Driving around with a bus full of teenagers isn't most TriMet bus drivers' dream job, but for A.K. Rucker, it sure comes close.
During the summer, Rucker is in charge of the First Step cleanup crew, a group of about 20 teenagers who spend their summer picking up litter on about every major bus line in the city. On an average day, the crew will collect 75 33-gallon garbage bags, as much trash as a typical family might throw away in six months.

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The Total Experience Gospel Choir performs at the Rainier Valley Link Light Rail Block Party on June 30 to celebrate the progress being made on the light rail system, which will begin operating in 2009 with service to Downtown Seattle, South Seattle and Tukwila. By the end of 2009, the Link light rail will run all the way to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

The Seattle School Board is considering a proposal to name the new building housing Garfield High School's auditorium, music room, athletic facilities and locker rooms in honor of alumnus Quincy Jones, a graduate of Garfield's class of 1950.
In 1983, Seattle Public Schools honored the award-winning Jones by naming the Garfield auditorium the Quincy Jones Auditorium.

Kevin Durant hadn't been a member of the SuperSonics two full days before one of the most popular players in team history anointed him Seattle's basketball savior.
"I don't want to put pressure on Kevin, but I think you will save the Sonics," Slick Watts, who played for the Sonics from 1973-78, said Saturday to Durant, the No. 2 pick in the NBA draft.
"I think you will help keep them in Seattle."

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration is urging a former White House political director to ignore a subpoena and not testify before Congress about the firings of federal prosecutors, her lawyer says.
The Senate Judiciary Committee wants to hear from Sara Taylor at its hearing Wednesday and she is willing to talk. Testifying, however, would defy the wishes of the president, "a person whom she admires and for whom she has worked tirelessly for years," lawyer W. Neil Eggleston said.
Eggleston stated, in a letter this weekend to committee leaders and White House counsel Fred Fielding, that Taylor expects a letter from Fielding asking her not to comply with the subpoena.

TEXARKANA, Texas (AP) _ A Texas appellate court has upheld the felony conviction of Shaquanda Cotton, the Black East Texas teenager freed in March amid heightened racial tensions in her small town and a shakeup of the state's troubled juvenile prison system. Found guilty in March 2006 of shoving a teacher's aide at Paris High School. She was 15 when a judge sentenced her to a state youth prison in Brownsville, where she served one year...

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The words "summer school" don't usually invoke images of barbecues, classic hip-hop tunes and videography classes.
But that's exactly what's happening at Oregon Outreach's "welcome to summer school" celebration.

Portlanders are known for their environmental passions, but a group of local women are taking recycling to a whole new level.
"It's beyond LEEDS," says Alisa Kane of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority's plans to convert their meeting hall into an environmentally friendly, "green" building.
Kane, who works in the city of Portland's Green Building program, reviewed the Delta's grant application, which garnered the sorority $117,000, and said the Delta's meeting hall plans are innovative and sustainable.