Recent Stories in News

Our correspondent Mindy Jones is a Seattleite living in Paris for two years. When she's not busy trying to figure out what the French are saying, she's busy trying to figure out what to say to the French. She posts frequently at An American Mom in Paris.

The view window

We left Seattle New Year's Eve, 2008 and arrived in Paris New Year's Day, 2009. New year, new life. Isn't it just so damn poetic.

We packed up our Seattle things, rented our Seattle house, sold our Seattle cars, and passionately kissed our Seattle friends goodbye (we have boundary issues) to follow my French-Canadian husband's dream of living in Europe. It was indeed his dream, not mine. I'd been to Europe; it was neat.

I'd even been to Paris a couple times; it was pretty. But not once while visiting was I struck with the desire to throw my arms around the person next to me at a cafe and say, "Be my NEIGHBOR, Frenchie!"

I was content being a tourist. My husband, my Alex, was not. His job fortuitously offered him a relocation opportunity--Luxembourg or Paris for two years--and Alex stared at me with pleading eyes. I agreed, but only if we chose Paris over Luxembourg because, well, come on it's obvious. (No offense to Luxembourg; it's a helluva grand duchy.)

I also made Alex pinkie swear we would return to Seattle in NO MORE THAN TWO YEARS. He swore. On his pinkie.

(We’re going to be here longer than two years.)

It's been a wild ride. Here's the story, parts of it anyway, from the beginning:

The 10-hour flight went as well as can be expected considering our almost-three-year-old son, Lucien, never stops moving and never stops using his "outdoor" voice. Benadryl got him through. (Ativan got his mama through.)

Then we were in Paris, jet lagged and stuck in a car with a driver who got a giggly thrill from trying to kill pedestrians. Al and I mouthed, "Oh my God!" to each other, eyes wide, all the way to our new 'hood in the 6th arrondissement.... (more)

I apologize for the stress I've put on the pun in the headline, but it's nothing like the stress, apparently, that the Gates Foundation put Seattle's Department of Transportation. Back in May, we were all made aware of the Foundation's discontent with how Sixth Avenue North fed cars to the deep-bore tunnel's north portal.

SDOT illustration

Currently, Sixth Avenue North does not cross Mercer Street. It bends along Broad Street between Harrison and Republican, and for a full block--Republican to Mercer--it doesn't exist before it snaps back to the grid north of Mercer.

SDOT initially planned to reinvent Sixth as a feeder to the tunnel southbound.

The northwest corner of the Gates Foundation campus being in the way, it would have tunneled underneath at a gradual grade (4.5 percent) and thus allowed cars from Mercer or downtown easy tunnel access.

The Gates Foundation, who are putting a building right there, made noises about millions of dollars in mitigation, and this has resulted in the street grid gaining startling curvilinear properties around the political gravity well that is the Foundation's campus.

SDOT illustration

A few things happen with the curveball option: the grade increases to six percent, a "half signal" allows Sixth Avenue drivers access to westbound Mercer (but not westbound Mercer to Sixth), and pedestrians have to cross Mercer at Taylor or go up and over via Aurora.

(The full signal in the earlier "from below it onramps" option let westbound Mercer traffic turn left on Sixth Avenue North.)

This is the kind of accommodation from SDOT that most private citizens can only dream of, and it's not likely to make hickorystick at Redstate any more well-disposed to what he calls the tunnel's servicing of "Billionaires' Row." (The tunnel's north portal fetching up around Mercer means its neighbors are the Gates Foundation and Paul Allen's Vulcan developments.)... (more)

The news about the Native American man who was shot to death after being found wood-carving in public continues to "develop," as they say. Now it is not clear that he approached the officer threateningly or otherwise, and his family says he was deaf in one ear.

