“I was nothing but happy (after the divorce). That was my only emotion,” she said. “I was so happy I wanted to run around all over the place.”

Stories like hers are increasingly common around the world as the number of “gray divorces” – splits among couples aged 50 and older – rises each year. The trend has been seen in countries like the United States and elsewhere, but takes on particular significance in Asia, where people generally live longer.

Many places like South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China are battling demographic crises as birth rates fall and elderly populations swell.

The surge in gray divorces is also often driven by women – who have long faced restrictive gender norms in conservative Asian societies, as well as legal, financial, and social barriers to seeking divorce. That’s now changing; in Japan, for instance, among couples splitting after decades of marriage, twice as many women as men filed for divorce in 2024.

Button up my collared shirt
Might fuck around and wear a skirt
Darken the hair that shouldn't be there
Hide your kids, best beware

Get problems lifted off my chest
Or at least suppress 'til further notice
Not to be contained
Though I'm a fan of a boxy shape

Ooh-ooh
Ooh-ooh

Bind me up, but not for long
Adjusting to another thought, feels so wrong

Ooh-ooh
Ooh-ooh
Ooh-ooh
Ooh-ooh

Men who feel femme, am I one of them?
Jealous of arrows that hit the same target
Do they realize that their bodies are erotic

So many things that I'd like to change
But I don't mind if I stay the same
Maybe I'm a fag instead of a dyke
Or maybe I'm both at the same time

Ooh-ooh
Ooh-ooh

Bind me up, but not for long
Adjusting to another thought, feels so wrong

Ooh-ooh
Ooh-ooh

Piggybacking off of Lady Butterfly's question the other day!

Shout out to @specialseaweed@sh.itjust.works for updating the other post on this topic!

Transcript:

"Now Council is proposing to pull this funding from our general fund, which is already facing a $175 million deficit. I look forward to seeing which critical services they plan to cut from the general fund to make their numbers work."

#EndEyeCheck is a new rape survivor-led campaign building awareness, community, and changing the laws that allow men to get away with drugging and raping their wives and partners. We are tackling online content as part of the campaign and starting to collect statistics of drug facilitated rape.

Our names are Zoe Watts and Amanda Stanhope. We are two survivors that were brought together with the support of ITV News for the first time in London.

ITV News has launched an anonymous survey of survivors as a part of their investigation into the scale of sexual assault and rape carried out by a partner against women who were incapacitated or unconscious.

If you are a survivor, please join us in filling out the survey and helping us develop statistics to support our advocacy work. This is a voluntary survey and we encourage survivors to connect with the Zoe or Amanda on Instagram or by e-mail.

If you need extra protection, we recommend using private/incognito mode on your web browser a personal device that isn’t shared or monitored. Please only continue if you are in a safe space to do so.

The mayor’s office had argued that universal school meals would help out more than 6,800 students whose family income barely exceeds federal thresholds. But Hollingsworth and Foster said equity should come first with additional aid to Seattle’s poorest youth. The question of whether to siphon off funds from one food program to another started a bitter zero-sum debate between proponents of means testing and universalism.

The vote did not fall neatly along progressive and centrist lines. Foster, a sponsor, is one of the council’s three progressives, while the centrist Saka gave an impassioned speech about how his childhood experiences motivated him to oppose any delay.

“We qualified for free and reduced lunch, which means we also would have likely qualified for Medicaid,” Saka said. “But I never went to the dentist and only went to the doctor a handful of times in nine years because of the severe, significant, non-trivial, and substantial administrative paperwork burden imposed on people that need these valuable resources.”

In a press statement, Wilson pledged to work closely with the council and city departments to implement the programs funded by the FEPP levy.

Washington joined the ranks of states like Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Maine in enacting a so-called millionaires tax. It places a 9.9% levy on households earning more than $1 million per year. The tax doesn’t apply to the first $1 million of income — only the income beyond that threshold.

Supporters of the tax argue that it affects only a sliver of households in the state, while opponents warn it threatens opening the door to a broader statewide income tax.

Let’s Go Washington, a political action committee sponsored by hedge fund manager Brian Heywood, put forward the repeal measure. “We are proud to lead the fight to protect families and small businesses from Olympia expanding their state income tax on all Washingtonians,” he said in a statement July 15, when its initiative met the signature threshold for appearing on the ballot.

