Today's headlines:
- Gov. Bob Ferguson signed some of Washington's first laws regulating artificial intelligence, focusing on content transparency and chatbot safety.
- Washington budget cuts abound, but the state won't cut long-term care for legal immigrants.
- The Trump administration is investigating WA again. This time, it's over a program meant to address a history of racial discrimination in housing finance.
- More stringent Medicaid expansion eligibility rules head to the Idaho Senate floor.
- Stevens County residents will vote on a levy next month that will determine if their libraries continue current service levels.
Plus, you might know Amal El-Mohtar as a co-author of the best-selling science fiction novel, “This Is How You Lose the Time War.” She's now celebrating the release of her latest fiction anthology "Seasons of Glass and Iron." She chats with SPR's Owen Henderson ahead of a release event at the Spokane Central Library on March 30.
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SPR News Today is a production of Spokane Public Radio.
Reporting today was contributed by Nate Sanford, Sarah Mizes-Tan, Owen Henderson, James Dawson and Monica Carrillo-Casas.
Owen Henderson hosts and produces the show. Eliza Billingham provides digital support.
TRANSCRIPT
[THEME MUSIC]
OWEN HENDERSON: From Spokane Public Radio, it’s SPR News Today.
I’m Owen Henderson. It’s Friday, March 27, 2026.
On today’s show, Washington’s governor has signed some of the state’s first artificial intelligence regulations into law. They’re focused on transparency and chatbot safety.
And who might keep—or lose—Medicaid expansion eligibility under new rules moving through the Idaho legislature?
Plus, what does it take to make a fictional world feel real? Award-winning author Amal El-Mohtar has thoughts on the matter, and she’ll share them in a conversation about her new anthology of speculative fiction and fantasy short stories.
All that and more, coming up on SPR News Today.
[FADE OUT THEME]
Gov. Bob Ferguson signed some of Washington’s first artificial intelligence regulations into law this week.
The two new measures focus on chatbot safety—and transparency for AI-generated content. KNKX Murrow News Fellow Nate Sanford reports.
NATE SANFORD: Bob Ferguson has reason to be concerned about AI. He’s a parent and someone who uses the internet.
FERGUSON: “I’m confident I’m not the only Washingtonian who often sees something on my phone and wondering to myself: Is that AI? Or is that real?”
NS: Ferguson hopes the new law will help clear things up. Starting next year, AI developers with more than 1 million monthly subscribers will be required to include watermarks or metadata and make other tools available so people can detect if audio, video or text was generated with their technology.
Another new law, sponsored by Rep. Clyde Shavers, will require AI chatbot developers to include suicide prevention protocols and content filters for minors.
SHAVERS: “I think we’re at this point, at this moment in Washington state for these kind of broader artificial intelligence legislation to pass.”
NS: Many other proposed AI regulations failed to advance while the tech industry pushed back.
But Shavers thinks they’re likely to be brought up again in future sessions.
Nate Sanford, reporting.
OH: If you or someone you know needs crisis support, call or text 9-8-8.
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Washington state will make heavy cuts to early childhood education and childcare subsidy programs this summer to balance its budget.
But the state won’t cut funds for long-term care for immigrants in the country legally.
State Government Reporter Sarah Mizes-Tan has more.
SARAH MIZES-TAN: About 1,200 immigrants will have their long-term health care preserved through the state starting in July.
Adam Glickman of SEIU 775 which represents healthcare workers says these immigrants are some of the neediest cases.
ADAM GLICKMAN: “You know these are, in a lot of ways, the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. These are folks who one, often moved here from war torn countries and they are seniors or people with developmental disabilities.”
SMT: State budget writers admitted they had a tough task laid out for them. They faced the challenge of closing a $2-billion-dollar deficit.
Lawmakers say this was partially caused by heavy cuts from the federal government to social service programs for immigrants and refugees.
In Olympia, I’m Sarah Mizes-Tan.
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OH: The Trump administration says it’s investigating a Washington effort aimed at addressing historic discrimination in housing loans.
The U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department announced this week it’s looking into the Washington State Housing Finance Commission’s Covenant Homeownership Program.
It offers loans to first-time homebuyers descended from people who lived in the state before 1968 and were part of a racial group affected by housing discrimination, like racial covenants.
HUD says the program uses “illegal racial and ethnic preferences.”
Governor Ferguson told reporters he’s confident the program can withstand a legal challenge and said the latest investigation is just “another day at the office” for blue state officials dealing with the Trump administration.
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Idaho Republican lawmakers are close to finalizing new eligibility rules for those receiving health insurance through the state’s Medicaid expansion program.
James Dawson has more.
JAMES DAWSON: Republican Rep. John Vander Woude’s bill would force people enrolled in Medicaid expansion to prove they’ve been in-school, working, or volunteering at least 30 hours a week for three months before they could get coverage.
Vander Woude says he doesn’t want people to qualify for health insurance by working just one month.
JOHN VANDER WOUDE: “I like the three months because I want to make sure the requirements we’re putting in are more long-term.”
JD: Three months is the maximum lookback period allowed by federal law.
Senate Democratic Leader Melissa Wintrow says the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare is already overburdened with other projects to take on more paperwork to verify.
MELISSA WINTROW: “I think this will present additional administrative errors that will cause people to get kicked off of Medicaid expansion.”
JD: About 79,000 people are currently enrolled under Idaho’s Medicaid expansion. If passed by the full Senate and signed into law by the governor, Vander Woude’s bill would take effect by Dec. 31.
James Dawson, Boise State Public Radio News.
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OH: Without extra tax dollars, Stevens County library officials say they’ll have to cut services.