Mayor Mike McGinn

"I think Chief Diaz is the right man for the job," McGinn is quoted saying, which has overtones of "Heckuva job, Brownie," coming the same week as King County prosecutors decided that a police officer who told an innocent Latino man he was going to "beat the fucking Mexican piss" out of him was not guilty of a hate crime. The city attorney could still file charges against Detective Shandy Cobane for misdemeanor assault, further endearing himself to the SPD.

McGinn's political deafness has instigated a completely avoidable kerfluffle with MOHAI. Yesterday the Slog reported that the city was making a grab for state funds allocated for MOHAI's SR 520-prompted move from its Montlake location to the South Lake Union Armory. 

After directing the museum to negotiate on its own for state funds, estimated to be around $15 million, the city's cartoon eyes exploded from its face when MOHAI came back with $40 million. Quoth Carl Marquardt, lead attorney for the mayor’s office: "This is not a time for any one community organization to be taking all that it can get, while others go without."... (more)

Whew! That was fast. A year ago a few of us pushed off from the shores of Seattlest on our own little raft of words. 165,654 unique visitors and 413,021 page views later, we know a lot more about the people and places of Seattle than when we started, thanks to a staggering amount of arts & culture interviewing from Jeremy Barker and Tony Kay--and of eye-catching contributions to our Flickr pool, which now has 3,200 glimpses of Seattle life in it.

Our top two stories, according to Google Analytics, were "An Atheist's Defense of 'Everybody Draw Mohammed Day'" and "Who Killed Belltown's McGuire? The Cast of Characters," the latter a story I lucked into when our hiking contributor John Hieger emailed me to say he'd gotten an odd note from his property manager.

Seth Kolloen (who's moving on to a life of even more sports) gave us a memorable, sometimes harrowing year in the life of a Seattle sports fan, while Audrey kept tabs on film and TV, especially Seattleites in film and TV, and Josh did everything humanly possible to introduce you to the work of Vincent Moon. We've just welcomed Constance Lambson for books coverage, and Jay Friedman of Gastrolust to our food section--and you'll soon see more on jazz and Paris living (for reasons I'll explain later), as we explore what it means to be a Seattle online magazine.

Seattle, Redmond, and Bellevue are our top cities for traffic. (Tacoma, Everett, Renton, and Portland are in the top 10.) A full 50 percent of our traffic came from Washington state. Who's visiting us? Top business/institutional addresses include Microsoft, UW, Amazon, RIM, Boeing, Costco, and King County and the City of Seattle.... (more)

An afternoon Sounder loads up at King Street Station.

The Sounder trains from Seattle to Everett and Tacoma are largely for commuters to Seattle, which is the first thing you notice when checking out their schedules (it's an hour trip for both destinations). The bulk of the runs to Seattle are in the early morning, then back to Tacoma and Everett in the evening. And of course it's weekdays only.

You only have one or two chances to make a reverse commute, depending on where you're headed, but it is possible. If you want to spend the night is Tacoma or Everett, then everything becomes easy as pie. Either way, at just $4.50 (Everett) or $4.75 (Tacoma) each way, it's a bargain, and one that you can use your new ORCA card to pay for, if you're so inclined.

If you disembark from the last train in the evening, you may hear the engine chugging away for some time. Electro-Motive Diesel, Inc., supplies the F59PHI locomotives, and tells me that the engine is usually busy recharging batteries and otherwise transitioning from its day's work. It's self-monitoring and can shut itself off when all systems are back to "green." Even idling, these are large engines and I wondered how green they really were.

Sound Transit runs 11 of the F59PHI locomotives, which emerged from the factory with an EPA Tier 0 rating. "In 2008 we switched to a low-sulfur fuel that burns much cleaner in our locomotives than the previous fuels," says ST's Kimberly Reason. "We replaced all of our Head End Power (HEP) units with a new Tier 2 unit in 2008 as well--the HEP is the smaller engine on a locomotive that provides support electricity to the coach cars for lights, heat, AC, etc."

