Week in Review: Election, Starbucks, and ferries

Host Bill Radke discusses the week’s news with The Stranger’s Vivian McCall, Puget Sound Business Journal’s Alex Halverson, and KUOW’s David Hyde.

Elections were held across Washington, with voting ending Tuesday. Results are changing day by day as ballots are counted. One of the main media story lines has been that the more centrist Democrats won.

Is that accurate? Seattle City Council member Theresa Mosqueda is running for King County Council. She appears to be winning. If she wins, who takes her seat?

In a series called "Forced Out," The Stranger has been documenting firsthand accounts of transgender adults who fled red states to blue states. Those fleeing were doing so in large part to escape restrictive policies and banned health care. The series shares the stories of many people who felt forced to leave their home for the first time. Why do they come here, and what do they find?

Starbucks is increasing pay and benefits for most of its hourly workers in the U.S. But not all of those new benefits will go to unionized workers. The company says they have to be negotiated with the union. Currently there's no labor agreement at any of the 300-plus unionized stores. Can Starbucks do that?

The Washington state ferry system continue to deal with its share of problems. Boats are not on schedule, and this week you weren’t even able to go online and find out exactly where your boat is at any moment, because somebody cyber-attacked the website. Traffic cameras were down for a while, the travel map, mobile app vessel watch was out of service. Why would someone want to hack the ferry system?

Last month on a Horizon Air flight last month out of Everett, an off-duty pilot who was riding in the jump seat in the cockpit tried to turn the engines off and tried to open an emergency exit and ended up in the back of the plane asking to be zip-tied. Horizon Air is owned by Alaska Air and now those airlines are getting sued by some of the passengers. If you had been on that plane, do you think you would join that lawsuit?