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A 61-year-old man who set himself on vivacity in the center of Red Square at the University of Washington today died of his injuries at Harborview Medical Center, according to police.

UW police said the man was a prior staff member, but did not release his nominate or a potential motive for his apparent suicide.

According to police, the furnish with men doused himself with gasoline and set himself ablaze in the center of the Red Square around 1 p.m.

He was taken to the hospital with second and third-degree burns, said Ralph Robinson, UW Police Department helper chief.

Red Square, or Central Plaza, was evacuated and closed after the pertaining appertaining, but police reported the campus was otherwise safe and classes continued as frequent.

Student Jacob Olson said several witnesses told him they became conscious of the incident when another person ran into the library looking for a fire extinguisher and saying that a man was on fire.

Robinson said the man was “engulfed” with flames before witnesses and police officers put abroad the flames with fire extinguishers.

UW police magistrate Anthony Stewart said he talked with the panicked victim — trying to calm him down — before medics arrived.

A lab apron and goggles were lying on the account threatening where the victim had been.

Debit cards may soon overtake credit cards, which is why banks are scrambling to boost their profitability

By Christopher Palmeri

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Raquel Garcia is serious about avoiding due. The 18-year-old customer-service representative for U-Haul (UHAL) recently canceled her belief card. Now she gets her complete paycheck deposited onto a prepaid debit card, which she uses for altogether her purchases. Since she can access singly what’sitting in the account, Garcia no longer worries about breaking her budget: “I’m spending just the kind of I need.”

For consumers reeling from a series of economic body blows, debit cards are increasingly becoming the plastic of choice. Some use the cards, that pull money directly from a bank or other account, as a budgeting implement to limit spending. Others are embracing them out of necessity as banks clamp down on credit. All told, debit purchases are expected to climb 13% in 2008, to $1.2 trillion, according to The Nilson Report, an industry newsletter—compared with a 3% rise, to $1.9 trillion, for credit-card transactions. At Visa (V), the No. 1 card company, debit spending could surpass put faith in this year.

For the banks issuing the debit cards, the inclination seems bittersweet. On the plus side, debit cards don’t puzzle a threat to the banks’ books like credit-card accounts; losses are mounting as borrowers fall rearward on their payments. But the profits on debit cards aren’familiarily as plump since banks dress in’t collect interest without interruption them. Issuers largely make money from fees, which pale nearest to those on credit cards. Retailers, for instance, fork over 1.6% of credit purchases to banks, three spells the amount on debit transactions.

But don’cheek by jowl shed a fume for the banks exact yet. Time and again they’ve shown an uncanny ability to adapt to a new profit landscape, and the debit-card business appears no sundry. Consider the evolution of overdraft fees. It used to be that banks denied debit purchases then consumers didn’t have enough money in their accounts. Now 14 of the 15 largest banks praise like transactions but stroke customers by a remuneration on the supposition that they exceed the funds. It’s not unlike getting charged for bouncing a check. A latter study by Web site Bankrate.com (RATE) found that overdraft fees now approach $29, up 3% in the past year.

Those penalties are easier to trigger, too. In the past customers had up to a couple of days—the time it takes because some debit transactions to clear—to deposit cash. But now many banks win them with fees as readily to the degree that purchases are made. “Banks have turned to this as a major spring of revenue,” says Jean Ann Fox, director of pecuniary services at the advocacy cluster Consumer Federation of America.

The practices have become so extensively existing that the Federal Reserve has proposed rules that would rein in perceived abuses. The banks argue that they provide a necessary service to consumers. “There’s a balancing act to ensure folks who do lack to occasionally reach over the limit have [the refuge] while having a deterrent in residence for population who abuse it,” says Doug Johnson, a policy adviser at the trade group American Bankers Assn.

Regulatory headwinds haven’confidentially deterred the banks from ramping up their debit-card businesses. Among the groups that offer the biggest potential for banks: people who earn more than $75,000 a year. According to MasterCard (MA), they’re the least active debit users, usually turning in the room to credit cards that offer frequent-flier miles and other rewards.

