Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) and other Virginia leaders proudly touted a plan alongside Washington Capitals and Wizards owner Ted Leonsis to bring both teams to a new arena in Alexandria, Virginia, leaving Washington, D.C., leaders scrambling to prevent the move.

Washington Examiner Commentary Editor Conn Carroll joins Investigations Editor Sarah Bedford to discuss how Washington, D.C., has been wrecked by crime and why the Wizards and Capitals are moving out of the district, as well as the border talks occurring in the Senate.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s popularity continues to soar, even after voters turned the commonwealth’s general assembly over to Democrats.

Doctors urge people who are experiencing respiratory problems to see a medical professional who can check their symptoms and test to determine what their illness is.

Gus Walz, the 17-year-old son of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has nonverbal learning disorder. He's one of millions of American kids with NVLD, which has been described as the opposite of dyslexia.

Testing has confirmed H5N1 bird flu outbreaks at three Central Valley dairy farms. Officials say the infections were likely the result of cattle transportation.

Three more California dairy herds have been infected with H5N1 bird flu. A new case of human infection has also been reported in Missouri.

Aging infrastructure, short-term thinking and ambitions that far exceed its funding are among the problems facing NASA, according to a new report.

Two more California dairy herds have been infected by H5N1 bird flu, bringing the state's total to eight.

With 17 dairy herds in California now infected with bird flu, the state is upping its surveillance.

"Let It Out," a stand-up show hosted at the Laugh Factory, aimed to demonstrate that making comedy shows inclusive for neurodivergent people could be easy.

Enterovirus D68, which in rare cases can cause polio-like paralysis in children, is on the rise in California and across the nation, analyses show.

The number of dairy herds infected with H5N1 Bird Flu doubled over the weekend. The count is now 34.

Although California dairy farmers anticipated a bird flu mortality rate of less than 2%, some say between 10% and 15% of infected cattle are dying.

It's hard to beat the convenience of baby food pouches. But overreliance can affect a child's nutrition, food preferences and speech development, experts warn.

Although California dairy farmers had heard about the H5N1 bird flu before it hit, none was prepared for the devastation it would cause in some herds.

Maternal health organizations and advocates are urging the California surgeon general to suspend the rollout of a plan aimed at reducing maternal mortality.

H5N1 bird flu has been discovered in a pig in Oregon, a development that has sparked new concerns among infectious disease experts.

Few drugs are available to treat heavy metals that enter the body, either from lead poisoning or nuclear fallout. A UC Berkeley startup hopes to change that.

Public health officials maintain the risk of H5N1 bird flu infection remains low. They are searching for the source.

Social media has become an accepted way to report and break news stories today. Twitter and Facebook are routinely used by newspapers, television networks and radio stations as sources for quotes. Some athletes and teams are bypassing the mainstream media and using social media to make major announcement on their own.

The other prominent unrestricted free agent for the Capitals this summer is Matt Hendricks. The veteran winger has set himself up for the one big contract in his NHL career.

The Capitals don’t have many decisions to make this summer. When NHL free agency opens on July 5 the two key players they have headed to the open market are center Mike Ribeiro and winger Matt Hendricks.

Capitals free agent forward Wojtek Wolski has signed a contract with Kontinental Hockey League club Torpedo Nizhny Novgorod, the team announced on Monday.

There aren’t a ton of internal decisions for Capitals general manager George McPhee to make this summer. He has four unrestricted free agents pending July 5. Defenseman Tom Poti and forward Wojtek Wolski won’t be back for sure. We’re unclear on the status of forwards Matt Hendricks and Mike Ribeiro.

That was some glorious return from the All-Star break for the Wizards, now wasn’t it? From the scoreboard that didn’t work, including the time and shot clock normally kept above the backboards, to Wale getting in a feud with the Toronto Raptors broadcasters, who called him a local rapper and said he was ‘no Drake,’ to the random “Jor-dan Craw-ford!” chant that sprang to life late as the Wizards failed to generate any consistent offensive flow and as Crawford himself remained reclined at the end of the bench throughout the game.