In 2012, Sound Transit will begin rebuilding the engines to convert to the EPA's Tier 3 rating, which requires tighter regulation of oxides of nitrogen (NOx), hydrocarbons (HC), carbon monoxide (CO), particulate matter (PM) and smoke--in the case of particulates, nitrogen oxide, and hydrocarbon, the reductions range from between 50 to 75 percent compared to Tier 0.

Do not think about heading to Downtown right now, unless you're going on foot.  And if you're already Downtown, well, you're gonna be there a while.  A Seattle police officer shot and killed a man armed with a knife near the intersection of Boren and Howell, so several streets are shut down, meaning traffic and buses are being re-routed.  It is not pretty.

(Thanks as always to Seattle 911 blog for being a reliable go-to resource in just these situations.)

Not all alcohol is created equal. Wine has more beneficial effects than, say, grain alcohol.

"Why do heavy drinkers outlive nondrinkers?" is the title of the TIME magazine article (among others). The surprise result from a study published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research (which does not seem to be funded by Jack Daniels) is that the mortality rate for nondrinkers is even higher than heavy drinkers.

This is no flash-in-the-pan study, either; its 1,824 participants were tracked over two decades. (Caveat: 63 percent were men.) Participants were between 55 and 65, and the study controlled for "for nearly all imaginable variables--socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on," says TIME.

Charles Holahan

While no one's suggesting heavy drinking is good for you (69 and 60 percent of the study's nondrinkers and heavy drinkers died, respectively, but only 41 percent of moderate drinkers did), it may be that stress and lack of social interaction is worse for you than brain damage and increased cancer risks. (Moderate, by the way, is one to three drinks per day, so it's not a path of ruthless sacrifice.)

Coincidentally, the same day I heard about the study, El Gaucho Bellevue (City Center Plaza, 450 108th Ave. NE) emailed me about their new line of "medicinal" cocktails, four new drinks involving "ginseng, ginkgo biloba, St. John’s Wort, and skullcap." Says lead bartender Chris LeRoy, "With all the stress that people deal with these days, I thought I would take the trend a step further and combine it with the healing properties of natural herbs and tinctures." See? Stress!... (more)

Photo: SDOT

SDOT's blog mentions that they're painting Ts on traffic signal actuators buried in the street, so bicyclists will know where to place their front wheel for best results.

Technically, it's your bike that trips the signal, not the front wheel alone. Even a carbon fiber frame probably has enough metal on it somewhere (gears, cranks) to work. The T should help newbie cyclists especially not to ride right over the actuator, and give them confidence they won't make the fuming line of motorists behind them miss a turn cycle.

There is nothing more wonderful than cycling for looking into how in-group and out-group behaviors develop. This is one instance. When you can't, on a bicycle, get a turn signal actuator to work, you're usually stuck in the middle of traffic. Neither option available (dismounting and using the crosswalk; or making the turn anyway, when traffic permits) inspires confidence in the drivers around you, who more than likely have no idea you can't get the light to change.

Every time a cyclist doesn't appear to be obeying the rules of the road, it counts against cycling in general. This is that in-group, out-group thing I mentioned. Some of these instances have to do with learned understanding, as with this actuator example; you don't really know why a cyclist is doing what they're doing (whether it's legal or not) until you've ridden yourself.... (more)

You know that mournful, mysterious train whistle you hear sometimes downtown? Here's the culprit: a freight train emerging from the South Portal of the Great Northern Tunnel.

Perhaps encouraged by the Seattle Times Truth Needle series, people are taking it upon themselves to correct the Times' reporting: Previously, the Seattle Bike Blog has fisked Joni Balter and Nicole Brodeur columns for their specious car vs. bikes set-ups (and let's not forget Sightline's succinct "Seattle Times Flunks Math").

Now Jon Scholes, vice-president of advocacy and economic development for the Downtown Seattle Association, has written an open letter to the Times to point out that enforcing parking limits is not, in fact, an anti-business move. That doesn't mean the Times doesn't write good stories; just this morning there's a great piece on why it seems like there are so many spiders around lately.