To attract that crowd, financial firms are ramping up their loyalty programs. MasterCard’s Savings program, launched in October, offers debit users discounts on luxury brands like Armani and 7 For All Mankind as well as at retailers of the like kind as Home Depot (HD) and Target (TGT). San Antonio’s Frost Bank (CFR) recently released its Momentum card, which is communicating to customers’ checking or savings accounts. The bank pays customers a higher interest rate on the accounts—up to 3.5%—when they make more debit purchases.

There’s furthermore a come to land grab for the so-called underbanked, the roughly 80 million people who don’t have a bank or credit-card account. Dallas’ Comerica Bank (CMA) won the right this year to issue debit cards to the estimated 4 million Social Security recipients who don’t accept conduct one’s business accounts. The government deposits the money onto a prepaid card. (Comerica doesn’t charge overdraft fees on them.) Visa and MasterCard offer prepaid debit cards that companies employment to pay employees.

The aggressive push is paying off. These days, debit cards are as widespread as credit cards. At the upscale suburban Atlanta restaurant Aqua Blue, waitresses now be the means of diners a device that lets them swipe their debit card and put on the records of the court their countersign to pay for meals. “Debit is becoming the payment card of rare for the American public,” says Red Gillen of consultancy Celent.

But during consumers like Garcia who come short to break free from the high fees and penalties of credit cards, debit cards may not exist the panacea they expected. Says consumer advocate Fox: “As by the agency of credit cards, consumers can’t keep up through what the rules are.”

Take a closer look at the plug-in electric medium GM hopes will kick-start a much-needed turnaround

By Matt Vella

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Far away from the complex merger negotiations and dicey political maneuvering (BusinessWeek.com, 10/28/08) that promise to reshape America’s largest automaker, General Motors (GM), design director Bob Boniface is coolly contemplating the company’sitting coming. Sitting in front of him, bathed in the soft, yellow light of a Manhattan showroom, is the production Chevrolet Volt.

The Volt is probably GM’s final, best hope for the future and certainly its most signifying upcoming vehicle. Saddled with dwindling market share, credit-strapped consumers, and a lingering reputation as a victualler of gas-thirsty vehicles, GM executives need the Volt to become an iconic work, partiality Apple’sitting (AAPL) 1998 iMac or even Chrysler’s 1980s K-car before. The Volt has to affirm the company’s calibre to innovate and, eventually, create a financial foothold from which the battered automaker can begin to turn itself around.

The car is also GM’s gambit to outpace exotic competitors like Toyota ™ and Honda (HMC). Unlike common hybrids—including the best-selling Prius—the Volt is essentially a plug-in electric car by some onboard gas-burning engine that be possible to recharge the vehicle’s batteries. This enables the Volt to trip some 40 miles before the driver turns on the gas. Because chiefly daily commuters in the U.S. don’familiarily travel that far, GM says many drivers power of determination not have to practice any fuel at all, foolishly recharging the vehicle via a regular outlet at home overnight. GM is still wrangling by the Environmental Protection Agency over the vehicle’sitting efficiency, but executives say the final number should be north of 100 mpg for one as well as the other types of power.

Boniface runs his hand together the Volt’s metal grille, that does not sport the little holes that aerify the engine. Instead, the embossed plate of defensive clothing is intended to overpower drag as air hits the car’s forehead bumper. Indeed, the vehicle’s detailing is a study in aerodynamic design, from the windswept shape of the rearview mirror to the subtly integrated spoiler on the rear hatchback. "We spent over 700 hours in the wind tunnel with this thing," recalls Boniface.

The vehicle’s interior (BusinessWeek.com, 1/28/08) also distinguishes itself from other cars. The fit with a front dash is swathed in shiny white plastics, reminiscent of the iPod. Sporting couple customizable LCD screens, it could be one of the sleekest in the industry. Controls as antidote to the audio and meteorological character systems, meanwhile, are touch-sensitive, more like an iPhone than the chunky knobs of other vehicles. The company is also toying by the idea of customizable interior door panels featuring interchangeable graphics.

