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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

  • Following Dobbs decision, abortion rates rise in Washington and Oregon

    The number of abortions per month in Washington increased by 5% after the Supreme Court's June decision that overturned Roe v Wade.

    Oregon saw a much larger increase — 18%.

    The data comes from a national effort, called #Wecount, that has been tracking changes in access to abortion since the Dobbs decision.

    In Idaho, where a near total ban is in effect, the number of abortions fell by about half — 48%.

    Nationwide, the number of legal abortions dropped by 6% following the high court's decision.

    Research has shown that women who seek an abortion and can’t get one are more likely to live in poverty and more likely to continue to be exposed to domestic violence than women who do obtain abortions.

    Read the full story at Oregon Public Broadcasting.

    Continue reading »
  • Some progress made on Washington's backlog of sexual assault kits

    A new report shows that Washington state is making some progress clearing its backlog of sexual assault kits.

    Data from 2019 revealed the Washington State Patrol had approximately 9,000 untested kits in its possession at the time. The the State Auditor's Office says the number is down to 6,000, according to an audit from January 2022.

    The auditor's office notes the pandemic slowed down efforts to get more sexual assault kits tested. The latest report states that 74% of kits received since 2015 have been tested by the state patrol.

    State Auditor Pat McCarthy has committed to another audit of the testing process in the future to determine whether the backlog has been eliminated, and if improvements can be made.

    “The Washington State Patrol has taken the right steps, but eliminating the backlog of untested sexual assault kits will take more time and it is still absolutely necessary,” McCarthy said in a statement. “We encourage the Patrol to continue its work, and we will return to this important subject again in the future.”

    In 2019, the state Legislature enacted a package of reforms intended to eliminate the testing kit backlog.

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  • GOP leader Kevin McCarthy visits Washington to help Joe Kent

    House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy quietly visited southwest Washington earlier this week to raise money for a former political foe: Congressional candidate Joe Kent.

    Kent has recently been outspent by his Democratic opponent, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.

    McCarthy visited the area on Monday. Aside from his stature nationally, McCarthy's visit is notable for another reason — he and Kent had been at odds.

    Kent has denounced mainstream Republicans at every step of his campaign, and has said he would not vote for McCarthy to be the next Speaker of the House if Republicans win a majority.

    But Kent has softened his stance on McCarthy lately, and he's relatively short on cash.

    In this final month, Kent has spent about $400,000. His opponent, Gluesenkamp Perez, has spent $1.5 million.

    Still, political pollsters say Kent is favored to win next Tuesday.

    McCarthy also threw nearly $200,000 directly in support of Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler, before Kent edged her out in the primaries.

    Read the full story at Oregon Public Broadcasting.

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  • Why the wave of voting reform measures in the Northwest?

    It’s a Tuesday night and there’s a small party going on in a back room of the Pike Place Market. Take a left at the pig statue, go up some stairs, through a hallway and you’ll find yourself in a little library full of more than a dozen people eating pizza.

    It’s a gathering of the most committed members and leaders of Fair Vote Washington, a group pushing for a big change to elections.

    They’re celebrating years of hard work that might finally pay off. This November, Portland, Seattle, and three counties in Washington and Oregon are considering ranked choice voting.

    These proposals vary area to area – Seattle’s ranked choice looks different than Portland’s, and Seattle will consider ranked choice voting alongside a thing called "approval voting" – but they all reflect a dissatisfaction with who elections choose.

    Take one of the partygoers at Pike Place – Patricia Raftery. The story of how she discovered Fair Vote is a great one for parties: She was chasing an escaped peacock at the Mill Creek Festival and ran past a guy at the Fair Vote booth, who told her which way the peacock went. Forty minutes later, with the peacock caught, she came back and said “Hey, that ranked choice voting thing. I’ve heard about it. Tell me more.”

    Here’s roughly how he explained ranked choice to her: You pick your favorite candidate as #1, but you also get to pick your second favorite and third and etc., if you want. If your favorite doesn’t get enough votes, your second favorite vote could still count.

    Raftery wasn’t sold immediately, but when she attended an info session and learned more about it, she began to think it could solve her misgivings about the two-party system.

    “The two major candidates, I almost never liked either of them, and there would almost always be a third or fourth candidate that I really liked,” Raftery said. “But when you looked at the numbers, you might as well just throw your ballot away. But with ranked choice voting, that wouldn't be the case.”

    Nationwide frustration with both the Republican and Democrat parties is at its highest in recent years. This year, the Pew Research Center released the results of a survey showing people who have unfavorable views of both parties is at 27%. In 1994, when they began asking that question, it was just 6%.

    In Oregon and Washington specifically, a lot of third party candidates are running this year. While few are likely to win, some are popular enough they’re making races tighter for Democrats and Republicans.