I caught up with Wizards coach Randy Wittman prior to shootaround this morning ahead of facing the Denver Nuggets tonight. Here’s what he had to say about trading away Jordan Crawford:

*Whatever the trade deadline and All-Star break did to disrupt the flow of the resurgent Wizards, they’re back. The idea of home wins over legitimate Western Conference teams Denver and Houston on back-to-back nights appeared daunting after the Wizards looked lethargic in their loss to Toronto earlier in the week. Instead, they proved they can still dictate how they want to play defensively over the course of 48 minutes against two teams with different kinds of significant offensive punch.

With their 90-84 win at Air Canada Centre on Monday, the Wizards sort of vindicated the notion that who they are now is a team that’s better on the road than their record (5-22) would indicate. I say “sort of” because that was the epitome of ugly. But it was also a game in which the Wizards never trailed by more than three points. As bad as they looked offensively at times (20 turnovers), they still had 23 assists on 34 field goals and made the Raptors, who shot 36.7 percent, look even worse.

There’ll be no more teasing with the standings after the Wizards lost, 96-95, to the Detroit Pistons. I’ll get to that in a sec, but first:

After it looked for a time like Bradley Beal might just threaten Portland Trail Blazers point guard Damian Lillard for 2013 NBA rookie of the year, the Wizards shooting guard ultimately finished third after the latter portion of his season was racked by injuries.

Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and his deputies in the House endorsed Rep. David Trone's (D-MD) run for Senate on Monday, further dividing the party in what has become a two-person race in Maryland.

The PGA Tour announced it is adding Tiger Woods to its policy board and making changes to its governance after criticism from several players over the lack of transparency in the lead-up to the announced deal between the PGA Tour and the Saudi-backed LIV Golf in June.

The personal information of more than 200,000 people in Los Angeles County was potentially exposed after a hacker used a phishing email to steal login credentials.

California's efforts to protect children from the harms of social media have faced legal challenges from the tech industry.

In "Mating in Captivity" and "The State of Affairs," Esther Perel dissects our hidden desires and impulses with intellectual rigor.

San Franciscans have rejected the city's far-left image in recent years, pulling it toward the center. Aaron Peskin says he wants to be the next "progressive" mayor.

Elwood Edwards, the graphics guru and camera operator who voiced AOL's iconic and once ubiquitous greeting, 'You've got mail,' has died at age 74.

L.A.-area startups received $1.8 billion in the third quarter, the highest quarterly amount for the region, according to CB Insights. Most of it went to a single company.

The Guardian 5000 Series Hotplate Stirrers represent a significant advancement in laboratory equipment, combining cutting-edge technology with unparalleled safety features. As the next generation of Guardian stirrers, these models offer exceptional performance and reliability for a wide range of applications.

Nematodes can sniff out trouble, kicking off a mitochondrial defense in the gut to fend off bacterial invaders.

The Wizards found out last week they will have the eighth-best odds (3.5 percent) to win next month's draft lottery after losing a tiebreaker with the Detroit Pistons. While they could leapfrog to the first, second or third pick, in an unlikely scenario they could fall as far as 11th.

The Okemos school board in Michigan voted Monday to drop its teams' name, no longer calling them the “Chiefs.”

The United States Coast Guard says it has recovered the remaining debris from the site of the Titan submersible that imploded four months ago while visiting the site of the RMS Titanic shipwreck.

(The Center Square) - How should researchers measure the populations of migratory birds? Researchers developed an idea around a campfire that was put to the test for the first time in Bosque Del Apache earlier this month, according to the University of New Mexico.

A horned "devil comet" barreling toward Earth is set to explode in the coming days.

Researchers confirm the terror bird fossil 20 years after its South American discovery, comparing the creature to a massive, carnivorous-like ostrich.

In between playing defense and scheming to win back Seattle’s voters over the next few election cycles, we should carve out some time for self-reflection. It’s tempting to think of the present moment as a backlash against progress, a temporary deviation in the arc of the moral universe—or perhaps, for the pessimist, to doubt the notion of progress altogether. But was this reaction really inevitable? by Katie Wilson

It’s a trying time for Seattle’s left.