After years of crying out in the boom-erness, Seattle Bubble is now becoming our own Paul Krugman of real estate, getting quoted far and wide on how a home is different from a retirement account. TechFlash is covering Paul Allen's Friday patent freak-out. Crosscut suggested that Mayor McGinn might be some kinda new-Jerry-Brown-style leader. (Where have I read that before?) Publicola has outsourced a temp column to Mexico City's Grant Cogswell, who, judging from the comments section, has still got that gadfly "it" factor.

Meanwhile, in neighborhoodliness news, a woman vanished from Hemp Fest. [UPDATE: Found! says the comments section.] CHS walked Broadway with the King County Council's Larry Phillips, who was not beaten and robbed. CD News waded into the intersection of nightlife rules and race. Queen Anne View covered City Council activity on urban farming, which increases the chickens you can have from three to eight.... (more)

Phil Talmadge

Talmadge notes first that Washington, very unusually, considers income property, and places strict limits on property tax rates. Secondly, he notes that the state constitution ensures protection against unequal taxation, which would also augur against I-1098, the "high-earners tax."

In the opposite corner is Hugh Spitzer, who argues that previous state rulings in the 1930s were based on federal rulings themselves reversed or wiped out; only two states, including Washington, still maintain income is property.

But Spitzer can't say, as Talmadge can, that he's already tried, as a legislator, to introduce an income tax, or that he authored a dissenting opinion while on the Supreme Court in 1999 that questioned the validity of the court's ruling that income was property. ("[T]hat position commanded only two other votes on the Court," Talmadge writes ruefully.)

Otherwise, supporters of I-1098 are fighting the good fight with charts and graphs that demonstrate it really is a "soak the rich" scheme. (I-1098's income tax would only kick in for any income earned over $200,000 for individuals, $400,000 for couples.)... (more)

"New Kindle Leaves Rivals Farther Back" is the headline in the New York Times, which is the home of serious readers who don't need--never asked for--color. Yes, there's a fervent hallelujah chorus from tech blogs and magazines, but if you're selling a long-form e-reader, the long-form newspaper is where you want to be.

Tech columnist David Pogue weighs in on the next-gen Kindle v. iPad match-up and concludes the two devices are really not for the same audiences, and in fact are more differentiated than ever before: "The Kindle 3 is ingeniously designed to be everything the iPad will never be: small, light and inexpensive."

Thank god, then, for the iPad, because previously the Kindle was not really setting records in two of those three departments, certainly not on price. Now comes a Kindle that measures 7.5 x 4.8 inches, that's only 3/10s of an inch thick, that weighs in at 8.5 ounces--and the Wi-Fi only version subtracts only $140 from your wallet (with 3G, $190).

In one of their context-free news releases, Amazon crows that the new Kindle is selling fast and is their hottest selling product (which is what happens when public relations becomes a marketing plaything). Contrast has increased "50 percent," and battery life is said to be up to a month if you're just reading (no wireless). Downsides: You're still tied to the Kindle's book format, and you can't loan your purchases to other Kindle owners.

Bothell's Marina Biotech has sold the patent rights and technology it holds for the intranasal formulation of synthetic oxytocin analogue Carbetocin to Cypress Bioscience, reports the Puget Sound Business Journal.

Marina Biotech is now focusing on RNA interference technology, to control disease-causing protein expression; Carbetocin is arguably a better fit for Cypress, who work on the development of drugs that affect the central nervous system, and have a good record of bringing them to market speedily.

Cypress is making an upfront payment of $750,000, with up to $27 million more tied to stages of successful drug development, with "single-digit royalties [going] to Marina Biotech based on commercial sales, if any," summarizes the news release.

