Seattle Wa

The story of Seattle's ascent out of the tidal flats of Puget Sound is a tad bawdy -- with tales of vice and 2,500 of the city's women whose registered occupation was "seamstress" -- but most of all it's about bad plumbing and engineering ingenuity. "You've just walked through a second-floor window," Tug, our tour guide, tells the group. It's July, and like all good tourists, we're partaking of Bill Speidel's Underground Tour of old Seattle. Tug was obviously delusional -- I know I had stepped through a doorway, from the street.

The story of Seattle's ascent out of the tidal flats of Puget Sound is a tad bawdy -- with tales of vice and 2,500 of the city's women whose registered occupation was "seamstress" -- but most of all it's about bad plumbing and engineering ingenuity. "You've just walked through a second-floor window," Tug, our tour guide, tells the group. It's July, and like all good tourists, we're partaking of Bill Speidel's Underground Tour of old Seattle. Tug was obviously delusional -- I know I had stepped through a doorway, from the street.

Stuart Smailes was a jolly, potbellied man, proudly gay, with a walrus mustache and a passion for Broadway shows, merry-go-rounds and calliopes, his friends say. But most of all, he was an art buff -- so much of a buff that he left a $1-million bequest for a fountain sculpture to the city of Seattle, with an unusual stipulation: It had to include a naked man. "He was adamant that he wanted the nude figure," said one of his best friends, Tom Luhnow. "Stu loved classical sculptures of nude males.

Seattle police said Friday that detectives are looking for links between convicted serial killer Rodney Alcala and two women who were slain in the late 1970s. Police are seeking DNA samples to determine whether Alcala is a suspect in the slayings of Antionette Witaker, 13, and Joyce Gaunt, 17. Both were killed in Seattle, and their cases were never solved. Det. Mark Jamieson of the Seattle Police Department said officials don't have any definitive evidence linking Alcala to the homicides but are exploring whether there is a connection.

In this noisy den of brine and ice, scales and slime, fish always have been part meat, part missile. One man points to an enormous white-bellied fish, and another man in a wet apron scoops it up from the ice, hoists it over his shoulder and sends it flying 15 feet toward the counter. "Hali-BUT! Hali-BUT! Heyyyyyy!" six men scream in unison. "Goin' right home! Goin' right home!" The counterman catches the hurtling fish neatly between the head and tail fin and slaps it onto a wrapping sheet.

Four Seattle-area police officers were shot to death Sunday morning in a coffee shop in what officials called a brazen ambush by a lone gunman. At least one officer apparently fought his way to the coffee shop door and returned fire, possibly wounding the shooter, authorities said. The shooter is likely to seek medical treatment for a gunshot wound, officials said. The officers, three men and a woman attached to the Lakewood Police Department, were conducting a routine pre-shift briefing over their laptops at the Forza Coffee Shop in Parkland, Wash.

IT'S housed in a 24-story building indistinguishable from dozens of other Condo Towers That Ate Seattle. But an elegant, soothing rain-forest ethos greets you when you enter Hotel 1000, the city's newest upscale property and one of its most distinctive. The lobby floor is leaf-patterned marble from Brazil; muted leaf, bark and wood colors repeat everywhere; and a subtle bamboo motif culminates in a floor-vase "bouquet" of 6-foot bamboo canes in each of the 120 guest rooms.

It is a stimulant and social elixir widely used in East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and it is one with more than 40 street names in this country, including khat, chat, gat, qat, African salad, Abyssinian tea and Somali tea. But, as federal drug guidelines put it: "There is no legitimate use for khat in the United States."

The lonely heights of bridges have often been magnets for suicide -- San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, England, the Coronado Bridge in San Diego. The lure of a spectacular plunge to a speedy demise in a womb of water has proven irresistible for generations. In few of these places, though, are despairing jumpers in danger of becoming deadly missiles, threatening pedestrians below. That dubious honor is reserved for Seattle, where the 78-year-old Aurora Bridge runs 167 feet above the west end of Lake Union -- half of it over land.

It's 4:40 on a Sunday afternoon, and I'm grazing at Le Pichet, a French bistro, slathering pork rillettes--an unctuous French cousin of pa^te--on crusty bread and sipping an Alsatian Pinot Blanc. The bartender keeps me in sight as he readies for the dinner rush, his manager writing the evening specials on a chalkboard. Next I order a plate of chevre from the Loire Valley.

