Northwest News

Past allegations of corrupt business practices have come back to haunt Troy Kelley, the Democratic candidate for Washington state auditor. Kelley’s Republican opponent Thursday launched a website containing hundreds of pages of court documents. Some of them contain accusations that Kelley misappropriated funds and attempted to move the money offshore.

It's a hot dry day for fire fighters battling blazes along Route 141 in Washington, just north of White Salmon. Forty-five homes have been evacuated since Wednesday afternoon. Other homeowners have been notified they need to be ready to evacuate on short notice.

In the past decade, a dozen Western State Hospital patients have killed themselves. More than a hundred others have tried. Megan Templeton was the most recent. In April, she hanged herself in her hospital room. She had turned 20 the day before. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for teenagers and young adults in Washington.

The latest community college enrollment numbers may hold a clue to what’s happening in the Northwest’s economy. Some two-year institutions in the region are seeing the first decline in class registration since the recession. Correspondent Jessica Robinson has more.

The waters of Puget Sound are a pretty noisy place, if you’re an orca. But what does a passing tanker ship or motorboat sound like to a killer whale? How does it affect their behavior? Ashley Ahearn reports researchers are trying to find out.

The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission is looking into an 11-year emergency planning mistake at the Northwest’s only commercial nuclear power plant. Officials at the Columbia Generating Station in southeast Washington used faulty estimates of how much radiation could escape during a crisis.