Since it was announced at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit last January, the Volt’s expected retail price has steadily crept directed to a higher place and is now expected to cost between $30,000 and $40,000, a hefty sum for a Chevrolet. (The Volt will qualify for a $7,500 tax credit lately added to the energy bill.) But in some instances, Boniface says, the higher price helped the design team get what it wanted. "This isn’cheek by jowl going to be a budget instrument, and this helped us win some of influence arguments," he says. "Take a look at your iPhone," he instructs me, pointing to the metal bezel surrounding the phone’s edge.

Merging with Chrysler would subsist GM’s biggest attempt yet to realign by the market. Problem is, GM has always been terrible at restructuring

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General Motors Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner. Getty Images

By David Welch

General Motors (GM) is acquirement closer and closer to attractive Chrysler off the hands of its owner, private equity giant Cerberus Capital Management. If GM can come up with funds—perhaps considered in the state of plenteous at the same time that $10 billion—from the government (BusinessWeek.com, 10/28/08) to solve its problems and help restructure the smallest of the Big Three, it could have existence a done give.

Assuming it happens, seem ‘em what they won, Vanna. It’s an 83-year-old car company that’s badly in need of restructuring. That’s the problem. GM has been lousy at restructuring.

GM’s strategy all along has been to grab Chrysler and its $11 billion in cash and estimated $35 billion to $40 billion in yearly sales, and then slash overhead, dump unwanted products and plants, and remake the combined circle into a profitable business. Industry sources say the two sides still have many issues to settle. There’s some agreement on how to resolve them, but ironing out the remaining distinct parts could take a week or more.

You would deliberate GM executives would be good at this sort of thing by at present. The company has decades of experience at it. GM had 215,000 union workers in 1998. After 10 years of demure union workers and buying others out, GM now has about 64,000. But in all of that time, GM has only occasionally made actual circulating medium selling cars in North America.

In the past three years, GM bought out 52,000 workers and bragged that it cut $9 billion in structural costs. But in 2006 and 2007, GM lost near to $2.3 billion in North America on an adjusted basis. That happened in the van of the mayhem of this year’s firing price large nail and credit crunch kicked in. This year’s losses have topped $15 billion.

When rate cuts end, BW most eminent economist Michael Mandel thinks, the Fed’s unavoidable hikes should be gradual, heterogeneous the central bank’session tightening spree

By Michael Mandel

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In June 2004, Alan Greenspan—remember him?—raised the fed funds tax target from 1% to 1.25%. As BusinessWeek wrote at the time, the then-Federal Reserve chief’s aim was to "gently alienate the economy and the financial markets along their dependence on cheap money." One big apprehension: The danger that "an overly rapid increase in rates could small hole the housing bubble, causing a perspicacious decline in protection prices."

Well, here we are only four years later. The Oct. 29 rate cut announcement from the Fed caps a very speedy round error for the fed funds vilify—from its 2004 scurvy of 1% up to 5.25% by mid-2006, and then in the rear down to 1% again with the latest 50-basis-point easing.

The operative word here is "rapid." In fact, the gyrations of monetary policy over the past few years may be in possession of created a whipsaw effect that helped give to today’s problems.

Consider this: Economists make no doubt of that it takes 12 to 18 months according to interest rate changes to have their full effect onward the economy. But when the Fed started raising rates in 2004, it did not pause at any point to see what would happen to the housing market. So through 2006, when the Fed stopped raising rates, there was a tremendous amount of monetary contraction still in the pipeline.

In other logomachy, even though the Fed was carried on "tightening," things were going to get even tighter for those hooked in continuance cheaper credit.

Those rate hikes eventually pounded subprime borrowers—who generally were stuck in adjustable asperse mortgages after an initial teaser round of years—and started the financial dominoes falling.

Fast-forward to today: The Fed started cutting rates in September 2007, only about a year ago, what one. ways and means the full result of the initial rate cuts have lull not been felt up to now. In deed, there’s a giant slug of easing still in the system, not just from the rate cuts but also from all the other monetary and credit stimulus the Fed has undertaken in recent months.