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  • AG files suit to block $4 billion pre-merger payout to Albertson shareholders

    Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed a lawsuit Tuesday to prevent Albertsons from paying $4 billion to its shareholders before a proposed merger with Kroger can be reviewed by state and federal regulators.

    Ferguson said the “special dividend” payment would undercut Albertsons’ ability to compete during the time government regulators are scrutinizing the proposed merger.

    The lawsuit, filed in King County Superior Court, will be followed by a temporary restraining order, which, if granted, would prevent Albertsons from making the dividend payment until the lawsuit is settled. A hearing on the restraining order is expected later this week.

    Last month, Kroger announced plans to buy Albertsons for $20 billion. Part of that deal included the $4 billion payout to Albertsons’ shareholders, which was scheduled to occur Nov. 7.

    But last week, a bipartisan group of attorneys general from six states asked Albertsons to delay the pre-merger payout until a review could be completed. They say the payout, which amounts to almost a third of Albertsons’ market value, would impede the company’s ability to remain competitive while the merger is under review.

    If approved by the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, the merger of the two grocery giants is expected to close in early 2024.

    Albertsons and Kroger operate more than 300 stores in Washington, including 80 in the Seattle area. Albertsons has groceries under its own name as well as Safeway and Haggen. Kroger owns Fred Meyer and QFC. Nationwide, the two companies have almost 800,000 employees and close to 5,000 stores across 48 states and the District of Columbia.

    Ferguson’s lawsuit points out that, although Albertsons is publicly traded, a large portion of its stock is controlled by a private equity consortium, Cerberus Capital Management, which bought Albertsons in 2006. The firm helped finance the 2015 purchase of the Safeway chain and took Albertsons public in 2020.

    According to Ferguson's suit, “paying out $4 billion will mostly benefit this private equity consortium, which controls Albertsons.”

    In a press release, the attorney general said the payout could reduce grocery inventories and impact Albertsons’ workers over the next year.

    “Paying out $4 billion before regulators can do their job and review the proposed merger will weaken Albertsons’ ability to continue business operations and compete,” Ferguson said. “Free enterprise is built on companies competing, and that competition benefits consumers. Corporations proposing a merger cannot sabotage their ability to compete while that merger is under review.”

    Continue reading »
  • A year of GRIT in Tacoma: Today So Far

    • Tacoma's GRIT pilot program has been paying people a guaranteed income for nearly a year now. How has it been going?
    • Washington's pandemic state of emergency has ended. Did you notice?
    • Takeaways from the Schrier / Larkin debate.

    This post originally appeared in KUOW's Today So Far newsletter for November 1, 2022.

    You can work a full-time job around Western Washington these days and still not make ends meet. Most folks know this. Beyond the traditional thinking of spending a third of income on rent, putting away money elsewhere, and so on, is the local reality of out-of-reach rents, and ever rising costs of living. Not to mention the inflation that has recently struck.

    This creates a unique pocket of people: those with jobs, but who don't qualify for assistance like food cards, etc. That's why Tacoma has been conducting an experiment — guaranteed income. Since December 2021, 110 Tacoma families have received $500 a month. The program is called "GRIT" (Growing Resilience in Tacoma). There were no strings attached, though participants had to be ALICE households (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed). Such families earn above federal poverty limits, but still can't afford regular expenses like child care, transportation, or housing.

    "It's been a massive help for getting myself back on my feet, because before I joined the program I felt like I was barely making it," Geno Rosario told Seattle Now.

    Rosario is a single father. He used some of the funds for tutoring for his son amid pandemic shutdowns. Before the program, he notes that small incidents would dramatically affect day-to-day life.

    "Like a flat tire or my son's unexpected insulin refills, small things that would normally be small for other people, would just trip me up and set me back for, sometimes, weeks or months at a time."

    Abigail Lawson is the director for Tacoma's guaranteed income pilot. Data for the first six months of the pilot was recently released, providing the first peek into how it has worked so far.

    "Families are using the funds, the guaranteed income, for food or hygiene products, for mechanical repairs, for tuition expenses, for after-school programming like football or soccer, tutoring, things like that," Lawson told Seattle Now.

    "It contradicts, directly, a lot of the narratives that float around guaranteed income, that say that it stimulates laziness and disincentives work, etc. We've seen the opposite. We've seen that (for) families, it has lit the spark of their own self-empowerment, and we're seeing families really work to better their situation, fix up their credit, so they have longer term financial wellness."

    Tacoma's GRIT pilot will end on Dec. 15. Check out the full Seattle Now discussion here.

    As of today, Washington state is no longer in a state of emergency over the Covid pandemic, and the governor's last few emergency orders have expired. Did you notice? Me neither. That's probably because most orders have already phased out, or because most folks don't work in settings where masks will still be required (health care, clinics, etc.).

