Your State

Today, in a surprise ruling from the bench in the critical climate case brought by youths against the State of Washington’s Department of Ecology, King County Superior Court Judge Hollis Hill ordered the Department of Ecology to promulgate an emissions reduction rule by the end of 2016 and make recommendations to the state legislature on science-based greenhouse gas reductions in the 2017 legislative session.

A port commission vote against a proposed $1.2 billion oil refinery in a Washington town proves that the people still have a voice.

The Great Blue Heron (GBH; Ardea herodias) is found in all parts of North and Central America. Although many areas like to claim them as their own, residents of Puget Sound and the Salish Sea in particular, feel a strong affinity for these statuesque creatures. To most locals, they are right up there with eagles and gulls as being part of our "native" landscape and part of our ecosystem. While not endangered at this time, they are considered a species of interest

Less than 11 months after receiving $8.7 billion in tax incentives from the Washington state legislature, Boeing has announced they will transfer nearly 2,000 engineering jobs to “lower cost regions” over the next three years.

Washington became the second state Tuesday to allow people to buy marijuana legally in the U.S. without a doctor's note as customers eager to be the first to buy pot lined up outside stores. People began purchasing marijuana at 8 a.m. at Bellingham's Top Shelf Cannabis, one of two stores in the city north of Seattle that started selling pot as soon as it was allowed under state regulations. Several dozen people waited outside before the store opened.

A group of teachers is holding a rally Thursday evening in Seattle to denounce education reform measures they say have been an attack on public education and let corporate interests and high-stakes testing trump real student learning.

By raising its minimum wage to $15, Seattle is leading a long-overdue movement toward a living wage. Most minimum wage workers aren’t teenagers these days. They’re major breadwinners who need a higher minimum wage in order to keep their families out of poverty.

The Seattle City Council is expected to approve an ordinance Monday to phase in a $15 hourly minimum wage — the highest in the nation. The ordinance passed a committee last week with a few changes. It would take effect next April and allow a sub-minimum wage for teens.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray on Thursday proposed a phased-in increase of the minimum wage to $15 an hour over the next seven years - a compromise endorsed by both business and labor that would make the city's pay baseline the highest in the nation.

Whistle-blower Donna Busche, who raised safety concerns at the nation's most polluted nuclear weapons production site, was fired Tuesday from her job at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Busche's complaints are part of a string of whistle-blower and other claims related to the design and safety of an unfinished waste treatment plant at Hanford. Hanford was created by the federal government in the 1940s as part of the top-secret project to build the atomic bomb, and cleanup costs today run about $2 billion annually.

Gov. Jay Inslee said Tuesday he was suspending the use of the death penalty in Washington state for as long as he's in office, announcing a move that he hopes will enable officials to "join a growing national conversation about capital punishment."

Though Republicans tied themselves in knots and exposed their party's extensive internal rifts by offering four separate rebuttals to President Obama's State of the Union on Tuesday, a development that received less attention was the short response to the speech offered by recently-elected Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant.