The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Charles Mudede What is this? It’s a key element of a development initiated in 2015 by Vancouver BC’s Westbank: the installation of a 747 jet once operated by United Airlines and sent to a California graveyard in 2017. The whole project, however, was delayed due to financial woes attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic and rising construction costs resulting from supply chain disruptions. In September, 2025, Westbank lost control of the project to OPTrust, a developer based in Toronto. The reconstruction of a Boeing 747 between the ground floors of two 47-story towers on 1200 Stewart Street began earlier this year. It is now close to completion. But it arrives as a relic twice over. For one, it’s a relic of the major role Seattle played in the history of aerospace; and, two, it’s a relic of the economic and construction boom Seattle experienced, thanks to Amazon, during the previous decade. Amazon is no longer the hiring powerhouse it once was (it recently lost its top spot as Seattle’s biggest employer to the University of Washington) and continues to bleed jobs. So, this installation has, at this point, no future in it. And as the present recession worsens, it will look more and more absurd. Just when you thought Seattle’s pharmageddon might be abating, it strikes again. Its latest victim is on 23rd and Jackson. This part of town, which used to be the Central District’s commercial hub, lost a Starbucks in 2022—the building remains empty to this day, despite years-long unrealized rumors of Black Coffee Northwest’s plan to occupy the space. In January, the only grocery store in the neighborhood, Amazon Fresh, abruptly closed and immediately transformed an area that once had an excellent supermarket, Promenade Red Apple Market, into a food desert. Now the Seattle Times reports that Walgreens, the Central District’s only pharmacy, plans to close its doors on May 19. A reason for the closure was not provided by the company, which was bought by a private equity firm (Sycamore Partners) in 2025. But a year before this acquisition, Walgreens announced that it would begin closing 1,200 (roughly 14 percent) of its stores because they were “underperforming.” The Seattle area has already lost all of its Bartell Drugs stores because its parent company, Rite Aid, which acquired the family-owned chain in 2020, was bankrupt and closing its stores. When it rains it pours. One hopes that April will not be a cruel month, that it will repeat the mood of much of March, which has enjoyed a bit of snow and kept things cool and wet. March, however, has been utterly mean to a huge part of the United States, which is still experiencing a record-breaking heat wave. The Pacific Northwest, and much of the East Coast, managed to remain in a mixture of winter and spring while several states entered a drought months before summer began to sizzle. Today, Seattle can expect a low of 37 and some clouds.  Remarkable Weather Channel article about the unprecedented heat wave and not a single word about #climatechange. Embarrassing, and journalistic malpractice in this day and age. weather.com/forecast/reg...[image or embed]— Peter Gleick (@petergleick.bsky.social) March 25, 2026 at 3:07 PM The 2 Line, which connects Seattle and Bellevue, finally opens tomorrow after “years of construction setbacks.” Indeed, many of us came to the conclusion that it would never happen; that the Crosslake Connection, which involves two key stations (one at Judkins Park; the other on Mercer Island), was nothing more than a costly engineering dream. But Sound Transit proved us skeptics wrong. This part of the line will start singing “I am for real” tomorrow morning. It seems the stock market has finally come to its senses and no longer believes a word exiting the president’s mouth. The war Trump started with Iran has no end in sight; there are no meaningful secret deals happening through back channels. Ain’t nothing going on but a bunch of social media posts that say one thing today and something else tomorrow. (These worthless announcements are accompanied by “suspicious trading.”) If you are not in the know—aka not in Trump’s inner circle of billionaires—then you’ll likely get burned in this corrupt market. The Dow is presently down 500 points after falling nearly 500 points yesterday. The Senate unanimously passed a measure that would pay Transportation Security Administration workers but not ICE’s thugs, who, by the way, are still getting paid due to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. And so their presence at a number of line- and employee-stressed airports (standing here, standing there; looking up, looking down) is seen as a slap in the face of those who haven’t received a paycheck in weeks. The Senate’s TSA measure has to go through the House before reaching the president’s desk. TSA workers have been going a month with no paycheck and they’re pissed that ICE agents are getting paid to chill and play airport cop. “TSA officers are sickened that we have unqualified DHS employees walking the airports, with pay, while we all suffer doing our qualified work unpaid.”[image or embed]— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com) March 25, 2026 at 7:59 PM Let’s end AM with Open Mic Eagle’s irony dripping track “woke up knowing everything (opening theme)”: ...read more read less