Roadwork Nightmare Weekend: Roadwork will be paused during the FIFA World Cup, so crews must kick it into high gear this weekend. Closures will typically start late Friday night and extend until early Monday morning. The impacted roads are:  I-405 southbound from Coal Creek Parkway in Bellevue to North 30th Street in Renton. Eastbound Highway 520 between I-5 to Montlake Boulevard. Northbound Highway 99 First Avenue South Bridge.  I-405 northbound and southbound ramps at Northeast 85th Street in Kirkland.  Oh, and the light rail between the airport and Rainier Beach is shutting down for repairs on Saturday and Sunday. Enjoy! Save the Trains: Sound Transit is in a $38 million hole and is trying to scrap a bunch of light rail lines promised in the ST3 plan voters approved in 2016. At a board meeting Thursday, people rallied to try to save the stations on the chopping block in a cost-saving project list Sound Transit published last week. The current plan cuts the three stations promised to Ballard, but Sound Transit threw them a bone and pinky swore it would at least build out a Seattle Center to Ballard line. West Seattle’s Avalon Station is dead. So are stations at Graham Street in South Seattle, and Boeing Access Road in Tukwila. Plus, a lot of stations that impact the suburbs. Oh, and ST3 now won’t be completed until 2052, 26 years from now. Hooray? Big News for Whistle Whetters: Happy Drinking Water Week, Seattle! To celebrate, Seattle Public Utilities put in seven new water bottle-refill stations. Now, you can keep your gullet lubricated as God intended. That’ll be great for the World Cup fans wandering around downtown. That is, if they actually show up… Seattle Public Utilities has installed seven new drinking water bottle refill stations in downtown Seattle:1000 2nd Ave.501 Olive Way1398 3rd Ave.898 3rd Ave.298 James St.100 Pike St.201 Occidental Ave.— Joe Veyera (@joeveyera.bsky.social) 2026-05-07T16:43:31.152Z A World Cup for Ghosts: Hotel bookings for the FIFA World Cup are “below expectations,” according to a survey of American Hotel and Lodging Association members. Not only are the bookings below World Cup forecasts, they’re also lower than a typical Seattle summer. Lucky Strike Out: A Seattle man is leading a class-action lawsuit against Lucky Strike Entertainment, the parent company behind the Lucky Strike bowling alleys, for making bowling more expensive and worse. The Weather: Kinda the same as yesterday. So, not as warm nor as sunny as we have come to expect after being teased and tricked by a few 70 degree days. How could we have fallen for this? We live here. We know. We know. Sweaters again. Pistol Shipped: The Trump administration wants to let people mail handguns, something that’s been illegal since Congress passed a law banning the practice in 1927. But the Justice Department thinks that law violates the Second Amendment. Let the people mail their handguns! It’s the only way they can use their own guns while traveling since laws make it complicated to carry a gun across state lines. Around two dozen state attorneys generals have opposed the rule change. Hm. Perhaps they’re afraid of making it easier to… go postal. Or, do they not want postmen to be able to defend themselves against dogs? Jim Crow Returns: With the Supreme Court doing away with the a major part of the Voting Rights Act, southern states like Tennessee are hastily gerrymandering voting maps to silence Black voters. The city of Memphis—the last Democratic district in the state—is now split into three districts; Nashville, which had previously been gerrymandered to hell, is now split further into five districts. The redrawn maps “further dilute the power of minority voters,” Mother Jones reports. Martin Luther King Jr.’s son, Martin Luther King III, wrote in a letter to Tennessee lawmakers that the maps would “take this nation back to the days of Jim Crow.” Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina are also considering redrawing their maps before the midterms. “Louisiana v. Callais decision could lead to the largest drop in Black representation in the South since the end of Reconstruction.” The mood on the ground in Tennessee today.— Mother Jones (@motherjones.com) 2026-05-07T18:02:04.613Z Sure, Why Not? Microsoft signed a 20-year power purchase agreement from Constellation Energy to power its insatiable AI data centers. Constellation operates a little place known as Three Mile Island. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Yes, Microsoft is restarting the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor—which will be getting a name change, too—and it is “the first time a nuclear reactor in the US has been recommissioned after closure,” the Guardian reports and it’ll make the Pennsylvania economy go gangbusters. Fingers crossed about the whole meltdown thing. Support Those Children, Says State Department: The US State Department is going to start revoking passports of parents who owe child support today. Okay? I can think of … at least three other groups I expected the US State Department to steal passports from first. The feds are going to start with parents who owe $100,000 or more—a total of 2,700 people, dads, if I had to guess—and expand the program to anyone $2,500 or more behind on child support, a threshold set in a rarely-enforced 1996 law. We have no clue how many people that would be because Health and Human Services is still collecting that data. The State Department claims that after the AP first reported this policy change in February, “hundreds of parents took action and resolved their arrears.” Ka$h: “Would a man who has lost control of the FBI do this?” asked FBI director Kash Patel as he ordered polygraphs for more than two dozen current and former members of his team in a desperate attempt to figure out if they had leaked information to reporters. Like that tidbit about him giving out self-branded whiskey bottles. According to reporters, Patel is panicked that more bad press could cost him his job. Ah, the Art of Misdirection: The Pentagon is releasing a bunch of new UFO files, saying the public can draw their own conclusions. Parents Rejecting Shot to Help Babies’ Blood Clot: In 2024, around 5 percent of newborns in the US didn’t receive a vitamin K shot. The shots are administered at birth because vitamin K deficiency frequently causes fatal brain bleeds in newborns. The standard practice had all but eliminated these deaths. Except, recently, due to misinformation online and from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services, parents have been rejecting the shot and their babies are dying. Finals Week Win: Canvas, the grading software used by the majority of US universities, got hacked by the pay or leak extortion group ShinyHunters during finals week at many schools. Canvas was down at 9,000 US schools, including the University of Washington, on Thursday,  and “compromised the personal identifying information of 275 million people, including students, teachers, and staff,” reports Inside Higher Ed. The post Slog AM: Your Bad Dad Can’t Leave the Country, We Can Finally Send Handguns in the Mail, and Are World Cup Fans Ghosting Seattle?  appeared first on The Stranger. ...read more read less