattle already has similar programs in place. When Nina and I saw Sunny Day Real Estate at The Moore back in March, her beer came in a hard plastic cup with a lid. Folks then returned the cups to a cart. The coffee mug proposal takes this notion to a whole new level, where customers take the mugs to work, home, the bus, the bathroom, wrestling matches, the ferry, fishing, barroom brawls, bingo, gardening, to dinner with parents while they criticize your life choices, and all the other usual places you find yourself.
KUOW's Amy Radil caught up with customers giving this system a try at Tailwind Café on Capitol Hill. Read that story here.
I have some close-to-home news for you. KUOW has a new podcast to help catch you up on the day's news. If you haven't yet, look up "KUOW Newsroom" in your podcast app. That's where KUOW has historically been dumping its news briefs for a while now. I probably shouldn't say this, and some folks are going to get irate with me, but this hasn't been the best presentation of the good work that folks at KUOW have been doing. That's why, starting today, KUOW's newsroom podcast feed will look a lot different.
A daily recap of the news, including all the reporting from throughout the day, will be posted around 5 p.m., all in one episode. Now that's what I call a podcast. This is totally a nerdy, podcaster perspective, but I'm personally pretty stoked about this development and folks in our newsroom deserve a nice pat on the back for this. Here's the thing: You're still going to get all of KUOW's reporting on the radio, but that signal only goes so far. KUOW.org reaches people around the globe. I get feedback from folks across the USA for simple blog posts (yes, KUOW has a blog and it's pretty awesome). TSF readers know that we have our own little newsletter community here. I've heard from readers spanning Seattle to Trinidad and Tobago, all reading for different reasons. A daily podcast rounding up KUOW's news is another great way for folks far and wide to hear us.
I know, I know. I'm the journalist who likes to talk about science, the future, Star Trek, etc. So when KUOW takes a step toward the future (aka podcasts), I get excited. It's one of a few steps the station has been taking recently. So go find "KUOW Newsroom" in your podcast app, and take this step with us.
If you have a chance today and tomorrow, go down to the shoreline. Our region is experiencing the lowest tides of the year right now.
“These low tides are a great opportunity to go out and see environments, habitats, places that are typically covered with water, that we don't typically get to visit unless we are willing to snorkel or scuba dive,” Washington Sea Grant oceanographer Ian Miller recently told KUOW's John Ryan.
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If property values go down in King County, will taxes follow? Not necessarily
KUOW Blog
Homes in Queen Anne are shown from the Space Needle on Monday, Nov. 6, 2017, in Seattle.KUOW Photo/Megan FarmerIn some parts of King County, property values are dropping. But that doesn't mean property taxes will fall.
The King County real estate market has cooled off.
Countywide, property owners may see a reduction in values anywhere from about 8% on Queen Anne to more than 20% in some areas, like the Sammamish Plateau. Those are areas that were red hot just a year ago.
King County Assessor John Wilson said "after record increases last year, what we're seeing is a natural course correction of the real estate market."
In an interview with KUOW, Wilson said roughly 40% of property taxes go toward voter-approved measures.
Assessors set the values, but not the taxes.
When it comes to setting property values, the process is quite complicated.
"Well, we have a whole series of things that are best practices in the industry," Wilson said.
King County is broken down into 85 separate "residential inspection" areas.
"We don't compare Medina or Bellevue to, you know, Skykomish," Wilson said. "It's within each neighborhood context."
Wilson said county assessors do extensive modeling and cross-linking to those models.
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A Tacoma woman is in custody after refusing tuberculosis treatment for more than a year
KUOW Blog
X-rays of a patient with tuberculosis, taken in November 2002 in New Jersey, show damage to the lungs.Getty ImagesA Washington state woman who was diagnosed with tuberculosis has been taken into custody after months of refusing treatment or isolation, officials said on Thursday.
The Tacoma woman, who is identified in court documents as V.N., was booked into a room "specially equipped for isolation, testing and treatment" at the Pierce County Jail, the local health department said, adding that she will still be able to choose whether she gets the "live-saving treatment she needs."
A judge first issued a civil arrest warrant for V.N. in March, 14 months after he'd first approved of the health department's request to order the woman's voluntary detention.