The city’s new council members are rounding the curve on their first year in office, and I don’t know about you, but I’m wishing it was time to pass the baton. It’s depressing enough that City Hall is no longer a laboratory for progressive policy innovation. But it’s the Bad Idea Whac-A-Mole that’s truly exhausting: rolling back minimum wages and renter protections; defunding community-driven development; reinstating so-called SOAP and SODA zones; turning our big business tax into a slush fund. The left is having to fight like hell just to defend the achievements of the past decade.

In between playing defense and scheming to win back Seattle’s voters over the next few election cycles, we should carve out some time for self-reflection. It’s tempting to think of the present moment as a backlash against progress, a temporary deviation in the arc of the moral universe—or perhaps, for the pessimist, to doubt the notion of progress altogether. But was this reaction really inevitable? Can we draw any lessons from it? What should the left do differently in the future to regain influence and maintain it?

Critics of progressive-left political culture, as it’s developed over the past dozen or so years, often emphasize its supposed impotence: its penchant for loudness on social media, insistence on ideological purity, and zeal for “canceling” individuals instead of changing systems. Its adherents operate mainly in the symbolic realm and can’t break out of their echo chamber long enough to affect the real world.

Whatever the merits of this kind of critique, it doesn’t fully capture what’s happened in Seattle. Precisely what characterizes our city (and just a handful of others) is that the progressive left has been effective, relatively speaking, at winning real things. But our success is not due to some special organizing prowess or because we’ve avoided the pitfalls of the wider culture. It has more to do with our city’s demographic peculiarities.

Over the past several decades, progressive politics have come to correlate ever more strongly with educational attainment, while “dealigning” from markers of working class status. The gradual replacement of old Seattle’s blue collar workforce, displaced by rising housing costs and the dwindling of maritime and industrial jobs, with the younger, more affluent tech worker set hasn’t made Seattle any less blue; perhaps the opposite. Add to that some political self-selection among new arrivals, and the average normie non-activist voter just happens to be a flaming lib. On top of all that, union density in Washington state is among the highest in the country, and when Seattle’s labor unions decide to throw their weight around in local elections, left-leaning candidates tend to get a leg up.

With these advantages, Seattle’s left hasn’t had to be extraordinarily smart or strategic to win a modicum of political power. And a movement with power faces different problems than a movement in opposition. From the outside, it’s easy to lambaste the status quo and its obvious failings. But actually governing is more complicated. It means passing policies, implementing them, defending their results. It also means being vulnerable to blame for whatever’s going wrong in the city, whether or not it’s your fault or within your power to fix.

Of course, even at its strongest, Seattle’s progressive left held only partial power—through a city council majority that was often undermined by more centrist mayors. In such circumstances, governing also means having to decide when to remain oppositional, and when to compromise and win what you can. Either way, you have to tell a good story, explaining what you’ve done and why you couldn’t do more, to avoid being seen as ineffective.

All this means that the progressive predisposition of Seattle’s electorate is a trap, as well as an advantage. If it were harder to get lefties into office, that might force us to be more strategic about what they should do when they get there—and to build the kind of movement that can support them when the going gets rough.

Winning power is one thing, holding it is another.

Over the last two election cycles, the left lost it. The backlash began in 2021 with the victories of Mayor Bruce Harrell, Councilmember Sara Nelson, and City Attorney Ann Davison. Last fall finished the job, ushering in the most conservative city council Seattle has seen in a long time.

In my new column for The Stranger, I plan to look both backward and forward. I’ll dig through the past ten-plus years in search of lessons that can help Seattle’s left into the future. I write as someone who’s been involved in many—though by no means all—of the progressive policy battles of this period, primarily through my work with the Transit Riders Union. But I’m speaking for myself, not for any organization, and I don’t expect that all my opinions will be popular. There is too much groupthink on the left; so let’s disagree!

The backlash elections of 2021 and 2023 centered most obviously around the issues of homelessness, policing, and public safety. I will start the journey there, looking critically at the question of what our goals should be and how we frame and explain these goals.

These are themes we share with other progressive big cities, but our politics have a unique side, too. No look back at the past decade of Seattle’s left can bypass an assessment of Kshama Sawant’s tenure on the council, and the influence of her former organization, Socialist Alternative.