The lonely heights of bridges have often been magnets for suicide -- San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, England, the Coronado Bridge in San Diego. The lure of a spectacular plunge to a speedy demise in a womb of water has proven irresistible for generations. In few of these places, though, are despairing jumpers in danger of becoming deadly missiles, threatening pedestrians below. That dubious honor is reserved for Seattle, where the 78-year-old Aurora Bridge runs 167 feet above the west end of Lake Union -- half of it over land.

Naveed Haq insists he's not the same man who stalked the halls of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle in 2006, killing one woman and wounding five others to vent his hatred of Israel and Judaism. In a courtroom filled with victims and their relatives, Haq said Thursday that the man who attacked the federation was filled with rage from mental illness and the wrong medications. "I am not a man filled with hate," he said. "That Naveed Haq at the federation that July day was not the real Naveed Haq."

Lin Yee Wong listened as the interpreter read a letter, handwritten in Chinese, that detailed memories of her husband, who was slain more than 26 years ago in the worst mass killing in Seattle's history. Gim Lun Wong was among 13 people hogtied, robbed and fatally shot by three men at the Wah Mee social club in the Chinatown district on Feb. 19, 1983. A 14th victim survived. In the years since, Lin Yee Wong said, she has been able to conceal her grief -- until now, with prison time possibly nearing an end for one of those convicted in her husband's killing.

A King County jury on Tuesday found Naveed Haq guilty of aggravated first-degree murder in the 2006 shootings at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, a verdict that carries an automatic life sentence. After hearing seven weeks of testimony, the jury also found Haq guilty of five counts of attempted first-degree murder, one count of unlawful imprisonment and one count of malicious harassment, the state's hate-crime law. Haq opened fire in the center's offices, killing Pamela Waechter, 58. Several of the shooting victims who were in the courtroom hugged tearfully when the verdicts were announced.

The hunt for a 37-year-old landscaper accused of killing four police officers expanded across western Washington on Monday, with investigators combing through hundreds of tips after an 11-hour siege of a Seattle house turned up empty. "Right now, they're just following every lead they can, whether it's up in King County or down here in Pierce County," sheriff's spokeswoman Sheri Badger said. Maurice Clemmons -- a multiple felon charged with gunning down the four officers Sunday morning in a Parkland, Wash.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee broke his silence Monday and defended his decision to support freedom for a convict now wanted in the ambush slayings of four Seattle-area police officers. "If I could have known nine years ago that this guy was capable of something of this magnitude, obviously I would never have granted the commutation," Huckabee said. FOR THE RECORD: Police shooting: An article in Tuesday's Section A about the shooting deaths of four Lakewood, Wash., police officers and another about former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's granting of clemency to suspect Maurice Clemmons said that Clemmons was released from jail a week before the attack on $15,000 bond.

It was perhaps a measure of how far Seattle has fallen--from its place deep in America's restless heart, a city of snowy mountains and inland seas to which the disillusioned, ambitious, bored and broke from the rest of the country flocked in the 1990s--to where it is now, which is a city under siege. Or maybe Seattle, with its average 3 feet a year of precipitation, has always expected the sky to deliver bad things.

Boeing Co. said Friday that it would pay up to $72.5 million to settle a discrimination suit filed by female workers at its Seattle-area plants. In addition, the aerospace giant agreed to modify some employment and compensation practices to settle the class-action suit, which received preliminary agreement in U.S. District Court in Seattle.

Four Seattle-area police officers were shot to death Sunday morning in a coffee shop in what officials called a brazen ambush by a lone gunman. At least one officer apparently fought his way to the coffee shop door and returned fire, possibly wounding the shooter, authorities said. The shooter is likely to seek medical treatment for a gunshot wound, officials said. The officers, three men and a woman attached to the Lakewood Police Department, were conducting a routine pre-shift briefing over their laptops at the Forza Coffee Shop in Parkland, Wash.

Amid the blues bars and rescue missions of Pioneer Square, Seattle's storied intersection of sports and booze, art and vagrancy, the Elliott Bay Book Co. has stood as a symbol of comfortable, old-world erudition. For years, it has been one of the West's few destination bookstores, a place tourists and locals alike visit for the sake of spending a couple of hours getting lost in its 140,000-some neatly stacked titles. When the last actual book downloads onto Kindle (at Amazon.com on the other side of town)