25 Memorable Seattle Weekly Stories

"How to cheat," by John Arthur Wilson, August 14, 1996: Wilson distilled the wisdom gained through years of great political reporting and produced a potent homebrew of jokes, insights, and well-researched case histories that show how politicians make a mockery of campaign finance laws.

There are other ways to exert your influence without having to fill out a lot of paperwork. Education! That's the key! Everyone from the AFL-CIO to the Christian Coalition believes in education. And they're wiling to spend millions to "educate" their members, exercising their rights of free speech and free spending. You been watching all those TV spots trashing Republican members of Congress? You may have thought those were blatant, partisan, political slams. No, that's education! There's no limit on how much you can spend on flame-thrower ads like those. The AFL-CIO says it's raised $35 million for this effort, but some conservatives peg it closer to $70 million. And no reporting requirement. Neat, huh?

"Seattle on steroids," by David Brewster and Peter Staten, July 8, 1992: Staten and Brewster delivered a stinging indictment of Mayor Rice's urban villages plan. It turned out to be the first shot in a land-use war that would consume the city and change our political landscape.

Urban villages are the trendy new thinking on how to install higher densities in cities...For a politician, urban villages are a godsend. They are politically correct (all those bike paths), filled with single or childless professional people who vote liberal and keep the local nightlife humming, and graced with nostalgic touches of pedestrian neighborliness and European compactness.

Best of all, they suggest a way out of an old dilemma. It used to be that we had the no-win choice between more sprawl in the county or cramming more people into the beloved urban neighborhoods of Seattle. Urban villages are a way out of this Hobson's choice, for they hold out the promise that density increases can be absorbed by these in-city villages without any politically suicidal raids on established neighborhoods. This is the best news for a politician since the Laffer curve of supply-side economics.

"Tearing at Children's heart," by Nina Shapiro, November 30, 2000: Shapiro gave us a rare look behind the scenes at Children's Hospital and Medical Center, one of Seattle's most beloved institutions. She meticulously detailed a dramatic controversy that involved an anonymous letter-writing campaign, furious debates over medical technique, and staff dissatisfaction that had roiled the institution for years.

Operations attempting a permanent repair were possible for Darius. But his original doctor advised his parents against doing them until it was a matter of life and death—they were too risky. The time came in 1995. Darius' body was producing more and more red blood cells to compensate for its lack of oxygen; his blood got so thick that there was a danger of clotting, an event that would clog up his circulatory system. Darius' parents took him to Children's heart center, where Lupinetti performed a difficult operation, called a Bidirectional Glenn, that restructures the top half of the circulatory system. The operation was a tremendous success. Seven-year-old Darius, who before had trouble walking only a few yards, went home to ride a bike with training wheels.

But Darius' father Moe, a Boeing engineer, remembers that even then there were indications the hospital staff weren't getting along...

"License to kill," by Rick Anderson, November 4, 1999: Anderson revealed that for decades county inquest juries have cleared local cops in police killings of civilians (a disproportionate number of whom were minorities). Even in cases where the county later paid out huge settlements, the juries exonerated the officers. The reason local communities of color do not trust the justice system could not be made any clearer.

The belief that prejudice is behind some of the shootings gets a lot of currency in the black community. "There's a perception," says activist Harriett Walden, from Mothers for Police Accountability, "that there's a lesser penalty, if any, for killing a black man." The question most often asked is: Would he have been killed if he was white? Would, for example, the dark-skinned Antonio Dunsmore have been obliterated by police bullets if he was a white man cornered outside the Magnolia Community Center?

To blacks and supporters, the answer seems obvious.

"WTO: report from the streets," by staff, December 2, 1999: The culmination of our yearlong, groundbreaking work on the protests that launched the global justice movement. One day after the N30 mayhem, the Weekly was on the street with full reporting and analysis of the marches, the tear gas, and the view from inside the crippled conference. Our cover photograph by Rick Dahms became the iconic image of the event.

As Tuesday's tumult lurched to a close at 4th and Pike, the last ground zero of the afternoon, the level of protest discourse fell even as the noise level rose. A few suited-up African and Asian delegates from the World Federation of Labor hurriedly posed for snaps with their big, incongruously cheerful banner before the up-ended dumpsters and black-masked anarchists, then hurried away as the mood turned mean. The drummers who'd been pounding out the usual drum-circle rhythms began thumping loudly and arrhythmically, in uncanny imitation of gunshots. Street rowdies stomped on the bus shelters' reinforced glass roofs, mugging and bellowing fiercely. One simply chanted, "Fuck the world! Fuck the world! Burn this motherfucker down!"