    Continue reading »
  • Seattle is suing marketing firm over opioid crisis

    Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison is suing McKinsey & Co., a firm that worked with opioid producers Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson.

    McKinsey and Co. worked as a consulting firm for the pharmaceutical companies as they marketed opioid drugs like OxyContin, starting in 2007.

    Seattle filed its lawsuit on Oct. 31. The city argues that the firm played a significant role in promoting the drug and misleading the public about its safety with "aggressive and deceptive marketing."

    According to Seattle's City Attorney's Office, the work McKinsey did "exacerbated our city's homelessness and mental health crises, and wrought havoc on communities across Seattle."

    RELATED: Fentanyl is a great drug for cartels. But those blue pills are killing King County

    "The opioid crisis in Seattle is responsible for hundreds of deaths every year, so many of which are among our city’s most vulnerable, and often overlooked populations," Davison said in a statement. "We can never bring back the loved ones lost to addiction and overdose, but with this lawsuit, we are taking another step towards holding the people who fueled this crisis accountable.”

    The city attorney blames the rise in illegal opiates, such as heroin and fentanyl, on the preceding rise in prescription opioids.

    Davison's office also notes that the city of Seattle has spent millions of dollars as a result of the opioid epidemic, pointing to a three-month period in 2017, when Seattle spent $906,000 for its fire department to respond to 453 calls for opioid-related emergencies. The attorney's office also argues that Seattle spent $800,000 to clean up homeless encampments that same year, "nearly all of which contained hypodermic needles used to inject opioids."

    Seattle's lawsuit comes less than a month after other cities, such as Portland and Philadelphia also sued McKinsey and Co. for its role in the opioid crisis.

    Seattle also sued Purdue Pharma in 2017 over the opioid crisis and received a $183 million settlement.

    “Opioid addiction is one of the most pressing issues facing our society today," Davison said. "In addition to the significant harm it is doing to individual lives, it is also contributing to the increase in misdemeanor crime. We cannot meaningfully address public safety in our city if we do not also address the impact that opioids like heroin and fentanyl are having in our communities.”

    Continue reading »
  • NW country music artist Patrick Haggerty passes away at 78

    Fans of the Northwest country-folk band Lavender Country are remembering singer-songwriter and gay rights activist Patrick Haggerty who died Monday morning from complications related to a stroke.

    He was 78 years old. Haggerty grew up in Port Angeles, Washington.

    In an episode of the NPR series StoryCorps, he told his daughter Robin about a memorable conversation he had with his father in 1959.

    "When you're a full-grown man, who are you going to go out with at night? And I said, 'I didn't know.' And he said, 'I think you do know and it's not going to be that McLaughlin girl has been making google eyes at you, but you won't even pick up the damn telephone,'" Haggerty said.

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  • Abortion billboards going up around Washington state

    Billboards that support people seeking an abortion will start appearing on both sides of the Cascade Mountains in Washington state.

    "There are a lot of anti-abortion access and abortion rights billboards, and you don’t really see the side that is about health care," said Kia Guarino, executive director of Pro-Choice Washington, one of the reproductive rights organizations involved in the billboard campaign.

    Guarino said a lot of misinformation is swirling around Spanish-language radio and in social media channels across Eastern Washington.

    The billboards east of the mountains will state: “Dear abortion seeker, you are welcome here. From Washington.” Another version will say that Washington state protects abortion providers, seekers, and clinics.

    The billboards come months after the U.S. Supreme Court's Dobbs Decision, which reversed a previous court decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion. The issue of abortion has since been decided on a state-by-state basis. Idaho, for example, immediately tightened restrictions on abortions. That put pressure on neighboring Washington state.

    Pro-abortion rights groups have been putting up billboards across the country in recent months, sometimes sparking controversy, or opposing billboards in response.

    Pro-Choice Washington has also been putting up posters around Seattle with similar messaging.

    Continue reading »
  • Washington's emergency order has ended, but you still have to wear masks in these places

    Washington's statewide state of emergency order for the pandemic is over as of this morning, but some pandemic-era rules and precautions will remain.

    Employees with the city of Seattle and the state of Washington will still have to be vaccinated against Covid-19 as a condition of employment. No boosters are required.

    Covid workplace rules will still be in place. Folks with Covid will still have to stay home for five days, and employers will have to provide accommodations for high-risk employees, and notify staff when there is a case at work.

    Masking requirements will also stick around certain settings: hospitals, clinics, and long-term care facilities.

    In September, the CDC dropped its recommendation that everyone mask up in health-care settings. The agency now only recommends that people wear masks when they’re sick or caring for someone with Covid, if they’re personally at risk of a severe case, or if community Covid risk is high.

