Planet Seattle

Starting July 24, Seattle and the surrounding area seem to flip into a summer celebration mode: several food festivals and street events at once, outdoor concerts, movies on big screens, and a range of theatrical productions. If you like to keep moving, there’s plenty to choose from too—running events and parades, sports weekends, and car shows. And for those who prefer a slower pace, there are architecture and waterfront walks, parks, and summer excursions that stretch the evening longer than...

This roundup is for planning in advance for the period starting July 24, 2026: August and September feature concerts by major artists and major sporting events. Keep an eye on the dates so you can snag tickets and plan logistics for venues such as T-Mobile Park, Climate Pledge Arena, Lumen Field, and White River Amphitheatre, where Muse, J. Cole, Karol G, The Strokes, Noah Kahan, Tame Impala, Andrea Bocelli, Weezer, Journey, and others perform. Special attention goes to days of live music “to...

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...

Canada is accelerating the expansion of the Port of Vancouver to tap into Asian markets, a move that has sparked disputes with Indigenous communities. Rare thunderstorms with large hail are expected along the south coast of British Columbia. In downtown Vancouver, 161 rooms in the Regent emergency hotel will be demolished to make way for social housing. Canada accelerates expansion of the Port of Vancouver: a new strategy to reach markets beyond the US The Government of Canada has announced...

The Vancouver Whitecaps FC has proposed taking over the management of BC Place Stadium, a move that could address revenue and scheduling problems. At the same time, the mayor of Vancouver criticized the province for placing new involuntary-treatment beds in other cities, leaving Vancouver with a disproportionate burden. Vancouver Whitecaps make a bid to run BC Place: a lifeline for fans After months of anxiety about the future of the Vancouver Whitecaps, a glimmer of hope has finally emerged....

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...

If you look at three very different news stories together, you can immediately see how differently the modern information stream is structured: one story is about a sudden threat to a child’s life and the fragility of everyday safety; another is about an international escalation, where leaders’ decisions can change the course of a conflict; and the third is about sports, which long ago stopped being only sport and has become a battleground for cultural and political disputes. These pieces are...

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...

Diosdado Cabello, head of Venezuela’s ruling party, said that none of the opposition leaders who had returned to the country has provided real assistance to residents of the state of La Guaira, who were affected by the recent earthquakes. In his program “Con el Mazo Dando,” he stressed that the opposition figures, who had previously announced their return to work for the good of Venezuela, were merely taking photos for publicity rather than engaging in selfless help, and cited Lester Toledo as...

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Iran is “begging” for an agreement with Washington—both directly and through intermediaries. In his view, Tehran can get a good deal if it “returns to reason” after recent strikes. Rubio stressed that the goal of the United States is not regime change in Iran, but the complete elimination of Iran’s nuclear weapons. Rubio noted that Iranian officials, or those speaking on their behalf, are constantly trying to reach an understanding, but each time,...

Fresh debates are erupting around the course of the U.S. administration: at the center are tough moves in foreign policy, sanctions measures, and regional pressure which, according to critics, could push events toward escalation. A special focus is on discussions about Cuba and Iran—where some observers see an effort to secure political concessions, while others fear that a “governance by pressure” logic could lead to destabilization and complicate balances in a region that is already fragile....

Jordan is watching with alarm the sudden worsening of tensions between Iran and the United States, believing the current round of the conflict is more dangerous than previous flare-ups. Unlike earlier clashes, Tehran, according to Amman, has now targeted strategic sites within the kingdom — the port of Aqaba and an airport — not only American military bases. This fundamentally changes the nature of the threat: Iran appears to view Jordan as a central arena for its retaliatory operations, going...

In the state of Barinas (Venezuela), after the deaths of two doctors who were admitted to hospital with severe symptoms, local authorities carried out an investigation and ruled out an outbreak. The head of regional health services, Jose Rafael Fajardo, explained that the doctors had been in a private clinic for several days before being admitted to intensive care, where they later died. Tests for hantavirus, yellow fever, dengue fever, leptospirosis, and other dangerous infections came back...

Imagine that every time it rains in the city, something invisible—and deadly for fish—washes off the roads and into the nearest stream. The fish die there within a few hours, and for years no one could figure out why. This is what happened in Seattle for decades. And when scientists finally solved the mystery, it turned out the answer was right under everyone’s feet—more precisely, under the wheels. Orcas off Seattle’s Coast: Beautiful—and in Danger In Puget Sound, right off the coast of...

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...

Imagine this: every summer you go to the same park. There are little slides where you race down screaming, cars you can crash into without consequences, and ice cream that melts faster than you can finish it. You know every corner of the place. And then, one day, you come back—and it’s gone. Instead of a carousel, there’s a fence. Instead of laughter, there’s silence. That’s what happened to thousands of children in Seattle in 2011, when Fun Forest closed. Where This Magic Forest Came From The...

Imagine your mom works all day—clearing tables in a café, washing dishes, smiling at customers—and then comes home in the evening and realizes that the money still isn’t enough for a decent dinner. Not because she’s working badly. Because that’s just how the rules are set up. This is exactly what was happening to thousands of people in the American city of Seattle—and that’s why one of the most unusual stories about how ordinary people can change the law began there. A woman with a microphone...