It was going to be a simple summer day on Sunday evening at Seattle Center. The city’s annual food festival, Bite of Seattle, had drawn thousands of people. It was the kind of event where kids run between vendor tents and parents carry paper cups of lemonade. The Space Needle loomed over the crowd like a permanent fixture of something good and familiar. Sixteen shots were fired on the northwest side of The Armory at 6:01 p.m. That familiar scene changed into something else in an instant. There are three dead. Two men, one 19 years old and the other…
Author: Sierra Foster
Sierra Foster
Born in Kansas City, Sierra Foster writes about politics and serves as Senior Editor at kbsd6.com. She was raised paying attention to this city, not just living in it. Sierra has a strong, deep connection to Kansas City, from the neighborhoods east of Troost to the discussions that take place in the city hall halls. Sierra, who is presently enrolled at the University of Kansas to pursue a degree in Political Science, applies the rigor of academic study to her journalism. She writes about politics in Missouri and Kansas as someone who genuinely cares about what happens to the people in these communities—the policies that impact them, the leaders who represent them, and the civic forces influencing their futures—rather than as an outsider watching from a distance. Her editorial coverage encompasses state-level policy, local government, and the national political currents that permeate bi-state regional life. Whether it's a city council vote or a Senate race, she has a special gift for turning complex policy language into writing that feels urgent, relatable, and worthwhile. Sierra seldom sits still off the page. She claims that playing soccer on a regular basis has sharpened her instincts for political reporting because of the sport's teamwork, strategy, and requirement to read a changing game in real time. She's probably somewhere in Kansas City with her friends when she's not writing or on the pitch, discovering new reasons to adore a city she already knows so well.
Watching a hurricane slowly move across the Pacific toward a group of islands where you can’t get away is very scary. Hawaii is beautiful and exposed because it is in the middle of the ocean. Every storm season, everyone holds their breath for at least a few days. This week, that storm is Fausto. Forecasters are getting more and more sure that it will pass just north of the main islands, but that word “just” does a lot of work in that sentence. On Sunday morning, Hurricane Fausto was about 910 miles east of Hilo and moving west at 14…
It’s not the same as a press release or a speech when it comes to how it reads. A court filing, which is written by lawyers and is cautious and hedged, tends to hide admissions in passive voice and qualified language. In the DOE clean energy grant lawsuit filed on July 15, something more unusual was included: a clear admission that the Department of Energy had suggested ending grants based “solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state.” It tells you whether a state backed Trump or Harris in 2024. Background is important here. Starting in late 2025,…
Berlin does summer nights better than almost anywhere else in Europe. On Saturday night in Tiergarten, hundreds of thousands of people were moving through the city, and floats and music played at one of the biggest Pride celebrations in Europe. The Christopher Street Day parade had been going on for hours without a hitch. Then, around 10 p.m., a rented delivery van hit a group of people on the Ahornsteig path near the Brandenburg Gate. A woman was killed. Twenty-nine others were hurt, and some were critically hurt. It happened quickly. It’s now being called the Berlin Pride attack. After…
There is a kind of charitable giving that takes place in secret; it’s the kind that charities only talk about in a press release weeks later, almost as an apology. Then there was what Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift did the week before their wedding. Twenty good causes. A whopping $26 million. From food banks in Rhode Island to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, this is a list of places that help kids with cancer. If this sounds like someone is trying to make a point, that might be the case. People didn’t like that the couple got married at Madison…
There is a part of the Firehole River close to Old Faithful where the water is cold enough in July that you can see your own reflection. It was getting close to 86 degrees Fahrenheit along that same stretch last week. People said they saw dead fish on the banks. The Madison, Firehole, and Gibbon rivers were closed to fishing right away by park officials, and there is no date set for when they will be open again. This is news that doesn’t feel like a normal closure notice for people who have fished Yellowstone for a long time. It’s…
A federal judge in Massachusetts did something on January 30, 2026, that the Trump administration did not expect or at least did not agree with. The Department of Homeland Security had planned for Temporary Protected Status for Ethiopian nationals to end in a clean and legal way, but U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy stopped that from happening. The paper work had been put away. It was set for February 13, 2026. Then the order came through, letting about 26,700 Ethiopians who were living and working in the US stay for a little while longer. The story of Ethiopia’s TPS designation…
Adam Frank said it began with the strangest question he had ever asked someone in an office. In 2017, he went to see NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt to try to figure out if alien civilizations would change the climate of their planets in the same way that humans change ours. He said that he was looking at other worlds because, well, there couldn’t have been any other civilizations on Earth. Schmidt stopped him almost right away. He asked, “How do you know that?” The Silurian hypothesis, which was based on that one question, is one of the more unsettling…
There is a surface along the Gulf Coast that used to be flat and lifeless but is now rough with groups of oyster shells. It is only a few feet below the warm, murky water. Small fish can get through the holes. The water above is a little clearer now than it was ten years ago. The scene isn’t very exciting. It took seventeen years of boring, methodical work to get there, but it’s real. FL dumped more than 500,000 tons of used oyster and clam shells back into the Gulf of Mexico from 2007 to 2024. The shells came…
Last week, Colter Wall got married. Most likely, he didn’t tell you that. That’s completely in line with who he is. As a country singer from Saskatchewan, Wall has always kept his personal life out of the public eye. His voice sounds like it belongs to a much older man living in the past. He is 31 years old. No public displays of his private self on social media. There were no carefully timed announcements. He only heard music and sometimes caught a glimpse of life on his ranch in Canada. It was through friends and Instagram posts that weren’t…