Carolyn Adolph

Washington’s Employment Security Department says the state now has more people working than before the start of the Great Recession.

It's an important milestone in the recovery. And though it comes as a result of genuine progress, it received an assist from a federal benchmarking that showed the state didn’t lose as many jobs as originally thought.

The rise in Seattle’s downtown density makes for scarce real estate and higher prices. As a result, one industry is heading south to the Sodo neighborhood: car dealerships.

Sodo has space and easy highway access, but it isn’t perfect. The high traffic can be a plus, but with three professional sports teams in the area, game days can be intense.

Boeing says it will have to wait until sometime in 2016 to turn a profit on the 787 Dreamliners line.

By that time, the aerospace says developing the game-changing plane will cost the company more than $25 billion. There was a time when Boeing thought it would take $5 billion to develop the new plane.

Microsoft is celebrating a new leader: Satya Nadella is the company's third chief executive. Nadella likes cricket, and he quoted Oscar Wilde in his email to employees Tuesday. And for Seattle's Indian community, his appointment to the top job means a lot.

It feels great to win the Super Bowl, especially if you sell beer, T-shirts or season tickets. But that's not what people mean when they talk about a boost to the region's economy. And when you consider the businesses that will close for Wednesday's parade and the employees who will disappear to see that parade, there may even be a downside to winning the Super Bowl.

The idea of coming together in common cause is woven into Washington’s social fabric, especially into its union history. But labor has suffered reversals before, and it suffered a large one on Jan. 3, when the Machinists union voted by a narrow margin to abandon the Boeing pension plan. At stake was a key production line.

The drama over the Boeing 777X jet has claimed its first casualty.

Tom Wroblewski, president of the Machinists Union District Lodge 751, announced on Tuesday night that he is retiring to a small group of elected representatives from local lodges. His last day is Jan. 31.

Japan Airlines has yet again grounded one of its Boeing 787 Dreamliner jets after the plane's lithium ion battery started smoking.

Correction 1/15/2013: This story has been changed to reflect that construction has  eliminated a center turn lane, not reduced the lanes from four to two as originally stated.

A previous version of this story also incorrectly said construction on all of the projects would take another three years. The current lane closures are scheduled to end in December, Sound Transit expects the Capitol Hill light rail station construction to be complete by spring 2015, and the First Hill streetcar is expected to be operating by the middle of 2014. Work on the First Hill streetcar started affecting Broadway in April of 2012. The story below has been corrected.

For many of us, years of light rail construction on Broadway has been a traffic headache. But some small business owners along Capitol Hill's main street worry that ongoing construction could force them to shut their doors.

Eight union machinists have filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board about the contract vote that determined the Boeing 777X jet would be built in Washington state.

The Machinists have spoken, and the vote was 51 percent in favor of the contract extension.

After a nail-biter day of tense waiting, Machinist local Chief of Staff Jim Bearden announced the results to a small crowd of reporters gathered at the union’s Renton headquarters, as union members learned the same news next door.

Boeing machinists will vote Friday evening on a contract for the second time, and this time, the aerospace giant has made it clear that a yes vote guarantees Washington will keep production of the 777X in state.

The politicians and mayors stood together to tell the union machinists that a vote for Boeing’s contract is a vote for stability for everyone. Then they said Boeing had a message.

Bill Iffrig was 15 feet from finishing the Boston Marathon in April when the first bomb went off.

For many Boeing machinists the battle to land the 777X production line is deeply personal, and generational.

Boeing runs in the blood of many families, who have tied their fortunes to that of the company.  Andrea Simmonds’ family is like that. A grandfather of hers was a 747 pilot.  Now Odin, her husband, builds the 747. He’s a machinist, like his father Don before him, who once worked the 777 line.