Meanwhile, a campaign urging voters to reject the repeal bid has won the backing of some high-profile Washingtonians, including travel writer Rick Steves and “Jeopardy!” winner-turned-host Ken Jennings.

Gov. Bob Ferguson (D) signed the bill creating the tax in March. It takes effect in 2028, with the first taxes due in 2029.

The Seattle area job market appeared to improve over the last quarter, with the unemployment rate declining and job openings increasing slightly. But those averages obscure a significant restructuring that may reshape the regional labor force.

Job growth is shifting away from the tech industry — once seen as the unstoppable economic engine of the region — toward healthcare and frontline services. That’s according to new data compiled by the Workforce Development Council (WDC) of Seattle-King County, a nonprofit that helps set employment strategy for the region.

The 300-foot-long wetland, anchored along a dock in Ballard, is designed to give young salmon some of the calm, shaded, shallow habitat they’ve lost along the city’s hardened shorelines. “They need every help they can get to survive,” said Nancy Rottle with the University of Washington’s Green Futures Lab.

Since 2022, the Green Futures Lab has partnered with the nonprofit EarthCorps to study whether a constructed floating ecosystem can survive in saltwater and help salmon do the same. “To our knowledge, no one had tested them in salt water,” Rottle said.

Researchers say more than 75% of Seattle’s shorelines have been altered by development, making it harder for young salmon to find the protective nearshore waters they need to grow. The floating wetland tries to bring some of that habitat back by providing shade, food sources and other ecological benefits right at the marina.

“The perfect place to provide habitat that would provide shade for salmon, food for salmon, other aquatic advantages, ecosystem services,” Rottle said.

The Seattle City Council approved a beefed-up renewal of the city's dedicated transit funding measure Tuesday on a 9-0 vote, giving voters the chance to sign onto a major expansion of city-funded King County Metro service. If approved in November, the refreshed Seattle Transit Measure will generate around $138 million per year, the vast majority of which would maintain and expand supplemental bus service across the city to increase Seattleites' all-day access to transit.

Increasing the Seattle Transit Measure's funding source from its current 0.15% sales tax rate to 0.3% will allow the City of Seattle to purchase around 100,000 more bus trips per year, ramping up from the 180,000 provided today. That will mean 10-15 routes see increased frequencies, particularly on nights and weekends, with the exact corridors determined using existing equity criteria in place at the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT).

Meeropol resists making Trump the focus of her film, having found a much more interesting main character in E. Jean Carroll herself. Dubbed “feminism’s answer to Hunter S. Thompson” by The New York Times, she built a career as a gonzo journalist, someone who excelled at entering strange social situations and bending the goings-on around her like gravity around a star, then writing about it. Her bubbly, acerbic wit shines through in every article she writes.

Influenced by the likes of Dear Abby and Ask Ann Landers, Carroll had wanted to be an advice columnist all her life. When she got a foothold selling stories to magazines, that childhood dream could finally blossom. From stories about Fran Lebowitz camping to tales of college fraternities, she says in the doc, she became “the go-to person at Esquire to cover bizarre sexual [and] gender stories.”

As the conscience for generations of American women, Carroll had a front-row seat to the country’s cultural metamorphosis. “If you ever want to know the pulse of America, read an advice column,” she says. “It’s not necessarily in the answers — it’s in the question.” Carroll noticed recurring anxieties among her readers about sexism in the workplace and men’s pushback to the feminist movement.

A few weeks ago, Rena Dixon, the head of Fact Forward, a South Carolina nonprofit that offers adolescent health and sex education classes, got a letter from the Trump administration with crushing news. The government was terminating the organization’s $1.6 million grant from a federal program to reduce teen pregnancies, effective immediately.

The administration’s priorities, it said, do not align with “content that encourages, normalizes or promotes sexual activity for minors.” The move is the latest in a campaign that began in the first Trump administration to defund or overhaul the 16-year-old, $100 million initiative. Courts blocked the effort in 2018, but this time the administration, which abruptly canceled 53 of the program’s 67 grants last month, has been taking steps to be on firmer legal ground. The letter from the assistant secretary for health accused Fact Forward of including lessons with “advice on making condom use more pleasurable” and discussions that normalize “use of pornography.” A video, it said, contained a “scenario of adolescents engaging in sexual activity.”

“That information was just not true,” said Dr. Dixon. The organization had never used the lessons specified, she said. The video “is about one teen telling another that she had had sex, and her friend responding, ‘That’s a big no-no!’”