It's Monday, we'll take what we can get: Partly sunny, with a high near 71. Forecast here.
Making headlines in the Northwest:
- Cantwell taps a keg, lauds brewery loan
- Pierce County unions freeze own wages
- Off the wire: Soldier killed; man survives in trunk
- Copper thieves put PSE substation out of service
- Math experts to discuss cancer, climate change
Cantwell taps a keg, lauds brewery loan
As she helped tap a keg, U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell lauded a federal small business loan program she helped pass through Congress at a Seattle brewery expanding its operations.
The Democratic senator joined Elysian Brewing Co. officials on Sunday as they announced they're adding 35 new jobs to their new brewery complex in south Seattle.
Elysian Brewing CEO Joe Bisacca says that because of the Small Business Jobs Act his company had access to the $5 million loan that's financing the expansion.
The Small Business Jobs Act decreased fees and increased small business loan guarantee limits from $1.5 million to $5.5 million for some business. It passed Congress last September.
Cantwell says the loans will be a key turnaround for small businesses.
– Associated Press
Pierce County unions freeze own wages
Employees in 20 Pierce County unions bargaining units have agreed to labor agreements for 2012 with no annual pay increase, or COLA, for the first time in nearly three decades.
“I think this is huge,” County Executive Pat McCarthy told The Tacoma News Tribune.
The agreements show union employees “understand the challenges due to the economic recession and what the county has been going through the past three years,” she said.
Off the AP wire: Soldier killed; man survives in trunk
- A Joint Base Lewis-McChord solider from Colville, Wash., has died in Afghanistan after an insurgent attack. The Department of Defense announced that 28-year-old Staff Sgt. Wyatt A. Goldsmith died Friday at Camp Bastion Hospital.
- The Coast Guard's 17th District is hosting the annual District Buoy Tender Roundup in Juneau, Alaska. The week-long gathering is set to begin today for five days of training.
- More than a dozen of Washington state's 39 counties have joined a federal program that uses fingerprint analysis to identify illegal immigrants in county jails. The so-called Secure Communities initiative is contentious among immigrant advocacy groups.
- State prison officials say a 35-year-old inmate injured three correctional officers at the Clallam Bay Corrections Center after he refused to go to this cell. A DOC spokesman says Steven M. Eggers was eventually subdued and taken to the prison's maximum security area. He is serving a life sentence for a 1996 murder conviction.
- The Idaho State Patrol says a Washington state man was lucky to survive after his car plunged into the Pend Oreille River near the state line. The Spokesman-Review reports 20-year-old Ned Florea of Newport wiggled his way to the trunk of his car and found a pocket of air that kept him alive as rescue crews and a tow-truck driver worked to get him out. Troopers say alcohol may have contributed to the crash.
- Federal dollars will pay for a cleanup of marine debris in Grays Harbor. The $100,000 restoration grant from NOAA will pay for a marine survey and removal of creosote-treated pilings from Grays Harbor.
Copper thieves put PSE substation out of service
BREMERTON — Puget Sound Energy estimates it will cost around $10,000 to replace and repair wires that were cut and stolen from a Northlake Way substation, putting the station out of service for a time, reports the Kitsap Sun.
Kitsap County sheriff's deputies were called at 8:40 a.m. Friday after someone found a hole cut through the station's fence at Northlake Way and Seabeck Highway. Roughly 25 feet of copper ground wires were cut and stolen, according to sheriff's reports.
Math experts to discuss cancer, climate change
VANCOUVER – From detecting cancer to understanding climate change, math is helping to improve our lives – and for the first time, its highest practitioners will be meeting in Canada.
The Vancouver Sun reports that the world’s leading applied mathematicians are meeting here this week for the seventh International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
“Mathematics help predict the future. If your mathematics is really good, you will predict it bang-on,” Dr. Arvind Gupta, conference president and CEO of MITACS, a Vancouver-based national research organization.
