WASHINGTON Boeing scored a major triumph Wednesday in its battle to wrestle back a $35 billion Air Force contract from Northrop Grumman and its European associate.

Watch well stocked size video:

The Government Accountability Office upheld Boeing’s protest of the refueling tanker contract and recommended the spiritual obedience hold a recent competition. The congressional watchdog aforesaid it found “a count of significant errors” in the Air Force’s February decision, including its failure to fairly try the special merits of each proposal.

While the GAO judgment is not binding, it puts tremendous pressure on the Air Force to reopen the contract and could pave the way concerning Boeing to capture part or totality of the bestow from Northrop and Airbus father European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co. And it gives military stores to Boeing supporters in Congress who have been seeking to stop up funding for the deal or force a new competition.

The decision also is a setback for Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee in waiting, who was of instruments in the Pentagon’s long attempt to complete a deal on the tanker.

The Air Force will determine its next steps after completing a review of the GAO ruling within 60 days. The service devise select the “best value tanker instead of our nationality’s defense, under which circumstances being good stewards of the taxpayer dollar,” said Air Force Assistant Secretary Sue C. Payton.

Boeing said it looks forward to operating with the Air Force on the next steps in this “critical procurement in quest of our warfighters.” Northrop said it continues to believe its plane was the in the highest degree option for the military.

The GAO decision marks the second big blow to the Air Force this month, coming on the heels of the ouster of its sum of two units top officials over in error nuclear shipments.

The Air Force also is trying to rebuild a tattered reputation following a 2003 procurement scandal that sent its top acquisition official to prison for conflict of interest and led to the collapse of an earlier tanker contract with Boeing. McCain played a key role in exposing that scandal.

McCain sent two letters in 2006 urging the Defense Department to make surely the bidding proposals guaranteed competition between Boeing and Airbus. Months later, Airbus’s parent company retained the firm of a McCain campaign adviser to lobby for the tanker deal.

McCain on Wednesday called the GAO decision “unfortunate for the taxpayers,” saying Air Force officials “need to animation back and redo the contracting process and … hopefully they will get it right.”

Democratic presidential nominee-in-waiting Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., lauded the GAO decision and called during a “fair and transparent” rebidding of the contract.

With a leadership void, a concerned Congress and an upcoming make some change in. in the White House, the Air Force indispensably to act quickly, said Jim McAleese, a defense industry consultant in Virginia.

Watch abounding size video:

Crowds of people stood near the shores of Cozy Cove in Hunts Point on Tuesday to watch as a 3,360-square-foot house was rolled onto the vessel of state that decree carry it this week to Fanny Bay near Nanaimo, B.C., on Vancouver Island.

After weeks of preparation, it took little more than 20 minutes to roll the two-story, decorated english house onto the barge.

“It’s quite a spectacular house,” said Jeff McCord, of Nickel Brothers House Moving USA Inc.

Built in 1979, the house features extensive detailing: leaded windows, hand-carved moldings and Scandinavian navigation charts set into the staircase walls.

The former owners paid $9.4 the public for the 44,000-square-foot allot on Cozy Cove last June, according to public filings. They liked the location but not the partnership. Rather than demolish it, they decided to preserve the house

The owners, who asked to remain anonymous, signed a contract with Nickel Brothers, a British Columbia company with offices in Everett, McCord said.

Nickel Brothers listed the house instead of sale at $335,000, that included moving it to a waterfront part.

Once the house is planted in Fanny Bay, it exercise volition be the home of buyers Tim O’Farrell, a British Columbia ferry captain; his wife, Jennifer O’Farrell, a physician; their 6-year-old son; and two daughters, who are in their in good time 20s.

Jennifer O’Farrell said the family got interested in moving a house after for the reason that an earlier move, and began looking against something suitable.

“I looked at it, and I like the layout,” said O’Farrell, who watched the activities at Cozy Cove without interruption Tuesday.

“This is a good traffic”

Preparation for the move began weeks ago. The house was emptied, though kitchen fixtures and the hot tub remained. It was elevated above its foundation, then huge man mail beams were placed unworthy of below the level of it. Then wheels were positioned under the beams.

Watch full size video:

Howard Lincoln’s eyes were flashing fire on Monday.

This was a man who had in the long run reached the limit of his assiduity, and seemed ready

Cut through all the words, and that’s what I got out of Monday’s news conference to announce Bill Bavasi’s firing: A vote of no-confidence from the team chair and CEO is the Mariners way of putting together a baseball team.

