Whatcom Roundup: New restaurant, nightclub and bakeries coming to Bellingham; local events

Alyse Smith
·2 min read

Here’s your weekly roundup of the latest retail, business and restaurant activity in and around Whatcom County:

New chain bakery and restaurant opening

A new restaurant and bakery, Sourdough & Co., has filed a building permit for a new location at 1225 E Sunset Dr. Suite 37 in Bellingham. The soup, salad and sandwich restaurant has locations in seven states including California, Nevada, Oregon, Arizona, Colorado, Washington and Texas. The permit was filed Sept. 5.

New nightclub proposed

A new nightclub has been proposed and a permit filed for a new business at 1115 Railroad Ave. in Bellingham. The permit was filed Sept. 6.

New sweets shop opening

Owners of new business called Sweet Haven, a “dessert universe,” have filed an application for a beer and wine restaurant at 1005 Harris Ave., the previous location of Sweet Bellingham. Cosmic Ice Cream, an ice cream truck business in Seattle, filed the license application on Sept. 9.

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New wood-fired pizza truck

Queens of Fire Pizza, a wood-fired pizza food truck, has announced it will soon be operating around Whatcom County.

No opening date had been announced as of Sept. 12.

Bellewood Farms opens U-Pick fields

Bellewood Farms, a farm, pumpkin patch, apple and pear orchard and distillery has opened its U-pick apple orchard for the season, according to an email from the farmstead.

John Belisle, co-owner of Bellewood Acres, gives U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell a tour of his apple orchard and distillery north of Bellingham on Oct. 23, 2013. The Belisles are putting the farm up for sale as they prepare for retirement.
John Belisle, co-owner of Bellewood Acres, gives U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell a tour of his apple orchard and distillery north of Bellingham on Oct. 23, 2013. The Belisles are putting the farm up for sale as they prepare for retirement.

“During the U-pick harvest that runs through Oct. 31, the public can choose their apples from the trees at the 62-acre Bellewood Farms. U-pick hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday,” the email states.

The farm also has a corn maze and an apple bin train ride, as well as apple cider doughnuts on Saturdays and Sundays. Bellewood Farm’s pumpkin patch is set to open Oct. 2.

Bellewood Farms and Distillery at 6140 Guide Meridian Rd. in Lynden, Wash. on Thursday, May 2, 2024.
Bellewood Farms and Distillery at 6140 Guide Meridian Rd. in Lynden, Wash. on Thursday, May 2, 2024.

Bellewood Farms is located at 6140 Guide Meridian in Lynden.

Bellingham events, trivia nights and live music

Bellingham is full of local events, markets, festivals and other events during the month of September. Here’s your guide to this month’s events, trivia, live music and more. For an extensive list of local events, visit our new Events page at www.bellinghamherald.com/events/#.

Sign Up: Discover Whatcom

This curated weekly newsletter is a roundup of what’s new and exciting to help you live joyfully in Bellingham and Whatcom County. Click here to sign up. In your inbox every Thursday.

