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Sound Effect's Under-Reported Stories Of The Week, July 4

There's always interesting stuff in the news that gets overshadowed by the big stories. On Sound Effect we invite a panel a journalists to talk over their nominees for under-covered story of the week. 

This week Alex Hudsonof the news and politics blog Seattlish noted that even though the heat wave is all anyone can talk about, there are dimensions of it that haven't gotten the attention they deserve, such as the outsize hazard heat poses for homeless people. 

"The city of Seattle has extreme weather plans that relate to cold weather, and there are no real plans that relate to hot weather," she says. 

"While the city put out a press release that said here are some of the places you can go that have air conditioning, and those include the libraries, community centers, senior centers, the pools, Seattle Center, there are big federal holidays that are coming and all of those places are closed." 

Pubicola founder and editor Josh Feit, who's also the politics editor for Seattle Met magazine, drew our attention to a couple of under-reported aspects of the big transportation bill that passed this week in Olympia. If all you know about it is the 12-cent gas tax, you missed the fact that it contains a "poison pill," as Democrats call it, that effectively prevents Governor Jay Inslee from pursuing a low-carbon fuel standard. 

The package also contains a provision allowing Sound Transit to ask voters for $15 billion to pay for several major projects. But that could be colored by an under-reported debate over light rail, as Feit explained. 

"The underreported thing that happened was a debate in front of the Sound Transit board about planning," says Feit. "What you're seeing is a debate about transit-oriented development, green development along the transit lines, or just building the line right down the highway, and not taking advantage of creating livable, walkable neighborhoods and communities. So you kind of end up with what some people are calling transit-oriented sprawl." 

Joanne Silberner, the longtime NPR correspondent who teaches journalism at the University of Washington, figured out her under-covered story of the week while slapping mosquitos outside her Wallingford home. 

"I thought wait a minute, this is Seattle, we don't have bugs! We have bugs now," she says. 

Silberner points out that climate change is likely to bring new vector-borne diseases such as West Nile, along with overheating and even exacerbated mental health symptoms. 

Subscribe to Sound Effect's podcast on iTunes, and you can download episodes of the show, as well as a separate breakout of our under-reported stories. Write us a review while you're there, or send feedback to SoundEffect@KPLU.org. 

Gabriel Spitzer is a former KNKX reporter, producer and host who covered science and health and worked on the show Sound Effect.