And these discussions will raise larger questions about progressive-left organizing. Who is “the left,” anyway, and does “progressive” mean anything anymore, if it ever did? Whom are we trying to organize and how? Toward what ends?

The left is not a monolith. In practice, Seattle’s left today is an uneasy alliance of labor unions, community organizations from the long-established to the ad-hoc, issue-based advocacy groups, service-focused nonprofits, parties and other overtly political formations, and freelance activists, coalescing imperfectly and temporarily around specific campaigns or policy goals. Between and also within these entities there exists a multiplicity of worldviews, theories of social change, and visions of a future, better social order.

When someone on the left (like me) talks about what “we” should be doing, only in the most abstract sense are they speaking to and about this whole constellation of actors. But throughout these institutions and broader left milieu there are individuals who, to a greater or lesser extent, can choose to do things differently, or to do something new.

There is a gleam of light on the horizon. In next Tuesday’s special election for citywide council position 8, the left looks poised to claw back a seat. Next year will bring a larger opportunity, with the mayor and city attorney up for re-election as well as the two citywide council positions. But progressives won’t have a chance at a reliable governing majority until 2027.

So let’s make sure that when we win that majority, we’re prepared to hold onto it. It’s easy to bemoan the hypocrisy of Seattle liberals, the reactionary and ungenerous impulses too often hiding behind those “in this house we believe” yard signs. I’ve done that myself. But if the left can’t maintain the edge in a city where your average voter is at pains to prove his progressive bona fides, what chance do we have at power anywhere?

The Stranger's morning news round-up. by Nathalie Graham

One more for the blue: After a neck-in-neck race, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez officially won re-election to the House in the 3rd Congressional District, beating out far-right challenger Joe Kent. Her win is another step forward for Democrats as they try to take back the House and retain a shred of power in the coming administration from hell. About two dozen races nation-wide still need to be decided.

Please spare us, H5N1: The Centers for Disease Control want more testing done for bird flu after blood tests on 115 of dairy workers showed 7% had bird flu antibodies, meaning they'd already contracted the disease at some point. Previously, we only confirmed 46 cases of bird flu jumping from cows to farmworkers. This new study suggests that bird flu has infected many more people than the confirmed cases. Experts say this indicates the H5N1 viruses are a greater threat than we realized. Great! Another flu just in time for the vaccine-doubters to take office. 

Wet weekend—and then week—ahead: Friday will likely be our last dry day for a while. Get your galoshes ready. The rain starts Saturday and it'll continue at least throughout the week.

I hope you like rain this weekend! ????️

It could be wet for the State H.S. football tournament games across the Puget Sound region. #pnw pic.twitter.com/JAvPx7hegV

— Jake Whittenberg (@jwhittenbergK5) November 8, 2024

That's nice: Boeing said it will pay the employees the money they lost while being furloughed during the machinists' strike that started in September. 

Egyptian flooding: A pipe leak at the historic Egyptian Cinema on Capitol Hill shut down the 108-year-old theater for the "foreseeable future." Repairs will be expensive and take months. The universe does not want me or my people (progressives, art house movie lovers) to be happy this week. 

INBOX: The SIFF Cinema Egyptian is going to be closed for "the foreseeable future and the Fine Arts building leadership expect that it will take multiple months of building closure to assess, repair and reopen." Sad news especially during what is a big time of the year for film. pic.twitter.com/v2ItPx5Lpi

— Chase 'Hutch' Hutchinson (@EclecticHutch) November 7, 2024

Another hit while we're down: Don't forget, five light rail stops will close this weekend. Starting at 10 pm on Friday through 5 am Monday, Westlake, Symphony, Pioneer Square, International District/Chinatown, and Stadium stations will all be closed and inaccessible. Trains will run between Lynnwood and Capitol Hill and between Sodo and Angle Lake. Shuttle buses will be available to bridge gaps between open and closed stations. It’s all part of the crawling effort to connect Line 1 to the Eastside line.

Sign of the times: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale rocketed to the top of Amazon's bestsellers list this week.  