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    The solution to Canada Post's financial woes and murky future, according to one observer, is just two words: Sell it."I'm not sure you can do any tweaks," said Vincent Geloso, an assistant professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. "The best you can do is make them suck not as bad. That's essentially it. There's no way around that," Geloso, who is also a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, told CBC News. "It's better if we just go down the route of selling it off."Canada Post's recent labour strife has renewed focus on what changes might have to be made to adapt to the future. 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(Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press)End postal monopoliesFor example, the European Commission, which is responsible for proposing and monitoring new EU laws and policies, said in 2013 that the delivery of all letters, regardless of weight, was open to competition. (In Canada, only Canada Post can deliver letters.)Such open competition would end monopolies and do more to control costs, Geloso says.But, he says, Ottawa could go further by following the lead of Austria, the Netherlands and Germany, which have privatized their postal operations. Because of the pressures of competition, those national postal services have focused on controlling their costs, he says, the sort of focus "Canada Post will never have as long as it's a Crown corporation with a monopoly."Geloso, however, doesn't mention the U.K.'s Royal Mail, which was privatized in 2013 and has struggled to adapt as the number of people using it continues to decline steeply. (Earlier this week, the U.K. government approved the sale of Royal Mail's parent company to a Czech billionaire.)Despite privatization, the Royal Mail has lost millions of dollars annually and been repeatedly fined by U.K. regulator Ofcom for failing to achieve its delivery targets.The U.K.'s Royal Mail, which was privatized in 2013, has struggled to adapt as the number of people using it continues to decline steeply. 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(Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)The practice has an acronym: SLAPPThe practice is so widespread it has an acronym: SLAPP, short for Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation. And it's used in all sorts of places, including in democracies by wealthy plaintiffs.Cherian George is from a country notorious for the practice: Singapore. He said defamation cases are part of the ruling party's stock response to public debate. In one famous case, a now-defunct magazine published an interview with an opposition leader who accused Singapore's government of abusing libel lawsuits to conceal corruption. How did the government respond? By suing the magazine for libel.A former journalist, George is now an academic who studies free speech and teaches at Hong Kong Baptist University. He tells his students — who are mostly from mainland China — that a big difference with the U.S. is that, because of how the First Amendment has been interpreted by courts, it's so difficult for politicians to win a defamation case that they rarely even try."I will have to update that lecture," George said.He says a lot will hinge on the willingness of media owners to defend press freedom — the stuff of Hollywood movies, as with The Washington Post's battle to publish a massive leak of documents on the Vietnam War.He called the ABC case a failed test, not the sort of moment Disney will ever want to commemorate in one of its own movies.Profit-driven media owners are vulnerable to this political pressure, he said.Just two days after Disney settled, there was another example of a wealthy media owner scrambling to get on Trump's good side.Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who also happens to own the Washington Post, donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund and flew to Mar-a-Lago. During the recent election, he stunned his own newspaper staff by cancelling an editorial that endorsed Trump's opponent Kamala Harris.Trump remarked in a cryptic social-media post Thursday that he's suddenly popular with certain unnamed people, in an all-caps message: "EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!"Disney's desire to make nice with Trump has drawn ample criticism. NBC host Chuck Todd complained that his ABC peer George Stephanopoulos was abandoned. The anti-Trump conservative news outlet The Bulwark fretted that media will start self-censoring, and stop platforming the hardest-hitting Trump critics.Trump once acknowledged motive for suing mediaBut some reports say the case was more complicated.The New York Post suggested Disney settled to avoid an awkward discovery process, including evidence that Stephanopoulos was warned several times before going on the air to avoid using the word, "rape," then used the word repeatedly.The New York Times said Disney's lawyers were worried the case could go all the way to the Supreme Court and wind up becoming a pretext to weaken First Amendment case law.As it stands, it's extraordinarily difficult for a public figure in the U.S. to sue successfully for libel. Media are protected unless they publish speech that is knowingly malicious and recklessly indifferent to the truth.Trump campaigns in Iowa in 2023. He easily won the state last month. Now he's suing a famous pollster for a survey that showed him behind in the polls. He's also suing the newspaper that ran the poll. (Charlie Neibergall/The Associated Press)It's the legacy of a court case in which the New York Times was sued over a 1960 ad opposing segregation. An Alabama police commissioner said it contained errors and maligned him unfairly, and he was initially awarded $500,000, but the Supreme Court overturned it in New York Times v. Sullivan, the foundation of current U.S. libel law.There have been efforts to challenge it. And a couple of Supreme Court justices, especially Clarence Thomas, support revisiting that 1964 decision.In the meantime, most suits like these get thrown out of court. Trump is on the record explaining, to Heinze's earlier point, that, when it comes to libel suits, winning isn't everything.Trump acknowledged this after suing a journalist in 2006 who questioned his claim of being a billionaire; he sued, lost, and then said it was worth it. "I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more," Trump said.  "I did it to make his life miserable, which I'm happy about." He's now aiming to render a few more people's lives difficult. WATCH | Trump hurled insults, threatened to sue columnist during deposition: A summary of Trump's lawsuitsThis includes suing one of the most-respected pollsters in the U.S. under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act. The reason? A catastrophically bad poll conducted by Ann Selzer, who has since retired after what had been a stellar career.A few days before the November election, she shocked the country with a survey showing Kamala Harris leading in Iowa, a result that pointed to a potential national landslide for her, and it got considerable media attention because of her track record.Trump ultimately won Iowa by 13 points; in his court filing, he said the poll forced his campaign to unnecessarily expend resources in Iowa, and he argued that an error of that magnitude was not statistically possible, but was in fact a malicious act.He's seeking unspecified financial damages from her and is also suing the newspaper that published the survey, the Des Moines Register.That's after Trump sued CBS over 60 Minutes editing clips of an interview with Kamala Harris. The show ran a shortened clip of her grappling with an uncomfortable topic for her: the Middle East. It then resisted calls to publicly release a full interview transcript. He's seeking $10 billion.But CBS denies Trump's accusation of malice. It says it ran one clip of the Harris answer on its show, and shared a different clip from that same answer with another CBS show. He's also suing the Pulitzer Prize board over awards to newspapers for their coverage of his 2016 campaign's alleged collusion with Russia — "the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax," as Trump calls it.The 2016 affair resulted in criminal charges against some of Trump's senior campaign staff and the Pulitzers have defended the awards they gave to the New York Times and Washington Post.In reaction to the pollster lawsuit, Columbia University's free-speech Knight Institute called Trump's effort a non-starter under the First Amendment and urged the court to dismiss it quickly, recognizing it for what it is: An attempt to intimidate and silence.But Trump expressed his full-fledged support for these suits during a media conference this week. In fact, he said, he shouldn't even have to be funding these cases — the U.S. Justice Department should be doing it; in other words, the Justice Department he's about to start leading in one month. "We have to straighten out the press," Trump said.

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