In the News

Washington lawmakers are looking at requiring assisted living facilities to be certified to take care of people with dementia. Senate Bill 5337, sponsored by Sen. Tina Orwall, D-Des Moines, would require the Department of Social and Health Services to create, manage and enforce a certification process for licensed assisted living facilities.

When the 988 crisis hotline launched in 2022, it was a bid to give people across the country a single easy-to-remember phone number, like 911, that they could call if they were suicidal or needed mental health help. Since then, the national line has received more than 14.5 million calls. More than 246,000 of those are from Washington.

The Metropolitan King County Council unanimously chose state Rep. Tina Orwall to be the newest state senator in South King County, replacing Sen. Karen Keiser who is retiring in the middle of her term. Orwall will make the jump from state representative to state senator, representing the 33rd District, which covers Burien, SeaTac, Des Moines and Kent.

Before sexually explicit deepfake images of Taylor Swift circulated on the internet in late January, Issaquah High School students already had fallen victim to nude photos digitally altered by artificial intelligence. During Caroline Mullet’s first homecoming dance in September 2023, a ninth-grade boy photographed her female friends and used AI to make the students appear nude. He then sent ...

Washington state has effectively eliminated its extensive backlog of untested sexual assault evidence kits. Officials announced Thursday that more than 10,000 backlogged kits have now been cleared from evidence rooms across the state and submitted for testing.

As a sexual assault survivor, Leah Griffin has spent years working to reform the public policies that she says repeatedly undercut her attempts to seek justice and heal. After the 2014 assault, she got turned away from a hospital, waited hours to speak with police and was threatened by prosecutors. “What I experienced at that time was a cascading system of ...

People experiencing a mental health crisis anywhere in the country will soon be able to call or text message a three-digit number — 988 — and be connected to an emergency helpline akin to 911.