The explosive derailment of 16 oil trains on June 3 in Oregon raised concerns about the safety of the tracks. Now, two federal track inspectors, along with regulators from Washington state, are looking over the southern Washington rail line between Pasco and Vancouver to make sure it meets safety standards. The tracks on the Oregon side of the Columbia river are also being inspected by state officials there. A report in Crosscut partner organization EarthFix examines how regulators in Oregon had less ability to control how the railway company Union Pacific responded to the disaster. But this was not an accident, nor was it inevitable. A year earlier, a bill in the Oregon state house would have given the state more oversight over emergency response, and would have taxed the company to raise money for state response efforts. Washington and California already passed similar bills.
Microsoft is buying LinkedIn, the world’s largest employment networking site. The $26.2 billion deal — which Geekwire notes is the largest Microsoft has ever done — has been finalized, and will close this year. Under the acquisition, LinkedIn CEO Jess Weiner will keep his job, but will report to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Weiner said the combination of Microsoft’s cloud network and LinkedIn’s professional network (which boasts over 433 million members) can “change the way the world works.”
The Seattle Displacement Coalition, a homeless advocacy organization, has hired journalist George Howland Jr. to write news and commentary for its newly launched site Outside City Hall. The site is new, but will host a column of the same name that since 2004 has been running in papers owned by the Pacific Publishing company (including City Living, Queen Anne & Magnolia News and the Capitol Hill Times). Howland has decades of experience as a journalist, having worked as a news editor and reporter for The Stranger between 1994 and 1999 and an editor for the Seattle Weekly between 1999 and 2006. He has also worked for Real Change and as a public communications officer for the Seattle City Council between 2006 and 2008. It’s this last job of his that Howland takes aim at in his first piece for the site, “A Paid Political Liar,” which was published yesterday. In the essay, Howland candidly describes how in 2007 he helped spin a ballot that was rigged in favor of a tunnel to replace the Alaska Way Viaduct. “I felt tormented by the outcome,” he writes. As for why he did it, “the answer is really quite simple: I needed a job.”