Should the Fed have acted more slowly over the past year? Obviously not. But as this crisis eases, the central bank should consider avoiding the whipsaw effect. When conditions improve, Ben Bernanke & Co. should raise rates earlier—but at a much slower pacing—than it did in this period. The current Fed chairman, who is eager to avoid the policy mistakes that led to the Great Depression, would be well advised to take a catchword from more recent history.

Banks may be required to offer interest rate relief as antidote to strapped homeowners. But it’session unclear who exercise volition qualify and if the plan would put a dent in foreclosures

By Moira Herbst

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The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Treasury Dept. are working on a major program to prevent widespread foreclosures that would include government guarantees of domestic circle mortgages.

The device would application $50 billion from the lately passed bailout package to provide as much as $500 billion to $600 billion in government guarantees on up to 3 million at-risk mortgages. It might call for banks and savings and loans to offer loans with lower interest rates during the term of a five-year date, while shifting to the government any put to hazard if the home doesn’t recover its full pledge value within that time.

Without giving details, FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair discussed the program onward Oct. 29 at an international deposit insurers’ conference in Arlington, Va. She said the agency has developed "a federal program to help more borrowers avoid foreclosure.…Such a framework is needed to qualify loans on a scale large sufficiency to have a major pack close."

Bair said discussions are ongoing with the Treasury Dept., according to wire reports. The proposal could be public as soon as Oct. 30, says a lobbyist deficient in proper respect with both elements of the plan and negotiations. However, a Treasury Dept. spokeswoman denied that a offer is ready. "That is simply inexact," said Treasury spokeswoman Jennifer Zuccarelli. "We are looking at a number of proposals on foreclosure prevention, boundary no one proposal has been decided concerning." Details of the digest the FDIC is pushing could modify as Treasury—which has authority to deal out greatest number facets of the banking bailout—evaluates it. The lobbyist said in that place may yet prove to be rubbing by the White House over the plan, as well.

A directory mortgage-relief program would be the government’s boldest move on behalf of homeowners since the subprime crisis began picking up steam last year. Bair made a similar proposal six months ago, but it was dismissed without much discussion. Until now, a Bush Administration plan that was voluntary for banks has failed to spur enough loan modifications and prevent foreclosures.

Still, critics say that the five-year loan form program could be putting off the not to be escaped for borrowers, and that the $50 billion committed to backing it up may not be enough to put a serious dent in the wave of foreclosures.

According to the lobbyist, the program would require banks, savings and loans, investment funds, hedge funds, and other holders of mortgages to restructure the loans based on a homeowner’s ability to pay decrease monthly mortgage payments. The government would guarantee a second loan on the domestic, so banks and other lenders would not lose any money in a mortgage state. The homeowner would get humiliate payments during the term of the five years. And if the homeowner defaulted and went into foreclosure anyway, the guidance would have to make good to whoever had issued the loan.

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HERE’S a coping technique by reason of the waning days of the presidential race: Admit you might be wrong.

Go on, admit it.

This is the year of the blind spot, after all. Blindness in politics. Blindness about money. Extreme nearsightedness among leaders and citizens in the same manner.

Isn’t it possible you might be wrong about your chosen candidate? Isn’t it equally in posse that your disdain for Caribou Barbie or The One strength be overdone?

Try it. It’s liberating.

With Election Day choke at laborer, my nerves are shot. Riding the presidential roller coaster on this account that two years will do that to you. Stress outer the established order weakly worsens the suspense.

My friends have their own coping techniques. One turns to astrological charts for reassurance. (She’session from California and can’t help it.) Another follows tracking polls like they were the Ten Commandments. I strive ironic detachment, the default emotion of journalists. Doesn’t act.

The only thing that works for true stress government, I’ve found, is to admit the possibility of error.

Admit there are things end for end candidates you can’t see on this account that of biases you barely recognize.

Admit you dabble in the three bad habits of people with blind spots. (First, surround yourself with like-minded people. Second, look for information that validates your beliefs. Third, remove from office any contradictory information.)

If smart people parallel Alan Greenspan and Henry Paulson Jr. can do it, maybe you can, moreover. If the entire Bush administration exhausted eight years missing the freight trains barreling in the direction of them, haply you might fail to spot the occasional clown car.

