The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Vivian McCall :( $$$: The Seattle City Council voted 6-1 to make the Seattle Police Department’s hiring bonus program permanent and to raise one-time incentives for experienced officers up from $30,000 to $50,000. Council Member Tammy Morales, the sole no vote, questioned why we’re doing this when the mayor’s budget cuts $400,000 for police accountability and we’ve got a $250 million deficit. Council President Sara Nelson said we need the hiring bonuses to stay competitive and hire “the best of the best.” We started offering bonuses in 2019, and in her most recent Bad Apples column, Ashley wrote about the “best of the best” we’ve attracted so far. Not to mention the Mayor sacrificed $200 million in what would have been affordable housing funding in a housing crisis. Good governance! https://t.co/nkyk19y4dH — Hannah Krieg (@hannahkrieg) October 8, 2024 Surveil me, plz: The council also passed legislation to install live police cameras in neighborhoods it says have the most violent crime. Council Member Cathy Moore thanked the ACLU for raising privacy concerns but evoked the “higher goal” of public safety. CM Bob Kettle, ahead of a vote on surveillance expansion, says that Seattle protects free speech and expression. He has yet to comment on the protester who alleges his neighbor threw a speaker at his head while excising his right to free speech. https://t.co/rM4OdPyeyH — Hannah Krieg (@hannahkrieg) October 8, 2024 The crosswalks are gay again: A few weeks after some asshole, or assholes, spilled paint all over a rainbow crosswalk on Broadway, the Seattle Department of Transportation restored its vibrant lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender glory. I doubt the homo-hating vandal(s) read Slog, but if you do, then I hope you know what a limp-brained loser you are and how little you hurt us gay people by attacking a fucking crosswalk. The result of a City pro-LGBTQ safety plan, a lot of us like them because they let newly out people, starry-eyed small-towners, and closeted folks know they’re safe here, but we’re not so self-serious about rainbow iconography, either. All your pathetic attack shows is that you suck and don’t even really know about what you hate or how to hate it. In the event you are the clumsiest person in the world and carry around open paint cans at night–please come clean, we’d be obsessed with you. The vandalized Broadway Pride crosswalk is rainbow bright again https://t.co/2QVenJdP6K pic.twitter.com/e90JZmu0Cy — CHSfeed (@CHSfeed) October 9, 2024 ICYMI: Coming Out Like a Pornstar was probably the largest-ever collection of essays from porn performers when it first published in 2015. Now it’s been updated for the age of OnlyFans, deep fakes, facial recognition software, and FOSTA/SESTA. We wrote about it here. Some good news: Police found Charlotte “Bowie” Drozd, teenage daughter of Flaming Lips drummer Steven Drozd, yesterday, a few days after she’d been reported missing near the Space Needle. Whew. Some more good news: University of Washington’s David Baker won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work decoding and designing proteins, alongside Google Deepmind’s John Jumper and Briton Demis, who used artificial intelligence to predict the structure of all known proteins. Journalists asked Baker if he had a favorite protein, but he wouldn’t pick favorites. Once-in-a-many-many-lifetime comet alert: Like your friend who never texts back, the comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS will say hi for the first time in 80,000 years this Saturday. Scientists say the comet will appear on the horizon about 45 minutes after sunset. It will stick around this month, growing dimmer and creeping higher in the sky until it disappears completely from view around Halloween. The clouds are expected to cooperate this weekend, so just find an unobstructed view of the horizon. If you can see the Olympics, that’s probably good enough. We've got a once-in-a-century storm brewing, too: Millions of people are fleeing Milton, a nearly Category 5 hurricane off the Gulf Coast. Milton is expected to make landfall in the Tampa metro area Thursday with 160 mph winds and lethal storm surges of up to 15 feet. Enough to swallow a house, said Tampa Mayor Jane Castor. “So, if you’re in it, that’s basically a coffin that you’re in,” she said. Tampa hasn’t been directly hit by a hurricane since 1921, and for some perspective on how bad this could be, Andrew, Harvey, and Katrina didn’t directly hit metropolitan areas. Know their names: Israel has wiped out 902 families since October 7. Al Jazeera published this interactive story about who they were. Over the past year, Israel has killed nearly 42,000 people. Who you gonna call (about ghost guns?): The Supreme Court, for once. Justices seem likely to uphold Biden administration regulations that require background checks, serial numbers, and sales records for nearly untraceable ghost guns, DIY firearms typically assembled from kits or 3D-printed parts. Manufacturers argue they shouldn’t have to comply with our gun control laws because they don’t think ghost guns legally count as guns, and their products are marketed like a sort of easy-to-assemble model kit for “hobbyists.” C’mon. They’re still totally guns capable of killing people, and, by the way, it's not much of a hobby unless you enjoy drilling and screwing things together with your feet, exclusively. Even the super conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and our gun-crazed Supreme Court seem to know that. Thank God, because these pesky ghost guns are everywhere. Republicans spent $65 million on anti-trans TV ads: With the election weeks away, conservatives are trying to strike fear into the hearts of suburban women with ads about trans women and girls in women’s bathrooms, changing in women’s locker rooms, playing youth sports with women, and residing in women’s prisons. Even Donald Trump has an ad where he says, “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” Phobic as that is, it made me chuckle. It’s so dumb, and I seriously doubt it’ll work. Trump gets big applause when he talks about “transgender insanity” at his rallies, but wedge-y messaging hasn’t been very successful in recent campaigns. Firefighters union snubs Harris/Walz: In August, after a roomful of Boston firefighters cheered Tim Walz one day and booed JD Vance the next (he’s the worst, but I would cry), an International Firefighters Association endorsement seemed likely. But the union has declined to endorse either candidate. According to Politico, this totally blindsided the Democrats struggling to win over working-class union members that MAGA Republicans were smart to court this election. Some of that may have to do with losing Biden, whose pro-worker stance is one of the few genuinely cool things about him. I think Trump’s dismal record of packing courts with anti-union judges, stacking the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union appointees, and past promises to pass anti-union laws, coupled with his recent comment that striking workers should be fired, as well as a general dislike for paying people, should … kinda speak for itself. But it’s Trump, so it slides right off that slimy exterior. The Fat Bear of Monte Katmai: In a vengeful, feminist twist, Grazer won her second Fat Bear contest over Chunk, the bear who killed her cub this summer. Good for her, I guess, though she has no awareness of our silly games. Also, I don’t get why the Fat Bear contest, which sounds so fun, is so sad and tragic. Last week, the National Park Service had to hold back on telling the public which fat bears were competing because a bear killed one of the contestants on a live feed. Irvine Police Department unveils “first” police Cybertruck: What better vehicle for this institution than a $153,000 Tesla for its DARE program, and what better walk-on song than the theme from Terminator, a film about an indiscriminately killing robot? It also seems weird to use the Terminator theme when Robocop exists, and the connotations of “terminating” people are that much worse. #IRVINEPDPIO - We are excited to unveil what we believe is the first police Tesla Cybertruck in the nation. The truck will support our Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program and community outreach efforts. Details in the comments. #irvine @Tesla #Cybertruck #irvinepd pic.twitter.com/H9F20FbsMR — Irvine Police Department (@IrvinePolice) October 8, 2024