What makes Carbetocin worth all this is a) Marina Biotech's intranasal delivery system, which has completed Phase I study, and b) the longer serum half-life of Carbetocin compared to oxytocin (it persists in the blood stream longer). There is also a c) which is potential upside to an oxytocin-based therapy for autism.

While the miracle-cure effects of oxytocin were trumpeted in the press earlier this year (ScienceDaily, Newsweek), like the early notion of the "serotonin deficit" accounting for depression, a simple "oxytocin deficit" hypothesis hasn't been borne out by studies [Modahl, et al, pdf]. (As a spectrum disorder, autism wouldn't necessarily be expected to have a single cause.) Recent studies have shown and not shown a link between the oxytocin receptor gene and autism.

Still, evidence is mounting that oxytocin has therapeutic effects: reducing social anxiety, promoting attention to faces, encouraging imitative behavior, inhibiting repetitive behaviors, helping strengthen emotional memory. Given that in one study, the researchers had to account for the effects of clonidine, Depakote, Tegretol, Dilantin, Ritalin, lithium, and Haldol on their study subjects' oxytocin levels, a therapeutic drug that's an analogue for a naturally occurring hormone is a bright moment in autism treatment, all by itself.... (more)

Mayor McGinn

"As of late last year, only 28 percent of small businesses were using bank loans, the lowest rate since 1993," notes the Seattle Jobs Plan, unveiled yesterday by Mayor McGinn.

A chunk of the $50 million in business financing that the city plans to distribute within an 18-month window will go to start-ups and small- and medium-sized businesses looking for loans to help them invest in operations or expand.

Millions more in tax exempt stimulus bonds and tax credits are targeted at large businesses, with a priority given for "projects that create or retain permanent jobs, increase the availability of goods, and serve as an anchor for future economic development in low-income communities."

It's a plan that seems to include the kitchen sink--job training and preparation for college is in there ($2 million), interim parking lots near light rail stations, street food vendors, a city-owned broadband network expanded to homes and businesses, urban farming, and energy-efficient retrofitting ($26 million).

Totaling it all up, the city expects to create around 10,000 jobs in the next few years, reports Seattlepi.com, while it's not really on the hook for much of the financing: "roughly $70 million for business loans and tax credits come from new federal funds and leveraged local dollars from partnerships."... (more)

Seattle/LocalHealthGuide has a story on the intercontinental team who have discovered the genetic link to a form of muscular dystrophy. Their paper, published in Science, details how expression of the DUX4 homeobox gene by an otherwise harmless stretch of "junk DNA" results in facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD).

They're hypothesizing that the DUX4 protein is at some level toxic to muscle cell development, which results in FSHD's "weakness and wasting" of muscles in the face, shoulders, and upper arms--which can later reach the abdomen and hips. Eventually, it could be possible to medically disrupt the protein-encoding process--but for now identifying the protein in a lab's controlled conditions and in the body are two very different things.

It's now possible, given this discovery, to determine via DNA testing if someone has FSHD before symptoms have begun to display. (Even pre-natally.)

Researchers from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the University of Washington (Daniel Miller), and the University of Rochester Medical Center collaborated with scientists in the Netherlands and Spain. Dr. Stephen Tapscott, from the Hutch's Division of Human Biology, was a co-author.

I spoke with Lauren Snider, from the Human Biology Division, about their lab's role. "Most of the work was done by the group in Netherlands, at Leiden University," she explained.

"We provided the technical refinements that allowed us to understand what transcripts are expressed." As you remember from biology, "Transcription is the first step leading to gene expression." (Not all of their research made it into the paper--some played more of a supporting role in delineating genetic possibilities, but that's science. There's a lot of ruling in and ruling out to do.)... (more)

This might be a good place to mention that Amtrak is offering a 25 percent discount on Seattle to Vancouver tickets this September. The new "second train" to Vancouver that leaves Seattle at 6:50 p.m. had 25,000 passengers in July alone. (The original Amtrak Cascades train leaves at 7:40 a.m.)