So they’re asking voters to bump up the library district’s operations levy from 27 cents to 44 cents per thousand dollars in assessed property value.
Library Director Amanda Six says inflation is driving up the cost of operations—meaning a levy failure would result in cuts to services and staff.
AMANDA SIX: "We would have to reduce the number of after school programs, early literacy programs, tech programs. In addition, we would have to cut materials, like the things we order and buy for the library, for patrons to use, downloadable eBooks, regular books, all those things."
OH: The district’s seven libraries across Stevens County would also probably need to close one or two more days a week.
Trustees say a 44-cent levy is the minimum the district needs to sustain current services for the next decade. Ballots are due April 28.
[SHORT MUSIC BED]
You might know Amal El-Mohtar as a co-author of the best-selling science fiction novel, “This Is How You Lose the Time War.”
Well, the award-winning poet and author has a new fiction collection, “Seasons of Glass and Iron,” and she's celebrating the release at the Spokane Central Library on March 30th.
She joins me now to talk about her work. Amal El-Mohtar, thank you for your time this morning.
AMAL EL-MOHTAR: Thank you so much for having me.
OH: So, your new book, it's an anthology. I believe the description says it's “miscellany from other worlds” — diary entries, reference materials, letters, folktales.
You write in the foreword that you weren't actually initially sure what the through line would be as you assembled this collection from your work, but what you landed on, and I'm only lightly paraphrasing here, is that you love women.
AEM: Yes.
OH: Elaborate on that for me.
AEM: Sure. I knew that I'd be looking back on about 15 years worth of short stories.
Given that all of the stories had very different geneses, it felt like it was possible that they would just end up being too dissimilar to each other to really make a coherent aesthetic argument, which is the thing that a friend once said about collections and I've always taken to heart.
But the throughline just being, very straightforwardly, ‘Oh, almost all of these stories that I feel proudest of have at least two women in them talking to each other about their lives and their experiences, and sometimes reading each other's stories against their grain.’
And it was sort of heartening to see that it is actually a core part of my life to assert over and over again that I love women.
I think women's conversations with each other and women's stories and women's relationships with each other are deeply important and deeply worthy of being presented in story.
OH: So like some of the pieces in this collection, your very popular novel, “This Is How You Lose the Time War,” is told in an epistolary style, which is written in messages from agents on opposite sides of this conflict as they fall in love. I'm curious, what about this particular writing style draws you to it?
AEM: Oh, so much. That's such a great question. I think there's something so intimate and confessional, potentially, about letter writing.
And with “Time War,” in particular, the tension between trying to impress and outmaneuver someone while simultaneously revealing a great deal about yourself, the vulnerability of committing your desire and interest to paper—well, to, you know, quote, unquote, paper—to the rings of a or the belly of a seal and stuff like that.
I think that that tension between the performance of an identity and the confession of an identity is so rich and so seductive, honestly, to me, both as something to write and to read, that I think there's a lot of really generative power there that I find myself returning to a lot.
I love a second person book.I simply, I love to encounter it. I love to see it done well. I kind of go, ‘Yum, yum, yum, second person, give it to me.’
OH: You know, speculative fiction, fantasy are the realms that you often live in as a writer. How much world building do you find yourself doing when you're writing just a short story as opposed to a longer work?
What are the things that you think are the most important to establish when you're creating this universe for your story to take place in?
AEM: World building is such an interesting aspect of writing because in some ways, you know, you can think of it as the container into which the story is going to fit, but that in practice is not really the way of it. It's more like the story is the aperture through which the world is perceived.
So when I—the way that I think about it really, really varies from one story to another because there are some where the story as I have it has emerged from a thought about how a world could be and others where the story is emerging from something else and the world is there as more of a rich tapestry, you know, a backdrop.
OH: I'm curious how you think about just speculative fiction as a genre, as a tool to re-examine the world, the real world, the world we live in and comment on that world.
AEM: One of the things that I would tell my students over and over to develop or improve their work is to read it out loud.
For a number of reasons, you read it out loud, you hear how a sentence kind of fits in your mouth and you can find different things about the cadence in which you're writing, you know, understanding your prose.
But the main reason is that to read something out loud, to read your own work out loud, puts distance between you and the work that you're reading so that you can appreciate things that might otherwise be invisible to you or that you're taking for granted.
And I think that what speculative fiction does is allow us to have this toolbox of different ways to introduce distance between us and things that we might otherwise take for granted.
And I don't mean this just in terms of allegory or, you know, one-for-one representations of things.
I mean that there are things that are easier to apprehend at a remove.
The toolbox that speculative fiction has, I think, allows for more ways of creating and maintaining that distance so that you can look at our world slant and by so doing, see some elements of it more clearly, perhaps.
Or if not more clearly, then in ways that are surprising or novel or revelatory.
I think that's the main thing, that idea of just, you can put distance between you and something in order to actually paradoxically come closer to it or come closer to apprehending something true about it.
OH: Amal El-Mohtar is the author of the new book “Seasons of Glass and Iron.”
She'll be discussing her work with local author Stephanie Oakes at the Spokane Central Library on the evening of March 30th.
Amal, thank you so much for your time and this fascinating conversation.
AEM: Thank you so much for having me, Owen. It's been a real pleasure.
[SHORT MUSIC BED]
OH: SPR News Today is a production of Spokane Public Radio.
Reporting today was contributed by Nate Sanford, Sarah-Mizes Tan, James Dawson, Monica Carrillo-Casas and me, Owen Henderson.
I’m also your host and producer. Eliza Billingham provides digital support.
Thanks for listening, and have a good weekend. We’ll be back in your feeds next week.
It’s SPR.
