Minor earthquakes rattle Mt. St. Helens, but no evidence of serious activity
Hundreds of earthquakes have been detected at Mount St. Helens this year. The vast majority have been too small to feel at the surface, and scientists say there's no cause for alarm.
Weston Thelen, a research seismologist at the Cascade Volcano Observatory, said the increased activity is not uncommon, and similar patterns can be found in records that go back to 1980.
"What we find is that it's not a direct precursor to an eruption. It's more part of background,” Thelen said. “And background consists of time periods where you have very little seismicity, and then time periods where you have swarms."
Thelen said the current cluster of quakes is consistent with something called recharge, which is the arrival of additional magma.
He says current monitoring systems would likely give about a week of notice prior to any future eruptions - big or small.
ALCU of Idaho to train people for immigrant advocacy
The bilingual advocacy workshop this summer will help advocates and immigrants better understand the legal system. The Somos program, which means “we are” in Spanish, is for anyone interested in advocacy work and civil rights.
“Its goal is to build the next generation of leaders in, specifically, the immigrant community and people who are passionate about immigrant rights,” said Rebecca De León, the Communications Director for the ACLU of Idaho.
The five-week program is structured around immigrant rights, but De Leon says the workshops will also give people tools to advocate for themselves and others.
“People get stuck in a very binary view of immigrants and they have a very elementary understanding of the complexities of immigration policy and immigration law,” she said.
The workshops, scheduled for next month in Caldwell and Twin Falls, will cover things like the origins of racism and how storytelling can help awareness and acceptance.
Amazon gets closer to plastics-free packaging
Amazon says it has reached an important milestone in its quest to reduce plastics in its packages. In North America, the company is now using paper instead of air-filled plastic in nearly all its packages. And the company says it’ll get rid of all of them by the end of this year.
The Washington-based retail giant says it has eliminated about 15 billion of those plastic tubes annually, from 2 billion packages, in just over a year and a half.
“I think they're gonna have a lot of happy customers. People are fed up with all the plastic,” said Heather Trim.
Trim is the executive director of Zero Waste Washington. She says this is a big move in amazon’s sustainability strategy.
“They've been moving from those plastic mailers to the paper, fluffy mailers,” Trim said. “And now with these fillers, they're gonna have I think, very little plastic left and what they're shipping.”
Like single-use plastic bags, the tubes and the mailers can’t be recycled in curb-side bins. You have to take them in separately.
Trim says Amazon has been helping craft legislation in Washington to make manufacturers responsible for any packaging that can’t be recycled curbside. The so-called WRAP Act hasn’t passed in Washington, but similar laws are already in place in five states, including Oregon.
Candidates for Washington attorney general present their cases
Beginning next year, Washington will have a new person leading its legal team. Three-term Attorney General Bob Ferguson is running for governor.
The three candidates, two Democrats and one Republican, who hope to replace him presented their views at a recent forum in the Tri-Cities
The Republican is Pete Serrano. He’s in his second term on the Pasco City Council. The council chose him at the beginning of this year to serve as mayor.
His legal experience includes time as a lawyer for the U.S. Department of Energy at Hanford. He’s also a founder and attorney for a non-profit, the Silent Majority Foundation, which vows to protect people from government overreach, including COVID regulations.
“One of our first lawsuits was to sue the Biden administration, to make sure that workers were protected, their health care, their freedom of religion and their freedom of expression was at the top of the priority. I have no issues suing, whether it’s the state agencies or whether it’s the federal agencies, regardless of who’s in that office," he said.
Democrat Nick Brown served as an attorney in the Army, as a lawyer for Governor Jay Inslee and as the former U.S. Attorney for Western Washington from 2021 to 2023.
“I was raised in Pierce County by two parents who were veterans and lifelong public servants and all throughout my life they pushed me to give a damn about what was happening about my community and the people in it. As a lawyer, I’ve always striven to be using the tool of law for justice, to help people," he said.
Manka Dhingra touts her experience as a senior deputy prosecutor in King County and as a Democratic state senator from Redmond. She chairs the Law and Justice Committee. She says her priorities as attorney general would depend on whether Donald Trump is elected president.
“Making sure we’re protecting reproductive rights, LGBTQI rights, that we are focused on consumer protection, that we are focused on data privacy," she said. "Those are all the laws that I have worked on as a state senator. I have written and passed those laws and those are the laws that the attorney general will be in charge of enforcing.”
The debate was sponsored by the League of Women Voters and Northwest Public Broadcasting. You can read more about the debate here.
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Reporting was contributed by Kate Walters, Bellamy Pailthorp, Monica Esquivel, and Doug Nadvornick.