Small Town News

Some hits and misses in the news headlines

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KOMEN COMMENT

Some hits and misses among the flotsam and jetsam in the news: In the toney town of Aspen, Colorado, the average price for a single-family home is $5.9 million; new "affordable" homes go on the market at $1.3 million each.

Comment on the sit-in by members of the U.S. House of Representatives in a letter to The New York Times: "This is exactly the behavior we teach our children to avoid if they want to be taken seriously."

Another letter writer criticized the Tacoma newspaper for mentioning the June 6 D-Day invasion only once, and that was in "Peanuts" on the comics page.

One more daily newspaper has bit the dust. The Tampa Tribune shut its presses May 3. It had covered the news for 123 years.

Count common sand among the world's diminishing resources. "We are starting to run out," says the writer of a book about the growing global black market in sand.

They're talking about eliminating the use of $100 bills and printing more $20 bills. It would make it more difficult for international criminals to package and distribute payoffs.

A 1968 painting of circular scribbles — very similar to cursive writing exercises required of 1950s school children-brought $36.7 million in a recent New York auction of contemporary art.

In hand is the following complicated fishing-regulation news release: "The Columbia from Highway 395 Bridge at Pasco up to I-862 Bridge at Richland near Columbia Point and from I-182 Bridge up to Priest Rapids Dam will be closed for sockeye retention from Thursday through Aug. 15." It adds: "There is an outside chance sockeye fishing may reopen."

A cyber security team has been summoned because the computer system of the Democratic National Committee has been penetrated by Russian hackers.

Male defendants said a traffic court judge in Arkansas would drop charges if they posed for nude photographs. The 70-year-old jurist was ousted after thousands of pictures of naked men were found on his computer. As a 15-year-old, a boy pointed a gun at a Tacoma man and shot him when he reached for the weapon. "I did not know what to do but shoot," said the boy — now 16 — when sentenced to 21 years in prison.

Six 16-year-olds (including a pair of twins), along with a 20-year-old, were charged with killing their holdup target gang-style in Parkland on May 18. The triggerman was one of the boys. They will be tried as adults.

It was 19 years ago when Ken Griffey Jr. debuted with two home runs in the Mariners' season opener to beat the New York Yankees 4-2 before 57,386 ecstatic fans in the Kingdome. It was 16 years ago when the King-dome was dynamited to rubble.

Eighty percent of Americans cannot see the Milky Way because the skies are polluted by light. "Humanity has enveloped our planet in a luminous fog," say light pollution researchers.

This state's population gained 93,200 men, women and children in the 2014-15 period. There are now 7,061,400 Washingtonians. The figure was 2.3 million in 1950, and probably half lived in the Puget Sound area.

The Greatest Generation lost two more of its female members recently: Lt. Col. Delores Hyatt, who had 30 years in the military, serving in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, died in Seattle at age 94; and Lucille Murphy, who at 5-foot-2, worked in 1942 on Boeing B-17s, died in Seattle at age 101.

John Komen, who lives on Mason Lake, was for 40 years a reporter and editor, Seattle television news anchorman and executive, national TV network news correspondent, producer, columnist, editorial writer and commentator. His column, Komen Comment, appears each week in the Shelton-Mason County Journal.



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