Rental Prices Stay High, Huskies to Cactus Bowl & More News

Protests continued in Seattle this weekend against the recent grand jury decisions not to indict the police officers who killed young black men in Missouri and New York. On Saturday, seven people were arrested when a few hundred marched to the Seattle Police headquarters downtown. Last night, protestors blocked the 4^th and Pine intersection with a “die-in,” where they lay in the road for four and a half minutes to symbolize the four and a half hours Mike Brown’s body was left in the street.

Seattle remains the eighth most expensive major city to rent in the nation, with its median one-bedroom apartment coming in at $1,610 per month—hiking $10 from last month.  For the fourth month straight, San Francisco tops the list, and when the list broadens beyond major cities, Seattle looks cheap behind Kirkland ($1,730/month for a one-bedroom), Bellevue ($1,730/month) and Mercer Island ($1,660/month). Want to stay local without breaking the bank? The median one-bedroom in Redmond is $1,420 per month.

Ballard High School has announced that two students have tested positive for whooping cough (pertussis). The school has mailed a King County Public Health fact sheet about the infection to all Ballard High families, and officials report that after examining immunization records, they learned that a few students had not received the pertussis vaccine. They are notifying those families privately.

A man who recently returned from Mali tested negative for Ebola and was released from Harborview Medical Center. The man was tested Friday when he had a slight fever; King County health officials say they will continue to monitor him carefully over the next 21 days, the period in which Ebola symptoms could still develop.

The US government released six prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay detention center, including a man represented by Seattle attorney David Marshall. Syrian Ahmed Ajam (37) had been held without a trial since 2001 when he attempted to leave Afghanistan while the US was warring with the Taliban. Marshall, who took on Ajam pro-bono, told King 5 News he does not think the former prisoner is a threat. “I hope that we are seeing the beginning of the end of Guantanamo,” Marshall told the news station.

The University of Washington Huskies will finish their season by competing against the Oklahoma State Cowboys in the Cactus Bowl January 2 at Sun Devil Stadium at 7 p.m. The two schools have battled twice before, each victorious once; their last match up in 1985 went to the Cowboys, 31-17.