Racist texts: In the days after the election, Black and Brown people across the country received spammy, racist texts telling them they had "been selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation" and that the senders' "executive slave catchers" would pick them up. State attorney generals say they will root out who sent these texts. A second Donald Trump term means the masks covering the depravity in America are well and truly off. Racists are emboldened. 

Nobody panic: Forty-three monkeys escaped from a medical lab in South Carolina. "There is almost no danger to the public," a local police chief said. No danger? Isn't this how Planet of the Apes started? 

Israeli soccer fans attacked in Amsterdam: Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv and Dutch's Ajax faced off in a Europa League soccer game Thursday. After the game, people attacked Israelis in hit-and-run scooter attacks. Five Israeli fans went to the hospital, but have since been released. Around 20 to 30 other Israelis sustained light injuries. Police arrested 63 people, and ten are still in custody. Context, as always, is important. In the days leading up to the match, social media videos showed Maccabi fans "chanting anti-Arab slurs, praising Israeli military attacks in Gaza, and yelling 'fuck the Arabs,'" according to CNN. Ajax won the game 5-0. 

And now, something from Ashley about the cops: 

Fill’er up: The King County Jail officially lifted misdemeanor booking restrictions for the Seattle Police Department (SPD) allowing officers to finally lock up all those pesky Target shoplifters and people who tried to use the bathroom at PCC one too many times and ended up trespassed. I wrote about how SPD Deputy Chief Eric Barden told officers in a department wide email Tuesday that they should book people into jail whenever a public safety interest existed and only show additional discretion when the department neared their misdemeanor bed limit of 135 people per day. Most people charged with misdemeanors spend less than a week in jail, so could be a lot of people cycling through, which King County Department of Public Defense Interim Director Matt Sanders said will ultimately make it harder for people to hold down jobs, maintain housing, and secure behavioral health treatment, ultimately undermining public safety in the city.

Did you hear about San Francisco's new mayor? He's a centrist Democrat and he's the heir to the Levi's fortune. Daniel Lurie won the ranked-choice voting election with 56.2% of the vote. Incumbent London Breed only received 43.8%. San Franciscans made clear they are sick of seeing poverty and being confronted with crimes of desperation. Unfortunately, as we know very well in Seattle, electing a centrist may hide the problems for a bit, but it will do nothing to fix them. 

A porn gorge: North Korean soldiers deployed in Russia have unrestricted internet access for the first time in their lives and they're using it to watch mountains of porn and jerk themselves silly. Boys will be boys! 

Need something to do tonight? The world is bleak. Why not laugh a little at an improv show? The improv theater I wrote about for my column is having a battle of the star signs show tonight followed by an open-to-all improv jam. I'll be performing on the Scorpio team even though I'm not a Scorpio (don't tell anyone). 

A song for your Friday: This just feels like the sound of my psyche right now. 

No one has ever gone broke betting on whiteness and patriarchy in America. by Marcus Harrison Green

No one has ever gone broke betting on whiteness and patriarchy in America. 

What else to make of Donald Trump’s re-ascension to the White House? How else can we metabolize this madness and glee that MAGA-lovers are feeling at this moment? “Your body, my choice,” white nationalist Nicholas Fuentas gloated post-election. Later in the week, Black people were assaulted in mass by racist text messages invoking slavery by an anonymous sender.

Before and since his re-election on Tuesday, there has been a glut of think pieces exploring the wayward shift of people of color toward Trump. The implicit message is to blame the 46 percent of Latinos, the 20 percent of Black men, and the 12 percent of LGBTQ voters for his return. 

Let’s cut the nonsense. A second Trump term and the calamity it will surely produce is not the result nor fault of Americans who are historically and still to remain, marginalized. It is not the fault of Arab Americans, Black Americans, or Latino Americans - whose marginal increase in support from men within those groups wasn’t enough in itself to secure Trump the White House. 

No, it’s the clearest example of Occam's razor.

Trump increased his votes amongst men this election, with 55 percent casting their vote for him this week. So did 60 percent of white Americans. Men haven’t given the majority of their vote to a Democrat in 60 years, and the Republican party has owned the white vote for more than a decade. 