Tuberculosis (commonly referred to as TB) is a bacterial infection that can spread easily through the air. Without treatment, it can be fatal, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Washington state law requires that health care providers report cases of active tuberculosis to the local health department for monitoring.
In Pierce County, the health department says it only sees about 20 active cases of the disease per year, and it works with patients, their families and communities to ensure that infections are treated.
V.N.'s case represents only the third time in the past two decades that a court order has been necessary to execute treatment, the health department said.
Over the course of 17 hearings, health officials repeatedly asked the court to uphold its order for V.N.'s involuntarily detention, which consistently ruled that the health officials had made "reasonable efforts" to gain V.N.'s voluntary compliance with the law.
Officers began surveilling the woman in March, and at one point observed her "leave her residence, get onto a city bus and arrive at a local casino," according to a sworn statement from the county's chief of corrections.
"Respondent's family members were also unresponsive [to] the officer's attempts to contact. It is believed that the Respondent is actively avoiding execution of the warrant," the chief said.
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Year's lowest tides coming to Puget Sound
KUOW Blog
A moonglow sea anemone in a tidepool in Shoreline, Washington, in May 2021KUOW Photo/John RyanThe lowest tides of the year are coming to Puget Sound starting this weekend.
Sea level in Seattle on Monday and Tuesday is expected to bottom out nearly four feet below the typical low tide.
Slightly lower tides are forecast for July 3-5.
The temporarily retreating shoreline will expose acres of seldom-seen tidelands.
“These low tides are a great opportunity to go out and see environments, habitats, places that are typically covered with water, that we don't typically get to visit unless we are willing to snorkel or scuba dive,” said Washington Sea Grant oceanographer Ian Miller.
Beach naturalists—tidepool experts—will be on hand at many beaches in King County Sunday through Thursday to help visitors appreciate the squishy, salty creatures all around and avoid harming them.
On Monday, members of the Swinomish Tribe plan to take advantage of the extra-low water to resume construction of the United States’ first modern clam garden on the tribe’s reservation near Anacortes.
“There's only certain tides, certain days of the year, that we can actually go out and see it,” said Swinomish Tribal Senator Alana Quintasket.
On a low tide in August, Swinomish tribal members and other fans of traditional Indigenous aquaculture gathered on Kiket Island on the Swinomish Reservation. They hand-placed 33 tons of rocks into a knee-high wall designed to trap sediment and boost production of butter clams and littleneck clams.
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Seattle's Holy Grail: reducing single-use cups
KUOW Newsroom
Tailwind Cafe is one of the participants in a new network offering reusable travel mugs. McKenna Morrigan, right, is with Seattle Public Utilities, which is helping implement the system to reduce use of disposable cups.KUOW/Amy RadilSeattle Public Utilities is partnering with local businesses to encourage reusable beverage containers. The goal is to keep those cups in use, and out of the landfill.
While some to-go cups are recyclable or compostable, city officials say washing and reusing a cup is the best environmental option. The city already launched partnerships for reusable cups at concert venues like the Showbox and Zoo Tunes, and at beer gardens like at the recent Northwest Folklife Festival.
Now they’re venturing into local coffee shops, which has different challenges, because people at a concert venue or beer garden tend to drink their beverage on-site so it's easy to drop the empty cup in a dedicated bin. Coffee shop patrons want to take their drink with them wherever they’re going.
Jack Gralla is the product operations manager for the company reusables.com, which is just entering the Seattle market after creating a network of reusable and returnable cups and food containers in Vancouver, B.C.
Customers at a handful of cafes in Seattle can tap their credit card at the register to get one of the company’s stainless steel travel cups for free.
Gralla said they’ve found that offering the cups for free makes customers more willing to try the system, compared to older setups like glass Coke bottles that required a deposit.
“When they hear ‘free,’ they’re like, ‘Yeah, sure, I’ll give that a shot.’ So that’s a big reason,” he said.
The cup is free as long as customers return it to the special bin in any participating business within 14 days. After that, customers are charged a $15 replacement fee for the travel mug, but that fee is refunded if they bring the cup back within 45 days.
At Tailwind Café on Capitol Hill, Noreen Shahani took her drink in one of the steel mugs, which she’ll return when she’s finished with her errands nearby. She said an added benefit is the mug keeps her coffee hotter than a paper cup.
