Planet Seattle

In the roundup: security concerns as the Port of Vancouver expands, 12 temperature records driven by heat and smoke, and the Whitecaps’ financial struggles in trying to buy BC Place. Security concerns amid an accelerated expansion of the Port of Vancouver The Government of Canada has sent a project to expand the Roberts Bank Terminal 2 office of major projects for potential expedited approval. The plan is meant to add $100 billion in annual trade and increase the Port of Vancouver’s container...

In British Columbia: the 5th dumpling festival in Coquitlam with a Chinese theme, an expanded program for repeat offenders in the Lower Mainland, and the return of the “Vancouver Canucks” training camp to Penticton. BC Dumpling Festival 2026: 40,000 people, Chinese theme, and free entry The fifth annual dumpling festival in British Columbia is once again bringing Vancouver residents and visitors together at Town Centre Park in Coquitlam. Organizers are expecting around 40,000 attendees, making...

Today’s roundup features three major developments across British Columbia: police shot and killed a knife-wielding man in North Vancouver; a B.C. resident turned a dream into reality through a viral TikTok campaign; and the province was hit by extreme heat and smoke from wildfires, including a record 40.5°C in Lytton. Police shot a man in North Vancouver after he threatened passersby with a knife and tried to get into a patrol car The incident happened during the day on Tuesday at a mall in...

A heat wave has swept across the province, prompting health warnings and record-breaking energy demand. At the same time, Delta’s mayor and experts are raising concerns about the safety of an expanding port over a lack of police oversight and the risk of smuggling. British Columbia in the Heat: Authorities Warn of Health Risks Residents and visitors in British Columbia are preparing for a prolonged period of abnormal heat. According to meteorologists, heat warnings have been issued in more than...

Metro Vancouver’s chair could step down amid a wastewater scandal, Cariboo has issued evacuation orders due to wildfires, and Vancouver has announced a free Summer Lights fireworks show on July 31. Metro Vancouver chair Jerry Dobrovolny could leave his post Metro Vancouver, the regional government that brings together 21 municipalities, appears to be on the verge of major personnel changes. As Global News learned, in a closed meeting of the board on Thursday, district directors instructed the...

Fairmont Chateau Whistler has been named Canada’s best resort by Travel + Leisure. Pamela Anderson showed off her slice of paradise in her garden on Vancouver Island. A Burnaby resident won $2 million in the lottery and plans to invest it in buying a home. Fairmont Chateau Whistler named Canada’s best resort by Travel + Leisure For travellers hoping to spend the summer away from the hustle and bustle but don’t want to leave British Columbia, the country’s top resort is just two hours by car...

The Canadian retailer London Drugs is cutting 80 jobs, a Burnaby resident has won $2 million and plans to buy a house, and a campfire ban is returning to the South Coast of British Columbia due to hot weather. A wave of layoffs at London Drugs: what lies behind the cut of 80 jobs In early July 2026, the Canadian chain of pharmacies and everyday goods London Drugs announced a major restructuring that will affect nearly all of its stores in British Columbia. According to an internal memo obtained...

Looking at these three pieces together, what links them isn’t the topic itself—politics, nature, or sports—but a deeper motive: in today’s information space, society increasingly has to grapple not only with events themselves, but also with how those events are described, tallied, and presented. In one case, it’s war and how the Pentagon recalculates the dead and wounded, raising suspicions of an inconvenient truth being hidden ABC News. In another, it’s a natural disaster, where local...

Across all three pieces—about the Canada–U.S. bridge, about the record surge of measles in the U.S., and about the next phase of LeBron James’ career—on the surface they’re talking about entirely different things: trade and diplomacy, public health and sports. But they share one striking theme: major institutions today operate in conditions of high turbulence, and success is determined less by bold gestures than by the ability to withstand pressure, negotiate, and quickly adapt. Where it used...

If you look at these three news items together, you can easily see a common thread: even in very different areas — from human health to transportation and urban engineering — much depends on a delicate balance that is upset faster than it seems. In one case, it’s about a habit of caffeine and how its effects depend not only on the dose but also on the source of the substance; in another, it’s a sea plane crash where emergency response and the work of rescuers move to the foreground; and in the...

In five news bulletins from different areas, the same logic is at work: an external political crisis can quickly push up commodity prices and intensify uncertainty, but it doesn’t always immediately break the internal economy. As the United States increases its military presence in the Middle East in the wake of strikes on Iran, the labor market in the country shows unexpected resilience: the number of initial jobless claims has fallen to the lowest level since 1969. Against this backdrop,...