Trump’s impending presidency is a product of white supremacy and the patriarchy it feeds.

The fault lies with too many white Americans who would cling to the promise of power they believe they’re entitled to, rather than link their fate to anyone else’s humanity. It is their lust for exclusionary dominance atop a racial caste. 

Whatever your opinion of Kamala Harris, she was never going to win a majority of white men. No Democratic, let alone progressive presidential candidate, has received a majority of their vote in 60 years, but way to task a Black woman with the impossible. This isn't to excuse the feckless and inept Democratic party. It is to say that a Trump rise should be impossible no matter the political party.

Trump is projected to win the popular vote with roughly 74 million ballots cast for him, a figure closely mirroring his failed 2020 campaign. Nearly 85 percent of Trump’s voters were white, unchanged from 2020. Sixty percent were white men.

In our history, if we only counted white men’s votes, we would never have had the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, the expansion of health insurance, job-protected family leave, marriage equality, and (as paltry as it is) an increase in the Federal minimum wage. Each achievement happened under presidents they rejected. 

One can argue that due to their voting propensity as a group, we lack universal healthcare, free college tuition, and a national living wage. Policies that would be beneficial to them and the entire country. 

When it comes to marginalized communities, our existence in this country will always be precarious unless enough white men decide to be communally human instead of uniquely superior. 

And that is a decision they have made in the past. 

At a time of chattel slavery when Black men were auctioned like cattle and only white men could vote, there were enough of them in 1865 to pass the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments - abolishing slavery, extending civil rights, and presenting the right to vote (at least to Black men), without one Black vote.

With an all-male constituency, there were enough of them in 1919 to pass the 19th Amendment enfranchising women with the right to vote, with no women eligible to vote.

With a predominantly straight Congress and Senate, there were enough of them in 2022 to protect marriage equality via the Respect for Marriage Act.

In the lead up to the election, the way our media coddled White men’s sense of self-worth at the expense of the concerns of others during this campaign was as repulsive as it was farcical. 

Now, I do have sympathy for the plights of white men who our media has fixated on this last year. Their life is hard. They are experiencing increased loneliness, addiction, economic anxiety, and the list goes on. But the thing is, life is no less hard for women who still make 84 percent less than men. Or Native Americans, who have the highest addiction rates in the country. Or Black women who are more than twice as likely to die during their pregnancy than their white counterparts. Or Black men, who are still more than three times more likely to be killed by police.

Yet, at one time or another during this campaign, all of these groups were publicly scolded, shamed, and patronized for not enthusiastically supporting Harris. But not white men. We spent hours of podcasts and gallons of newspaper ink on their support for exploring their newly discovered malaise. 

Meanwhile, the coalition of the historically marginalized still voted as a majority to reject Trumpism. 

Trump’s presidency is built on the myth of white male exceptionalism. From the way Trump’s economic plans were hailed, you’d think he magically transported the whole of this nation from the breadline to the penthouse during his first term. His economic agenda is not one of mass prosperity. It includes deficit-widening tax cuts for the rich, inflationary tariffs, and mass deportation that will devastate the construction and agriculture industries, at least. Nor did he pretend that he was anything other than he was: unapologetic in his brutality of women, disdaining of trans people, hater of immigrants, and dismissive of racial prejudices.

Upon news of his reelection, the top 10% of wealthiest Americans saw in $64 billion increase in their net worth. Pardon my skepticism of them anticipating a mass redistribution of capital to our poorest.  

This country will only reach its final form when enough white men reject a myth of ultra-individualism, superiority, and dominance in favor of a saga of solidarity. A saga that is difficult, challenging, occasionally infuriating —but ultimately hopeful. 

On Tuesday, we saw that happen in our majority-white state of Washington, and our majority-white city of Seattle. Both dived deeper blue on Tuesday. 

Many pundits and commentators are wary of discussing race at patriarchy at the moment. But it is precisely because we have failed for generations to seriously consider those duel poisons and their lingering effects that we have arrived at this point. 

If we accept that the only recourse we have to better this country is to bow to the whims of recalcitrant white men then where exactly does that lead us other than the hell we’re already in?