Tom Bates drives about 10,000 kilometers a month. He has a few regular stops and warehouses between Kyiv, where donations arrive, and the Donetsk region in the east. “I travel around to Dnipro, along the Dnieper River, to Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Bakhmut when we could. There’s a lot of action on that eastern front.”

Seattle faces a budget crunch for its schools, but the secret case for closing schools and saving money is flawed.

A Benedictine monastery on a hill south of Portland selects the Finnish modernist master, Alvar Aalto, to design its fan-shaped library.

Gluesenkamp-Perez narrowly defeated MAGA Republican Joe Kent, after Kent ousted six-term GOP Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler in last year’s primary. Kent took controversial stands, saying that Dr. Anthony Fauci should be tried for murder. Now Kent is running again.

Remember Google’s early motto: “Don’t be evil”? With superintelligence they might be. And there’s Facebook’s motto, “Move fast and break things.” They’re racing to develop superintelligence and this kind of thinking still animates the tech companies. With AI they’re pretty likely to break things.

The biggest question about Mullet’s campaign is whether he’s got a real shot to get out of next August’s primary, given the presence of Attorney General Bob Ferguson and former U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert. 

The once-rare scores of 95 and above have become commonplace. Someone somewhere no matter how obscure has given that $8 Chardonnay a 95 and the number is all that matters.

Marcelo Lehninger says about the Bellingham post: “The reason I look forward to the Bellingham Festival is not only the quality of the orchestra made up of many first chair instrumentalists from orchestras around the country, but as a place to grow the Festival.”

Cozy financial dealings with a powerful banker, a state treasurer, and angry stockholders. Trials were held, but all went free.

Wisdom from a teen: Ruby’s five-part prescription for teenage happiness is a stirring protest against the ruling gods of contemporary culture: speed, competition, information, convenience, and self-absorption.

Biden moved to resolve a half-century of conflict in favor of conservation, saying: “As the climate crisis warms the Arctic more than twice as fast as the rest of the world, we have a responsibility to protect this treasured region for the ages.” Biden

How weird is it that publishers are clamoring to get good placement on the platforms and spending money to do so even as they're screaming that their content is being stolen and demanding the platforms pay them for being featured on their sites?

The whole drainage system was cut by three-quarters, rather than developing the large Duwamish basin. And the delta of the Duwamish was turned into a polluted industrial waterway, its meanders filled and its main stem dredged.

The Catholic church has already given $900,000 to Protect Women Ohio, which is opposing Issue 1. In a “letter to the faithful,” sent out last month, Cincinnati Archbishop Daniel Schnurr explained: “The church must not remain on the sidelines when confronted with such a clear threat to human life and dignity and the primacy of the family.”

The “run philosophy” has been allowed to thrive on censored social media .makes one wonder if the Chinese government encourages it or ignores it

Seattle people love streetcars — at least, the idea of them. In recent times, they’ve allowed their leaders to spend millions of dollars on two short streetcar lines that hardly go anywhere and aren’t connected. Yet the city once had a system that had lines to West Seattle and the Rainier Valley, to the U District and Ballard, and a web of lines covering Queen Anne, Capitol Hill, and the Central District.

Murrow’s memories of summer lumber-jacking in the woods around Puget Sound and the Olympic Peninsula became a life-long, idealistic standard by which he judged himself and others.

Those were days when almost every major newspaper had a staff cartoonist. Sad to say that is now only a distant memory. In last Sunday’s column, Horsey noted that in July alone, the McClatchy chain laid off three Pulitzer-prize-winning cartoonists in a single devastating day (Jack Ohman of the Sacramento Bee, Kevin Siers of the Charlotte Observer and Joel Pett of the Lexington Herald-Leader). Contrary to a subsequent mealy-mouthed news release lauding their work, the three cartoonists were dumped mainly because the hedge fund put profits above the community journalism it dishonestly professes to serve.

Some American bishops can look like the MAGA movement at prayer.

Consider what happens to a wine when it is chilled down to refrigerator or ice bucket temperature. The aromatics – a strong point for many white wines – all but vanish. The fruit flavors close up – shrinkage! The acids pop out aggressively, because everything else has been squashed. And should that wine have a flaw, such as brett or TCA, it will either be undetectable or hidden to such a degree as to seem unimportant.

Ever since Oliver Anthony’s song caught fire, the combatants in the culture wars have been trying to peg, box, claim, or deny Anthony and his song. So locked in to the culture war are its combatants that they cannot, apparently, conceive of someone who is not taking up arms.

Italy's two-week collective vacation period is an intense time of festivals, performances, concerts, entertainment for children, community dinners, and other events in public places. My family and I feel fortunate to have experienced this continual “social weaving” ourselves.

The Third  Avenue my wife and I once happily and securely walked is now mired with blight, homelessness, and crime.  

A new poll lays out how the nation’s political divisions have settled like a stagnant air mass over the environment. 

A hellacious, killer wildfire was not high on Hawaii’s list of expected alarms. But, as in many other emergency situations over time, the islands residents would realize, too late, what had led to the terrible events of August 8.

One of Nolan’s notorious quirks is his obsession with time and non-linearity, and this aspect sets Oppenheimer apart from other biopics.

If we’re going to revisit the world-changing early decades of nuclear weapons, people should recognize the historic importance of eastern Washington’s Hanford nuclear site, and that our government exposed thousands of its own citizens to radiation from airborne waste and the fallout from nuclear tests.

One wonders how much fun Will Shakespeare would have had with Ron DeSantis, the bowdlerizing autocrat and his “vaulting ambition” and his rictus-like “smile and smile and be a villain.”

There is still no signature grape providing a clear distinction (definition?) for Washington wines; a handle that consumers and trade who are not located in the Pacific Northwest want and need.

Which candidate was the most severely misjudged in post-debate punditry: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.