"The Energy Department is tightening its control over the Bonneville Power Administration in the wake of a scandal over BPA's illegal hiring practices."

"Monsanto Co. and DuPont Co., among the biggest makers of bioengineered crop seeds, are persuading Washington state voters to change their minds about a proposal to require labels on genetically modified food."

"INCHELIUM, Wash. -- Imagine bringing your kids to the lake and wondering if they’d be better off at home, watching TV."

"Promoters of a giant coal export terminal, proposed for north of Bellingham, have given $40,000 to the Washington Republican Party, bucks that a Western Washington University professor suspects are being funneled into campaigns of sympathetic but officially 'non-partisan' Whatcom County Council candidates."

"Salmon counters at Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River are seeing the biggest chinook run since 1938, but environmentalists still worry."

"As he waits for crabs to take his bait, the Cambodian man explains his approach to eating seafood out of the Duwamish River. 'If it comes up black ... I throw it back,' he says. 'But if it looks normal, that means it just swam up from the Sound. It’s OK to eat.'"

"More than half a century has elapsed since the Seattle School Board — with nary a raised eyebrow, records indicate — voted to allow one of the nation's biggest and busiest highways to be built cheek-by-jowl with John Marshall Junior High, trading away the school's playground for a larger plot of land nearby."