“It wasn’t too out of my way today, and I do like really hot coffee," she said.
McKenna Morrigan, strategic advisor for waste prevention with Seattle Public Utilities, said her agency and the city’s Office of Economic Development want to help businesses make the transition to reusables.
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Washington state crowns its first Civics Bee champion
KUOW Blog
The 2023 Washington Civics Bee finals were held at the Museum of Flight on Thursday, June 1, 2023. The winners were: first place, Benjamin Wu; second place, Devin Spector Van Zee; and third-place, Ye Joon Ameling.Photo courtesy of Brian Mittge/AWBWashington state has its first ever Civics Bee champion.
Twelve-year-old Benjamin Wu from Narrows View Intermediate near Tacoma took the title at the state finals.
The state's first Civics Bee started months ago with a call for middle school students to submit essays identifying a problem in their community, and how it might be solved.
It culminated Thursday in Seattle with nine finalists who went through two rounds of quizzes.
The quizzes are somewhat like a spelling bee, but instead of spelling words the students were answering questions about the finer points of government rules, structure, and history.
The top scorers went on to answer questions from judges about their essay.
Wu, who took first place, spoke passionately about the issue of unequal access to computer science education, a problem he said is creating a new digital divide as technology revolutionizes our world.
Some of his peers spoke about issues such as homelessness and littering.
"It feels exhilarating,” Wu said after being named champion. “And also my ideas are being heard now.”
When asked why civics education is important, Wu said it teaches a sense of civic duty.
"It teaches us that we have the responsibility to solve these problems, we have the civic duty to solve these problems, and we need to be industrious, and we need to take action," he said.
Wu and his peers at the state Civics Bee are well-versed in a set of topics that many of their fellow students around the country struggle with.
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Did You Know? The Northwest's pinball culture is flipping hot
KUOW Blog
In honor of the Northwest Pinball and Arcade Show coming up in Tacoma, here's a little pinball history from Seattle and beyond.
The following pinball factoids have been combined from KUOW's Today So Far newsletters from May 31, June 1, and June 2, 2023.
On a recent trip to Los Angeles, something struck me as odd. "Where are all the pinball machines?!" I asked. They were harder to find than I'm used to as a Northwesterner.
Stepping away from our region, it becomes quite clear how lucky we are. The Northwest is a pinball-loving region. It's part of our culture, like hiking, micro brews, and tech. It can be easy to take for granted that wherever you are in Western Washington, you're usually not too far from a pinball game.
In Los Angeles, there are 212 pinball machines. That might sound like a lot, but for a big city like LA (3.8 million people), it's not much. In our smaller city of Seattle (734,000 people), there are 630 pinball machines. That's not counting neighboring towns, like Tacoma (127), or Kitsap County (about 80, if you don't count retired basketball star Todd MacCulloch's garage ... he has enough to host a world pinball championship tournament). Between Olympia and Bellingham, Western Washington has 1,470 machines. Over in the Portland metro area (including Vancouver, Wash., Hillsboro, etc.), there are 921 pinball games.
This is all according to the Pinball Map, the go-to source for finding pinball.
So yes, our region boasts more pinball machines than LA. We also have far more than New York City (242), or Las Vegas, which has 459 (341 of which are located at the Pinball Hall of Fame). And Chicago — the city where most of these games are created and manufactured — only has 290. Indeed, the love of pinball is deep in the Northwest.
Full disclosure: Proposing to my wife involved a trip to a downtown Seattle pinball bar.
Where did pinball come from?
The origins of pinball could be credited to the French who came up with a game called "bagatelle" in the 1600s/1700s (which itself was an evolution of billiards tables and croquette, etc.). This tabletop game involved hitting a ball onto a table with a stick. The table had pins spread throughout as obstacles. The goal was to get a ball past any obstacles and into a hole.
The French brought bagatelle to North America, where it became quite popular in the 1700s/1800s (there's an old cartoon of Abraham Lincoln playing the game). It then went through some evolutions, such as making it smaller and portable, and building a spring-loaded plunger to launch the ball. The ball would be shot up onto the table, hit pin after pin, and hopefully land in a hole. The element of chance was a big part of this version of bagatelle, which placed it in the realm of gambling.