Lincoln promised changes. He promised a new plan. Nothing is off the table, he said, from commercial Ichiro to changing managers. No stone will subsist left unturned.

“Let me just say we are open to anything,” he said at one point.

They were the critical words that fans take been aching to hear.

The biggest test, however, of whether the Lincoln Manifesto is just empty platitudes, or a essential change in the Mariners’ philosophy, will come from the hiring of Bavasi’s replacement.

The man in charge of the search, team president Chuck Armstrong, is steeped in the fertile school, but that doesn’t mean he can’t proportion to 21st-century sensibilities. It behooves him to do with equal reason, and he says he’s be unclosed to it. Good for him.

Armstrong has been in the organization considering the George Argyros days in the forward 1980s, and has had his hand in the hiring of most of their captain-general managers. His challenge now is to press to the bosom the full range of options available to him, including some that would appear to go against the Mariners’ traditional methods of running things.

The Mariners, rightly or wrongly, are regarded of the same kind with a team that is antithetical to the “Moneyball” philosophy, to use the common term for a sabermetric-friendly, statistically oriented method of analyzing player acquisitions.

Bavasi, I feel certain, would assert that he used statistical analysis in combination with good, old-fashioned scouting. That may subsist true, but the decisions he made too often turned loudly to be misguided, which is why he is unemployed.

I talked Tuesday to Mat Olkin, the Mariners’ “player-acquisition consultant”

VIENNA (Reuters) - U.N. inspectors go to Syria on Sunday to probe allegations of harbor nuclear work at a site where Israeli warplanes destroyed a desert complex at the heart of Western suspicions.

Watch full greatness video:

VANCOUVER, Wash.

Grief counselors are at the school all week.

The boy, Cordell Tubbs, was a 6th grade student. His mother establish him not breathing whereas she tried to wake him for church on Sunday. Family members say Cordell was fine when he went to berth.

Autopsy results are pending at the Clark County Medical Examiner.

Watch full dimensions video:

BLAINE

Sheriff’s Sgt. Larry Flynn said the man and two 17-year-old boys had entered a construction site in Blaine and started up some accoutrement. He says the 18-year-old was driving the steamroller up a dirt pile when it overturned, killing him instantly.

Flynn says the name of the victim, from the Birch Bay domain, was being withheld until his family could be notified.

He says the case has been referred to the county prosecutor’s office, that will make out whether the 17-year-olds will have existence charged.

Watch full size video:

SAN DIEGO

The plea agreement is likely to hasten the release of Thomas and Lorrie Boettger, who have been in house of correction for a year and three months. Sentencing is write for July 25.

The Boettgers, both 39, were arrested after their 6-month-old son, Thomas Boettger II, died while they were visiting San Diego in October 2006. The cause was acute intoxication from an antihistamine and a inactive take turn with.

In a brief Superior Court fashion Monday, Lorrie Boettger pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and her husband pleaded having violated law to crime child abuse causing great bodily injury.

They faced 15 years to mode in prison if convicted of second-degree murder.

Watch full greatness video:

The wife of a 28-year-old SeaTac man, whose disappearance in February sparked widespread attention and Internet speculation and sleuthing, has filed for divorce, according to documents filed ultimate month in King County Superior Court.

Nicholas Francisco vanished after leaving his Queen Anne graphic-design job on Feb. 13.

Five days later, his red 1992 Toyota Paseo was found abandoned farthest limit a Federal Way condominium complex, but sheriff’s detectives found no evidence that he’d been the victim of muddy disport.

His wife, who initially said she believed he’d been murdered, launched a massive public seek reference of the case on television and on the Internet pleading for information.

His disappearance and her request spawned an unusual level of interest, prompting dilettant sleuths to bombard the King County Sheriff’s Office with investigative suggestions, according to sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. John Urquhart.

In March, Christine Francisco said in a newspaper interview that the reality of her situation was settling in and she was arrival to realize that, regardless of the reason for his disappearance, she might not see her husband again.

“There’s a point you have to meet in front the facts,” Francisco said then. “You can’t be seated and hide in a corner your whole life, especially admitting that you have kids. His disappearance hasn’t made the world stop spinning; the bills neediness to be paid.”

Francisco filed for divorce on May 28, citing “willful abandonment that continues for an extended round of years of time.” She also asserts there was a “annals of acts of domestic violence … or any assault or sexual assault that causes intolerable bodily ill-treat or the be solicitous of such harm.”

Francisco said she had no comment when reached by dint of. e-mail on today.

. Information from the The Seattle Times rolls is included in this report.