Day Hook is an occasional feature on threesheetsnw.com in which bloggers Deborah Bach and Marty McComber visit urban cruising destinations around Puget Sound and check out things to do over a 24-hour visit. Today: Nanaimo. 

Nanaimo is a natural stopping-off point for cruisers crossing the Strait of Georgia or heading to and from Desolation Sound. The second largest city on Vancouver Island, with a population of more than 80,000, Nanaimo is a good place to provision and get boat parts, with a large grocery store and chandleries conveniently located near marinas.

But the city is worth a visit as a destination in its own right.

Read more here: 

To effectively fight the prostitution of children, it helps to look at the chronic problem in terms of supply and demand.

“You will never bring down this business on the victim’s side. The driver is on the clients’ side,” said Kaffie McCullough, campaign director of the Atlanta non-profit organization A Future. Not a Past, dedicated to stopping the prostitution of children.

McCullough was one of about 80 service providers from non-profit, government and law enforcement agencies who gathered at Seattle City Hall Tuesday to focus on the problem. Few cities have a coordinated effort to help prostituted youth, and Seattle is now getting serious about tackling the problem.

The business is much bigger than many people think. McCullough shared the results of research in Georgia on the shadowy problem: 7,200 men a month in Georgia purchase sex with a female under 18 years old, and more than 400 girls are exploited each month. By 2013, that number could grow to 1,500.

Researchers counted... (more)

It appears the city is still planning to cut its Crime Prevention Coordinator positions next year, and is apparently preparing to farm out some of their duties to police officers and neighbors.

As we've previously written, the CPCs at each of the five precincts work with neighbors to secure their homes using Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, and also help organize block watches and the yearly Night Out, among other things. However, due to budget issues, the CPCs will likely be out of a job next year.

Full story at SeattleCrime.com

Grab your library DVDs now! Seattle public libraries are set to close Monday and remain shut until Tuesday, Sept. 7, due to library budget cuts totaling $3 million.

  Here's a list of the many things you can't do during the closure, according to a library press release:

Services unavailable:

Most Library services will be unavailable during the one-week closure and will have the following impacts:

• No materials will be due and no fines will be accrued.



• The last day to check out Library items before the closure is Sunday, Aug. 29. The Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., will be open until 6 p.m. that day and another 11 branches will be open until 5 p.m. Visit www.spl.org or call 206-386-4636 for more information on Library locations and hours.



• No book drops will be open. The Central Library book drops will close at 8 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 29 and will reopen at 6 a.m. Tuesday, Sept. 7. Book drops at branches that are open on Sundays will close at 5 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 29. The book drops will reopen...

For area church-watchers, the recent news that the Ballard-based Mars Hill Church has purchased the University Baptist Church building may not be surprising, but it is noteworthy, even striking. The tale of these two churches — the decline of one and the ascent of the other — tells a story of larger shifts in the Northwest.

University Baptist Church, near the University of Washington, had long been a standard bearer for progressive religion and social-activist politics. In the 1980s and 1990s, University Baptist was led by Donovan Cook. A charismatic minister, Cook often could be found in the forefront of demonstrations and protests against wars and for social equality. But Cook’s pastorate ended badly. He was charged with having been involved in a string of sexual affairs, some with members of the congregation.

Cook was followed by Tim Phillips, now senior minister at First Baptist Church, just east of downtown on First Hill. The University congregation, under Phillips' leadership,... (more)

In May, state auditors reported that the Puget Sound Partnership had misspent state funds during the agency's first two years. Problems at the agency responsible for cleaning up Puget Sound included illegal purchases and the unfair distribution of millions of dollars in consulting contracts.

The auditors didn't look into the political connections of people getting those contracts. KUOW did. We found contracts going to people who had worked with Congressman Norm Dicks. The influential Democrat's son is the Partnership's executive director. This is part four of our series "Inside the Puget Sound Partnership."

Read full story here... 

Full series...

RELATED

Tacoma News-Tribune: Puget Sound Partnership isn't winning public trust

There's little doubt that Puget Sound is in bad shape — or that restoring the ecosystem will take many millions of dollars. Congressman Norm Dicks has steered millions of federal dollars to the cleanup effort. His son David runs the state agency in charge of cleaning up Puget Sound. Father and son both say there's no conflict between family and public interest. Ethics experts split on the question. In part three of our series "Inside the Puget Sound Partnership," KUOW focuses on the agency's family ties.

Read full story...

Full series...

The head of the Puget Sound Partnership gets a perk that few state–agency directors do. The state provides David Dicks a Toyota Prius for his exclusive use on the job. A whistle–blower complained that Dicks was also using the official vehicle for a personal benefit: his commute to work. State investigators declined to look into the allegations. So KUOW did instead.

Read the full story here

Despite a set of loud booms that rattled Puget Sound just after 1:30 PM, President Barack Obama's motorcade ventured on and delivered the president to the shores of Lake Washington Tuesday afternoon. With no official announcement of the motorcade route, we ventured off Hill to the intersection of McGilvra and Lake Washington Blvd that was most likely to afford a view of the presidential entourage as it arrived in Madrona for an exclusive luncheon.