    Now, only about a dozen states and D.C. still require masking in health-care facilities, including Washington, California, Oregon, New York and Massachusetts.

    Washington, D.C., has some of the most stringent rules, requiring people to mask up not only in health-care settings, long-term care facilities, and prisons, but also in homeless shelters, city government buildings, and libraries.

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  • Takeaways from the Larkin-Schrier debate for the 8th Congressional District race

    Congressmember Kim Schrier and Republican challenger Matt Larkin are back campaigning after their one and only debate. Their race for the 8th Congressional District is a close one. It could determine future control of the U.S. House.

    In their debate over the weekend, the two candidates were often evasive.

    Larkin called for big cuts to federal spending, for example, but declined to answer a question about what he would actually cut.

    "I think there's a whole bunch of things that we need to take a good hard look at," Larkin said.

    Larkin also did not answer a question about his view on recent gun safety laws. Or another about whether former President Trump bears any responsibility for Americans believing false information about the 2020 election, and in some cases turning to violence.

    "Everyone who who is screaming right now, and mad, and upset on both sides of the aisle can be blamed for this," Larkin said.

    For her part, Schrier did not answer a question about the time Georgia Democrat Stacy Abrams called her own election stolen.

    "I can't comment on what another politician has said," Schrier said.

    On abortion, Larkin has said he's against it, even in cases of rape and incest, but in the debate, he would not say what exceptions or limits he’d want to see in any federal abortion ban.

    "That's not in my topic playbook, Larkin said. "I've got other things to worry about."

    Continue reading »
  • The difference between Día de los Muertos and Halloween: Today So Far

    • Día de los Muertos celebrations have been growing in the Seattle area. This holiday is not the same as Halloween.
    • Seattle wants to put its money where its graffiti is.
    • The latest court conclusion over Everett's bikini barista dress code states that the ordinance is unconstitutional.

    This post originally appeared in KUOW's Today So Far newsletter for October 31, 2022.

    Happy Halloween everybody! It's the most wonderful time of the year, in my opinion, so I hope you're having a great day.

    Following Halloween, you might notice another event taking place over the next two days — Día de los Muertos. Last week, I mentioned that many cultures across the globe have holidays and events around this time that share a lot of themes. Día de los Muertos is one of them. It's celebrated across Mexico and is a time to reflect on loved ones who have passed away. Skull imagery is common along with a range of other traditions. This holiday takes place on Nov. 1-2, right after Halloween, but unlike the creepy, spooky holiday the United States is familiar with, Día de los Muertos has a more joyful vibe.

    "It's not Halloween," Judy Avitia-Gonzalez told Seattle Now. "Everybody has gotten mixed up now that it has become more widespread in the United States. It's celebrated very differently throughout Mexico. For example, my family is from northern Mexico and it is celebrated from Nov. 1-2. Nov. 1 being the day for children who have passed, Día de los Angelitos, and Nov. 2 ... where you go and share space with your loved ones who have passed, you take food to the cemetery, you clean up, decorate, bring flowers and celebrate with them."

    Avitia-Gonzalez co-founded the Nepantla Cultural Arts Gallery in White Center with Jake Prendez. The gallery has featured work from more than 40 artists over the past month on the theme of Día de los Muertos.

    "Here in the United States, Chicanos have put their own spin on Día de los Muertos," Prendez said. "Even the way it is celebrated in LA versus San Antonio, versus Seattle, is going to be different."

    Prendez said that when he moved to the Seattle area seven years ago, there were three local events for the holiday, with altars honoring those who passed on. Food, drinks, candles, photos and more, which were loved by the deceased, would be placed at the altars. Today, he notes a lot more is going on with vendors, art, and other happenings.

    "I've really seen the celebration grow, and from these three that I knew of, now we're getting emails from all over the place," for more and more Día de los Muertos events, Prendez said.

    "To me it shows that communities are recognizing their Latinx folks ... I think it just shows that we're here and it's changing the face of Seattle for the better."

    Check out the full conversation with Seattle Now here.

    You would have thought that bikini barista news was so 2017. Well, it's back now that yet another court has ruled on Everett's barista dress code. A few years ago, Everett passed an ordinance that regulated attire at bikini barista drive-thrus. If you don't recall that story, perhaps you'll remember the term "anal cleft" that became a news content sensation across headlines, TV, and radio coverage. Yes, the coverage was a bit ridiculous ... clearly, it's supposed to be called the "intergluteal cleft," or the "cleftal horizon" depending on whether you're referencing an x or y axis. Reporters dissected Everett's dress code to explain it to the public, but in short, it came down to covering up your bottom at a barista stand (if you call it a "plumber's crack," however, then it's legal).

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