The discount September fare will hopefully boost ridership even more--the second train is a pilot program, and the more people who ride it, the better chance it has of becoming a permanent addition to the schedule. Visit Vancouver Attractions for more discounts. Here are even more travel offers, courtesy of the B.C. Ministry of Tourism.

A reminder that you need to take 1-90 because 520 is closed for inspection, reopening 5 a.m. Monday.

The Seattle Times says a man was found dead at a South Lake Union construction site early this morning, just three hours after someone called police to report shots fired. Police visited the call's location, a "private event" at the 1000 block of Valley Street, but no one had heard anything. Also, a woman was attacked by what she claimed was a man with a machete in "the Jungle" (11 Avenue South and Beacon Avenue South), though when police found her covered in blood, they suspected a blunt instrument.

This casts into relief the nothing-is-too-good-for-our-homeless advocacy of the City Council's Sally Bagshaw. Real Change reports Bagshaw objected to a housing site offered to Nickelsville residents by the mayor's staff, the former Sunny Jim peanut butter plant in Georgetown, because "[o]ut-of-sight, out-of-mind strikes me as not being the compassionate way we want to treat people." (See our previous coverage of the roving homeless encampment Nickelsville here.)

Publicola wrapped up the primary election results for you. (Yes, there was a primary election.) The mayor announced it was Geek Week in Seattle. More luxury condos hit the auction market; this time it's Olive 8 and the case of the price minimums. Researchers from the Hutch made a big step forward in determining the genetic basis of a form of muscular dystrophy. (More on this once I read their paper.) President Obama came to town and blew things up.... (more)

Every so often, people who like to think of their reality as fact-based (most everyone, then) throw up their hands and ask what is to be done about people who "don't get it," as if there's some formula. This isn't a partisan viewpoint; it reflects biases we all have, which tend to show up in how we intuitively imagine consequences of action. But sometimes how we imagine builds those biases.

If you force "four busy lanes of traffic into two," after all, anyone can see that a congested crawl will be the result. In a feeble economy, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know you need to make substantial cuts to keep the state's deficit down. If you want to save on electricity, even a child could tell you that the best thing is to turn the heat down.

Except none of that may be true.

It's based on what is easy to visualize, rather than what isn't. In the case of a road diet, the third, bi-directional turn lane gets overlooked, but left-turning cars block traffic in a four-lane model--and it gets worse the busier the street gets. So far as deficits go, consider a liquidity trap--again, harder to visualize than simply cutting to make fit. And that electric bill? "Making retrofits, for example, saves far more energy than turning down the heat a few degrees."... (more)

The view from higher ground

Special to The SunBreak by John Hieger

Generally the Margaret Lake trail takes you right there--which is fine if lakes are your thing--but on a clear day, the vistas from a summit always trump the scene from the shore.

If there's a loose philosophy to employ when selecting a hike, it makes sense to save summits for clear days and lakes for those less so. There are people who argue that dipping in a mountain lake is the ultimate payoff on a hot day: I don't agree, for the following reasons:

a) Mountain water, even in the peak of summer is painfully cold. Like jumping in Puget Sound, you get in because swimming sounds fun, you get out to keep your muscles from seizing.

b) Lake hikes aren't without their charms, but since it's cloudy more often than not in these climes, try to preserve view hikes for days when views are actually possible. Put another way, the window for summit views is far shorter, increasing their value (if you want to be a nerd about it).

Instead of hiking the ridge and dropping down the reverse side to the lake below, I decided to keep gaining elevation once reaching the ridgeline and bag the 5,459-foot summit instead, which is actually less work than getting to the lake basin itself.

The real leg work of Mount Margaret is a steady climb through old clearcuts now reclaimed by wild flowers and replanted saplings. The glass half-full crowd marvels over the vegetation and huckleberries on display in this phase, but I tend to think of it as a hot, exposed trudge through a rebounding, butchered forest, all too common along the I-90 corridor.... (more)

Backscatter scan, courtesy TSA, leaves little about how it's hanging to the imagination.