In the 1920s, bagatelle showed up in Japan, where it transformed into another popular game called "pachinko." In the USA, it wasn't until the 1930s that these games started to resemble the pinball machines we know today.
Coin-operated machines were introduced. Electricity propelled its evolution at lightning speed, with bumpers, lights, and bells. The main thing that distinguishes modern pinball didn't come around until 1947 — the flippers. Different games started using flippers at various locations on the board. In the 1950s, they were placed toward the bottom where they have stayed ever since, as the machines continued to advance with electronics and computers.
The flippers removed much of the chance aspect of the game, without removing too much unexpected chaos (which is part of the fun). Whereas bagatelle boards would shoot a ball up, only for it to fall within seconds, modern players can now keep a ball in play for extended periods of time, while going on missions, completing tasks, and more. But due to pinball's roots in games of chance, the game was heavily associated with gambling, which put it in the crosshairs of anti-gambling politicians throughout the 1900s. Pinball was actually illegal in major parts of the USA for many decades. There were even many attempts to ban it in Seattle.
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Let's get weird: Today So Far
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KUOW's Dyer Oxley likes strolling with a pineapple whenever the opportunity strikes.
Courtesy of Taylor Crockett- TSF readers weigh in on the word "weird" and whether or not Seattle and the Northwest have retained their signature weirdness.
- Also, Seattle's schools have become less diverse in recent years.
This post originally appeared in KUOW's Today So Far newsletter for June 2, 2023.
Seattle's schools are getting less diverse and some of the blame is being placed on the absence of Seattle Public Schools' busing program. But there is some nuance to the history of bussing in the city.
Seattle's bussing program started in the 1980s. It moved students from different areas of the city to schools they wouldn't normally attend because of their address. The idea was to counter the city's segregated history, make its schools more diverse, and expose students to cultures, classes, and experiences they wouldn't otherwise have. Up to 15,000 students were mandatorily bussed each year. A 2007 lawsuit ultimately concluded that the bussing program was unconstitutional. Looking back, results of bussing in Seattle are considered mixed. As Seattle Times reporter Dahlia Bazzaz told KUOW's Soundside, the burden of bussing was more severe for students of color; white students in the district dropped by about 28% when the program first started. The Times also reports that it's difficult to measure any educational benefits.
Participants were also divided on the issue. As KUOW has previously reported, one student changed her race on school records from Black to white in order to stay at Garfield High School.
“I actually graduated Garfield as a white female because that was the only way I could get back in, is to change my race,” Teya Williams told KUOW in 2013.
Others, such as Anthony Ray, aka Sir Mix-A-Lot, felt differently. He lived in the Central District, but attended Eckstein Middle School and Roosevelt High School in Northeast Seattle. That is where he initially discovered his love of music. Over the years, he has commented on his education in Seattle.
"Being exposed to other cultures and other ways of doing things was the best thing that could have happened to me, especially eventually becoming an artist," Ray told Seattle Refined.
“I’ve heard things like, ‘Forced integration is not good,’ ‘I want my kid to be able to go to school in our community; that’s why we moved here’ – all those things I totally understand,” Ray previously told KUOW. “But from my perspective, I didn’t have the luxury of living in a neighborhood where a good school was. We didn’t make that kind of money. My mom worked as an LPN at the King County Jail making 6 or 7 bucks an hour. So from my perspective, it was the best thing that could have happened to me.”
Fast forward to today, and Seattle's schools are different. The numbers indicate that the schools are becoming less diverse. For example, northwest Seattle's West Woodland Elementary School was 50% students of color in the 1990s. Today, it's 27%. Bailey Gatzert Elementary along Yesler Way and 12th Avenue South was 65% students of color in 1990. Today, it's 88%. KUOW's Soundside dove into this reporting here.
Now, let's get weird!
Earlier this week, I asked you if Seattle was still weird? Also, is the Northwest weird? And, are we using the word "weird" too much? This was a follow-up question to Bill Radke's "Words in Review" segment on the word. In short, Radke feels "weird" is overused, not descriptive enough, and he avoids it. He even said it should be banished. His guest, author Erik Davis, felt otherwise. TSF readers wrote in with a few thoughts of their own.
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