Across all three pieces—seemingly completely unrelated at first glance—there’s a common thread: how systems—natural, biological, and team-based—cope with stress and try to regain stability. Tropical Storm Bertha shows how quickly a tropical cyclone can fall apart and then re-form; a cyclospora outbreak illustrates how hard it is to localize the source of infection immediately across multiple states; and Jose Ramirez’s return to the Cleveland Guardians serves as a reminder that even a sports...

At first glance, these three pieces are about completely different things: a personnel crisis in Ukraine’s leadership, a local investigation into a death in Florida, and military drills by China and Russia near Japan. But if you look more broadly, they share one big storyline — a world in which security, risk management, and the ability to respond quickly to threats have become central political values. In some cases, this shows up as a fight over the right military strategy; in others, as the...

A roundup of the latest reports from CBS News, Fox News and ABC News shows that the conflict over Iran has moved from a limited exchange of strikes into a broader, strategic risk. On one end of this chain are the deaths of U.S. service members and discussion of expanding the U.S. military campaign; on the other end, gas prices in the United States are rising above the psychologically important $4-per-gallon mark. Between them lies the central knot of the entire story: the Strait of Hormuz,...

Three very different news items — about the US Congress, the biggest media deal in Hollywood, and a long-running criminal case — are really about the same thing: in the American system, decisions are rarely quick, and any major turning points almost always run into procedural barriers, legal disputes and battles over interpretation. Somewhere the question is whether the House will remain in session in Washington until the end of the week; somewhere it’s whether a merger of two media empires...

Taken together, these pieces show not just three separate stories, but a broader backdrop of the times: the world is living with a high level of uncertainty, where military risks, natural disasters, and even sports rumors are part of the same logic—an unstable logic in which any event rapidly shifts the balance of power, expectations, and interpretations. In one case, it’s the deaths of American service members in the Middle East and the derailment of a fragile ceasefire; in another, it’s the...

U.S. President Donald Trump ordered that no new strikes be carried out against Iran in order to give a chance to diplomatic efforts led by Oman. Sources told Axios: on Friday, Trump declined to approve plans for new strikes and ordered the military to stop air raids. At the same time, the army continues preparing military scenarios in case of escalation, although it is still unclear whether the halt is temporary or a change of course for the administration. CNN уточняет, that Vice President JD...

According to an investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian, amid rising tensions in the Middle East, Iran has significantly improved its ability to strike U.S. military bases and critical infrastructure in the region. The development of its missile program, the use of satellite imagery, and the borrowing of tactical methods from the war in Ukraine have enabled Tehran to increase the accuracy and destructive power of its attacks, as well as identify vulnerabilities in U.S. air-defense...

US President Donald Trump said that Venezuela is not yet ready to hold elections, but he acknowledged significant progress in that direction. He praised the work of Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, calling it “fantastic,” and stressed that cooperation in the oil market benefits both American companies and the Venezuelan people. Trump also noted that he knows the country well from the time of the Miss Universe competition, where Venezuela has consistently achieved success, and he promised that...

Washington and London are pushing to create an international mechanism to ensure the safety of shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. According to Axios, a high-level meeting is planned for next week in Britain’s capital, where the formation of a coalition will be discussed. The meeting comes amid a temporary lull in attacks on merchant vessels and a surge in regional diplomacy aimed at stabilizing one of the world’s key sea routes. According to sources, the meeting may include the US and UK defense...

Official Baghdad has categorically rejected information circulated by The New York Times that Iraq acted as a mediator between Iran and the United States in negotiations on a ceasefire. In a statement from the Iraqi prime minister’s office, the report is described as “unreliable and bears no relation to reality.” It refers to a purported Iranian refusal of a U.S. proposal. Iraqi authorities urged the media to verify information through official channels and not to circulate unconfirmed data...

Venezuela is going through a colossal crisis, exacerbated by natural disasters and the lack of prospects if the country does not unite. The author argues that recovery and the sharing of information must be grounded in solidarity and transparency in the management of resources. In his view, the current situation calls for true leadership to stop social and administrative decline. The government is especially harshly criticized, where, as the article puts it, the “most mediocre and unprepared...

The US Central Command said it has successfully concluded the 13th night in a row of large-scale strikes on targets in Iran. According to US forces, the attacks focused on the country’s southern and south-western provinces. Iranian sources report four deaths and seven injuries in the provinces of Khuzestan and Hormozgan, as well as damage in several cities. In Khuzestan province, the strikes hit the outskirts of the city of Ahvaz, where four people were killed and five others were wounded....