Goldy at HorsesAss is having none of the full-body security scans starting up at SeaTac this September, claiming the invasion of privacy and safety concerns are just too much. (In March 2010, the TSA purchased 450 advanced imaging technology units with ARRA funds--at $130,000 to $170,000 each, says the Seattle Times.)

Regular surveillance cameras were enough to catch the TSA supervisor who stole $20,000 worth of valuables from checked luggage, but SeaTac, which has one of the more complex and inane security/performance art installations in the nation, has no problem with an invasive upgrade. (In fairness, they arbitrarily downgrade, too: "TSA Relaxes Restrictions for Cigarette Lighters and Breast Milk in Carry-On Luggage.")

Of the two types of imaging technology, millimeter wave and backscatter, it's the latter that has health professionals worried. Backscatter relies on low-dose x-rays just strong enough to "see through" clothes, but be reflected back by skin and soft tissue.

Health professionals are concerned that this kind of exposure directed at the skin could still have effects: "[T]here really is no threshold of low dose being OK. Any dose of X-rays produces some potential risk," David Agard, a biochemist and biophysicist at UCSF told NPR.

In an Orwellian touch of "sensitivity," the x-ray units employ a blurring algorithm while passengers are observed nude, and the TSA has instituted a complicated privacy procedure so that you will never actually see the officer checking you out nude:... (more)

The damaged BT-3 boring machine in shinier days. Photo: King County.

I was a little surprised to hear that the final phase of Brightwater tunneling is set for this fall. Back in mid-February, King County Executive Dow Constantine declared the project's status an "emergency," and I assumed that meant round-the-clock tunneling action. But really the emergency declaration was simply to allow Constantine to switch contractors, to Jay Dee Coluccio (JDC), and renegotiate terms with them. (JDC is also working on the University Link light rail project.)

After the tunneling that finished this June, the boring machines have been on hiatus while "reconditioning" is done. A fact sheet (pdf) explains:

JDC will move the tunneling machine that has mined from Point Wells into the 200-foot deep shaft at the Ballinger site. This will take about two weeks. Once the TBM is in the shaft, several sections will be lifted to the surface to be reconditioned. Remaining portions will be refurbished inside the shaft. Cranes will be used to lift the TBM sections to the surface and to lift equipment and crews in and out of the shaft.

Brightwater is a huge wastewater treatment system north of Seattle, with a 114-acre treatment plant, 13 miles of pipeline, and a marine outfall that, via twin pipes that shoot about a mile out into Puget Sound, diffuses treated water with the Sound. It's designed to treat 36 million gallons per day, and expansion planned by 2040 should increase that capacity to 54 million gallons.... (more)

The net neutrality Internet is like a series of happy pipes, glad to see all kinds of data. Thanks to our Flickr pool's zenobia_joy for this wonderful shot.

Special to The SunBreak by Mark Rushing of Orbis Lumen

[Ed.: A proposed agreement between Google and Verizon has pundits debating its merits at warp speed, while pixels are still free. Wired has the "real" story. HuffPo has seen it all before. We asked Mark to take a step back and give us the lay of the land. Here's the first part in a series on net neutrality.]

Would you be happier if you no longer were charged for voice minutes? What if you were no longer charged for voice minutes, but strangely you had unlimited voice talk time?

What if you suddenly had unlimited text messaging capabilities for free? And unlimited multimedia messaging as well? And what if you also were given a new telephone number for free, that rang your cell phone and home phone simultaneously, or any other phone, too? And all your voice mail messages were  recorded and transcribed, then emailed to you, and you never had to worry about copying people and their contact information to your phone again?

