Update: The scam that is the PacMed Hospital lease got a rubber-stamp of approval last Wednesday from PacMed's Public Development Authority, despite testimony from some 100 concerned neighborhood, health care, and good government types alarmed at a public giveaway that, as described in this column last week, may exceed the Pacific Place/Nordstrom's garage fiasco for sheer lucre. Essentially, public money that should be spent on health care for lower-income area residents is going instead, by the tens of millions of dollars, into the pockets of one of the city's best-connected developers, Wright Runstad Co. And thanks to the lax oversight enjoyed by PDAs and a waiver last month from the feds, it may be a done deal before anyone knew what happened.

While there still may be questions around issues like environmental impact reviews, the basic terms of Wright Runstad's 99-year lease--and its ability to lease in turn to the decidedly non-medical use of office space for Amazon.com--appear set. Along with the recent brouhaha among vendors at Pike Place Market, and the expected atrocities surrounding our two new stadiums, the deal calls into question the utter lack of accountability of Public Development Authorities. The PDAs are independent government bodies, set up by Seattle City Council to run public assets in the public trust. In some cases--Good Shepherd Center springs to mind--they do that job well. But more and more cases are springing up where the clubhouse network of developers, lawyers, and politicos that run Seattle politics are using the independence of PDAs as a front to mobilize controversial development schemes without advance public scrutiny--or recourse. Short of disbanding particular PDAs-- which isn't gonna happen soon--taxpayers are left to grind their teeth and plan the next revolt.--Geov Parrish

Those most recent stadium atrocities, by the way, include an announced $30 million cost overrun for the new football stadium (two years before construction even begins!) and a squabble with neighborhood groups that thought they would get mitigation money in exchange for the lost business and inconvenience of having years of construction in their front yards. Wrong. Paul Allen's First and Goal is now demanding that construction in the partly residential neighborhood be allowed to proceed from 5:30 AM to 11 PM, every day, and that if it doesn't adhere to that schedule, the mitigation money go to Allen's overtime costs. In other words, rather than the promised kitty for the public, Allen wants another pot of money to go to service his greed-motivated rush construction schedule. Perhaps he should ask the Mariners what rush jobs do to the ol' budget. Look for another battleground soon, too, as Montlake residents discover that the Seahawks will--despite previous promises to the contrary--be playing in Husky Stadium for two years while the new playpen is built. --G.P.

And--we're still on the sports pages here--everyone needs to brace themselves for the frightful, and expensive, scam that is Seattle's bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics. By the end of September, Seattle must tell the U.S. Olympic Committee that it's in on the bidding process. This will involve convincing local governments to accede to USOC's demand that those governments assume all financial risk for the games. The most recent summer games in the U.S., hosted in Atlanta (1996) and Los Angeles (1984), were both fiscal and social disasters for their cities and people. That's not deterring our Big Thinkers, of course, starting with Mayor Pork. Also on the outrage-o- meter: plans to tear down low-income housing at Yesler Terrace to make way for a shiny new Olympic Village.-G.P.

When the Russian central bank defaulted on $40 billion of short term loans two weeks ago, the big losers were German and Swiss banks, particularly Credit Suisse Group, the bank that's been fighting off lawsuits for having appropriated funds in accounts belonging to Holocaust victims. Credit Suisse is reported to have lost at least $350 to $400 million. U.S. banks had about $1.5 billion total invested in Russian debt as of March 31st, although no banks were giving details about how much they lost last week. And, happily, George Soros, the billionaire currency speculator who was instrumental in crashing the currencies of several Southeast Asian countries last year (and who made millions from it), saw a couple of his mutual funds lose at least $2 billion. Easy come, easy go, eh George?--Maria Tomchick

Forget Bangladesh, Mozambique, or Paraguay. The World Bank is now lending money and economic advice to Washington, D.C. Yes, that's right, our nation's capital is standing in line with various Third World countries needing funds to pay for basic infrastructure. While the World Bank's charter prohibits it from lending money to industrialized nations, that didn't stop it from giving over $1 million in project grants to the District of Columbia. So how poor is Washington, D.C.? The statistics are grim. According to the Wall Street Journal, infant mortality in D.C. is 16.2 per 1,000, way above the national average of 7.6 (the worst among industrialized nations), and slightly worse than Sri Lanka's 16. In 1995, 13.5% of babies born in D.C. were underweight, compared with 13% in Zambia, while 39% of children in D.C. live below the poverty line. Other ills include high unemployment rates, deteriorating schools, crumbling streets and bridges, and overflowing sewers. As Deepali Tewari, a World Bank urban planner from India who has worked in Pakistan and Vietnam, said: "This has always struck me as being much more a Third World city than many other cities I've been to....Everybody here is pretty horrified at the way this place works." Uh, so are we--and we don't just mean the city government. As it turns out, neither does the World Bank: they're using this project as a way to lobby Congress for more money.--M.T.

Olympia rumor of the week: Everett Republican incumbent state rep Gary Strannigan's full time legislative aide is on the payroll of the state, with benefits, at the same time he's running Strannigan's 200k state senate race. Strannigan's seat is one of three the Democrats think they'll retake, which would give them back control of the state senate. Using a state employee to run your campaign on taxpayer dimes is illegal, of course, but the campaign work in a neck-and-neck election battle is supposedly done "only at night."--G.P.

It had to happen, given the logics of capitalism, and you'd be correct if you guessed that it happened in a New Age catalog: Somebody has trademarked a type of orgasm. In a "sexually explicit video" hawked in "The Pyramid Collection (tm): a catalog of personal growth & exploration," we have the opportunity to witness "the incredible Grafenberg Orgasm tm!" Can other body functions be far behind? The Krumlaufer Fart tm! The Sondheim Ankle Scratch tm! The Newmark Nosepick tm! My mind boggles tm...--G.P., with thanks to Jean Fallow for the clipping

AMERICAN NEWSPEAK. Hoarded at http://www.scn.org/newspeak Celebrating cutting edge advances in the Doublethink of the 90's Supposedly written by Wayne Grytting