The booms were confirmed to have been caused by military aircraft scrambled because of a breach of the airspace above Seattle while the president traveled below:

A pair of loud sonic booms heard around the Seattle area shortly before 2 p.m. Tuesday were caused by two F-16 jets, according to Allen Kenitzer, spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Via Facebook, NORAD released the following statement:

SONIC BOOMS over Seattle: NORAD responded to an aircraft violating a VIP Temporary Flight Restricted Area near Seattle at approximately 1:35...

Washington's whistleblower law encourages public servants to report wrongdoing when they see it. The law lets insiders blow the whistle anonymously on bad behavior by state officials. And it protects the employees from retaliation if their employers even suspect them of spilling the beans.

But sometimes, whistleblowers lose their jobs anyway -- as happened to one at the state agency responsible for cleaning up Puget Sound. It's part one of KUOW's investigation of the Puget Sound Partnership.

Read full story here...

How hot is it expected to be in your ZIP code tonight or tomorrow? Check it out: this University of Washington interactive tool will tell you...

A Seattle Times newsroom employee has been caught stealing more than $50,000 worth of books, DVDs and CDs meant for a Seattle Times charity fund, but no charges have been filed.

In June, an acquaintance of the Times employee contacted the paper and told them the employee had been "intercept[ing] the books as they come into the mail room," taking them out of the Times' building and storing them at his home until he had 18-20 full boxes of books, which he would then take and resell at Powell's bookstore in Portland.

Read the full story here: 

Last month, the South Lake Union Streetcar had record ridership, finally breaking the 2,000 mark with a weekday average of  2,193 boardings and a weekend/holiday average of 1,459.  

This is about a 15 percent increase over June’s weekday ridership, and a 9 percent increase in daily ridership over the same period last year.  

Read more here: 

Seattleites can’t get enough of history lessons these days.

That is, if the lessons include taverns, amusement parks, sports stadiums or other popular topics from the last 30 to 40 years.

“Very few people are going to click on an old photo of a Seattle pioneer,” said Feliks Banel, a local producer and historian. “They want to read about things they can identify with.”

Banel has been spreading history to the masses in a variety of new venues these days. In June, he began a series for Seattlepi.com called Seattle Rewind. The weekly episodes include a podcast and historic photos.

So far, Banel has covered the amusement parks of Seattle’s past, stadium plans that never came together, J.P. Patches (pictured at left), Seattle radio, Seafair, and the 4^th of July. Next up are pieces on the Beatles coming to Seattle and the Seahawks.

Banel tries to tie the history pieces to current events. The Beatles, for instance, played in Seattle in August of 1964. The Seahawks just started... (more)

The other morning, my wife saw a yellow Wilson's warbler perched in the old, cracked apple tree in front of our house. When she told me she had seen the bird, I thought north to the Canadian boreal forest where it had probably fledged, and to a third-floor office in Seattle's 1913-vintage Securities Building.

It's in that Seattle office from which the Pew Charitable Trusts have engineered a deal that may be a giant step toward saving huge swaths of that forest. At the end of May, Pew, eight other environmental groups and the Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC) announced an agreement covering 180 million acres of boreal forest, which has been called the largest conservation agreement in history.

Read the full story at crosscut.com.

King County's $140 million dollar plan to rebuild the Youth Services Center has made it another step closer, with the King County Council moving to place the issue on the fall ballot.

Voters will get the final say whether to increase the county's sales tax by 0.1% to fund a new building to house juvenile and family courts and associated offices.

Read more here: 

A prize claimed by renowned conservationists such as David Attenborough and directors of some of the world's largest botanic gardens has been awarded to Estella Leopold, a University of Washington professor emeritus of botany, forest resources and quaternary research.

The International Cosmos Prize carries a cash award of 40 million yen, nearly $500,000, and goes to just one individual or team each year, according to information from Japan's Expo '90 Foundation, sponsor of the prize.

Leopold, 83, has been teaching and conducting research for more than 60 years, 35 of them at the UW. She pioneered the use of fossilized pollen and spores in North America to understand how plants and ecosystems respond over eons to such things as climate change.

She is the daughter of Aldo Leopold, known for proposing the "land ethic" that individuals are responsible for the health of the land and author of "A Sand County Almanac." Estella Leopold "has dedicated herself to the preservation and stewardship of natural... (more)

Seattle police were out in force Thursday rounding up 15 cab drivers who, according to SPD, are part of a major "open air market" for stolen goods in the heart of downtown.

Police say a cab stand and pay parking lot at the corner of 6th and Stewart—across the street from the Westin Hotel, and about three blocks from the Seattle Police Department's West Precinct—has become a hot spot for thieves to fence--or resell--stolen perfume, iPods and handbags taken in shoplifts, car prowls, and burglaries of homes and businesses in downtown Seattle.

The cab drivers were “engaged in stealing and…fencing” stolen property, Assistant Police Chief Jim Pugel told Seattlecrime.com.

  (more)