Well, you can get this right now, and the mobile telephone companies are not too pleased. Google, one of the Great Horsemen of the ongoing Internet Apocalypse--which is seeing the slow demise of such power institutions as traditional newspapers, the music industry, publishing, and is transforming the way we perceive our role in government, international issues, and the way we organize--well, Google is ruffling the feathers of the Powers that Be, namely the very few companies who own all the pipes that this Internet thing flows through.

And the power that forced these giants to allow others--such as Google--room to grow was...you and me, through the principles of net neutrality.

We may smugly believe the Internet has already arrived, but it is actually still in the process of arriving. And sometimes this behemoth of decentralized interconnections between us looks more like a planet crashing in ultra-slow motion through a steel and glass china shop than it looks like, well, just an amorphous thing of stuff, doing this and that. That china shop has been many things. Right now, that steel-girdered china shop is the mobile telecommunications industry, and they're doing all they can to stop that world from crashing through it.... (more)

King County's unemployment rate (ESD)

"State jobless rate drops to 8.9% in July" reads the Seattle Times headline. (Et tu, TechFlash?)

We're a metrics nation (even if that whole metric thing never took off), so it's understandable that people follow numbers closely to see what news they contain. But some people seem to want numbers to deliver action-verb news monthly, even when the economy is clearly stagnating.

When Washington's Employment Security Department announces that "Washington's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate fell to 8.9 percent from June’s upwardly revised level of 9.0 percent," it helps to remember that June's rate was originally 8.9 percent. Comparing unrevised numbers then--apples to apples--absolutely nothing happened.

But something did happen, of course. As ESD's July report states right at the outset, "Washington state, on a seasonally adjusted basis, shed 2,300 jobs between June and July 2010." The ESD news release on July's numbers focuses instead on our anemic but actual private-sector job growth.

The private sector added 3,100 jobs in July, led by 1,000 in transportation, warehousing, and utilities. Construction and education and health services grew by 900 jobs over the month.

Almost 240,000 people were anxiously awaiting their UI checks in July, but a growing number have simply reached the end of that rope. ESD's David Wallace tells me, "Since Congress implemented Emergency Unemployment Compensation in July 2008, the State of Washington has had a total of 15,848 claimants that have exhausted benefits."... (more)

Maybe our "brazen squatters" in Magnolia and Kirkland are simply adopting best practices. Almost two years ago, in late September 2008, federal bank regulators seized Washington Mutual and sold it to JPMorgan Chase & Co. for $1.9 billion. All around Seattle the WaMu signs came down and Chase signs went up.

Now a WaMu shareholder, armed with a FOIA, claims to have a document showing the deal has yet to reach a final settlement. The PSBJ reports:

Lam noticed that on pages 7 and 9, the original WaMu purchase and sale agreement allows the FDIC to extend the settlement date. He says he asked about it, and the FDIC confirmed in phone calls and emails that the settlement date was set for Aug. 30, 2010, and could be extended further.

The PSBJ's Al Scott called the FDIC and JP Morgan Chase for comment, only to be told they were "looking into it." [Ed: I'll be downtown later this afternoon putting up TSB signage on Chase branches, since there's apparently some confusion about when Chase bought WaMu and when they knew they'd bought it. The market rewards nimbleness!]

At the time of the sale, WaMu had assets of $307 billion and deposits of $188 billion, so the $1.9 billion "sale" price represented a remarkable bargain for JP Morgan Chase, who took over WaMu's assets while WaMu shareholders' claims were wiped out by bankruptcy. Those shareholders have been waging a battle ever since, to reclaim at least part of their investment.... (more)

Governor Gregoire

Washington state's insurance commissioners generally do the people proud in the watchdog department, pressing for regulation until the insurance company executives cry out from their day spas in annoyance. But you can't nap for a second: "rates for some individual health plans in Washington increased by up to 40 percent until we stepped in to impose stiffer premium oversight," writes Gregoire.

To let people know about changes in premiums, Gregoire says, the state will "create a web based consumer website called 'Consumer Care' to provide information about the cost and quality of health care."