The tariff strikes that Trump has described as a lever for pressure in recent news reports do not look like a one-off step. Instead, they appear like an economic shock that is changing the rules of the game for partners across the entire hemisphere. At the center of attention are both concern and calculation: countries in Latin America and Canada are looking for retaliatory formulas, revising their negotiation positions, and preparing countermeasures to reduce risks for their own markets and...

Modern artificial intelligence models process all information that users enter into chat dialogues without distinguishing between corporate secrets and ordinary public data. This means that if an employee shares a company’s commercial secrets in an AI chat, they could end up in the model’s training dataset and become accessible to others. Such indiscriminate handling puts business security at risk: confidential information could be disclosed, and the company using AI could face data leaks and...

Picture this: a morning with fog over the bay, and down the street rolls a big yellow car. It doesn’t honk angrily like a vehicle— it rings. Inside, it smells of wood and a little bit of oil; the seats are polished by thousands of hands, and outside the window, hills, shops, and neighbors’ faces drift by. This was a Seattle tram. And almost nobody today knows why it disappeared. A City That Rang In the early twentieth century, Seattle was a tram city. Rails stretched in every direction— to Pike...

Imagine working all day—washing dishes, frying potatoes, clearing tables—and at the end getting so little money you can’t even afford a decent lunch. That’s how thousands of people lived in the American city of Seattle. And that’s exactly what one woman—Kshama Sawant, a teacher from faraway India—decided to change. What Is a Minimum Wage and Why It Matters Imagine that in your class there’s a rule: every child must get at least one candy at the end of the day—no matter how many assignments they...

Imagine this: you’re forced to leave your home, taking only the most important things—and then set out for the unknown. What would you take with you? Many Vietnamese women who fled their country in the late 1970s brought seeds. Small, light, almost invisible—yet they held everything inside: the taste of a homemade soup, the scent of Mother’s garden, a memory of home. Who Vietnamese refugees were and why they came to Seattle In 1975, the long and terrible war in Vietnam finally ended. Many...

Imagine this: you come to the river, and there’s a huge sea lion sitting there, looking at you with intelligent eyes and letting out a loud roar. You laugh, pull out your phone to take a photo, and think, “What a handsome guy!” That’s exactly how thousands of Seattle residents must have felt in the mid-1980s, when an unusual guest by the famous Ballard Locks appeared—named Herschel. But behind this sweet story there was a real drama: a tale of how one city tried to both love nature and protect...

Imagine this: there’s a vast forest that almost no one is allowed to enter. No shops, no roads, no houses. Even just taking a stroll—can’t. Sounds like a fairy tale about a bewitched place, doesn’t it? But it’s not a fairy tale. This is a real forest near the city of Seattle in the United States—and it fills your cup with tea every morning. Well, if you live in Seattle, of course. Where does the water in the tap come from? Most people don’t think about it. You turn on the tap, and water flows....

Imagine that inside your body there are two tiny organs—about the size of a fist—that do an enormous job every day. They filter all of your blood, removing everything harmful and unnecessary from it. These are the kidneys. But what happens if they suddenly stop working? Not so long ago, the answer was terrifying: the person would die. Then one night, a doctor from Seattle woke up with an idea—and an engineer helped him turn it into reality. Kidneys are small, but incredibly important Imagine a...

Imagine a market that hangs over the sea. Literally—it sits on the edge of a steep cliff above a bay, and if you look at it from the water, it seems like it’s about to drop straight into the waves. This is Pike Place Market in Seattle—one of the oldest markets in America, where more than a hundred years have been selling fish, flowers, cheese, and just about everything else. Tourists think it’s always been like this—loud, colorful, and eternal. But in reality, this market was nearly wiped out...

Imagine a massive concrete dome—so large that an entire neighborhood could fit inside it. That’s what the Kingdome stadium in Seattle was like. From the outside, it looked like a giant gray dish. But inside its walls, in crevices and dark corners, hundreds of birds made their home—swifts, sparrows, and bats. For them, it was a real house. The Old Home and Its Secret Residents The Kingdome opened in 1976 and quickly became one of the largest indoor stadiums in the world. It hosted American...

Imagine a store where you’re one of the owners. Not a CEO, not a millionaire—just you, and millions of people like you across the country. That’s how REI works: a huge outfitter for hiking and adventure, with its headquarters in Seattle. But what’s really interesting isn’t what they sell. What’s really interesting is the building itself—and the story of how it went from being an unwelcome guest to a beloved place for an entire neighborhood. What a cooperative is—and why that’s cool A typical...