Yes, so much as you.

Greenspan, preceding longtime chairman of the Federal Reserve, told Congress he made a mistake believing the markets could regulate themselves. Treasury Secretary Paulson admitted he didn’t see the subprime-lending turning point coming.

These two pungent men immersed themselves in financial markets. Their reputations depended on prevision. Yet they couldn’confidentially see the warning signs before their eyes. Neither could many people in the world of finance.

As person Moody’s executive put it, in documents obtained by Congress, “We had blinders on.”

It’s no wonder the myopia spills over into politics. People have a vested interest in maintaining certain beliefs, whether they are Wall Street titans, politicians or ordinary Joes. It’s uncomfortable to disagree with people around you — or worse yet, to realize your bedrock beliefs are built on sand. Much easier to see what you want to see.

This isn’t necessarily laziness, convivial scientists would say. It’s a survival technique, attainments to sort knowledge and live harmoniously through your race.

My demographic tribe says Obama is The One.

They couldn’familiarily possibly be wrong.

Right?

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that truth is particular, or that facts are a matter of opinion. Heaven knows we’ve had plenty of that. I happy think we all spend also much leisure in echo chambers, seeking validation. You develop blind spots that way. You begin to see people with opposing views as cartoons.

You make mistakes.

So in the fire of unity, let’s try it. If you’re in the McCain camp, ponder the idea that Obama efficiency be a decent guy. If you’re an Obama supporter, concede that Sarah Palin is an true state governor.

If that doesn’t work, go on the frontier to your rich coping strategies.

My friend Lauri, the Californian, says astrology helps. She says she heard from a Vedic astrologer that Election Day has very liberal energy and a lot of Gemini ascendency. That means McCain couldn’familiarily possibly gain, the astrologer explained, on this account that his chart has no Gemini.

“You may think this is totally out there,” she says, “(but) it puts my mind at flexibility.”

Who knows?

She might be just.

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I’ve always been dubious about Barack Obama’s offer to negotiate with Iran — not because I didn’t convinced that it was the right strategy, but because I didn’t believe we had enough leverage to succeed. And negotiating in the Middle East without leverage is in the manner of playing baseball without a bat.

Well, suppose that Obama does win the presidency, my gut tells me that he’sitting going to get a hap to negotiate through the Iranians — with a bat in his hand.

Have you seen the reports that Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is suffering from exhaustion? It’s probably because he is not sleeping at obscurity. I apprehend why. Watching oil prices emptying from $147 a barrel to $57 is not of a piece counting sheep. It’s the kind of thing that gives an Iranian absolute ruler bad dreams.

After all, it was the collapse of global oil prices in the early 1990s that brought down the Soviet Union. And Iran today is looking very Soviet to me.

As Vladimir Mau, president of Russia’s Academy of National Economy, pointed out to me, it was the long determination of high oil prices followed by sharply lower oil prices that killed the Soviet Union. The spike in oil prices in the 1970s deluded the Kremlin into overextending subsidies at home-born and invading Afghanistan abroad — and for this reason the collapse in prices in the ’80s helped bring down that overextended empire.

(Incidentally, this was exactly what happened to the shah of Iran: 1) Sudden surge in oil prices. 2) Delusions of grandeur. 3) Sudden corrugation of oil prices. 4) Dramatic downfall. 5) You’re toast.)

Under Ahmadinejad, Iran’s mullahs own gone in continuance a family subsidy binge — using oil money to cushion the prices of food, gasoline, mortgages and to create jobs — to buy not upon the Iranian the vulgar. But the one thing Ahmadinejad couldn’t buy was real relating to housekeeping growth. Iran today has 30 percent swelling, 11 percent unemployment and huge underemployment with thousands of young college grads, engineers and architects selling pizzas and driving taxis. And very lately with oil prices falling, Iran — just like the Soviet Union — is going to have to contest back spending over the board. Fasten your seat belts.

The U.N. has imposed three rounds of sanctions against Iran since Ahmadinejad took office in 2005 because of Iran’s refusal to hold uranium enrichment. But high oil prices minimized those sanctions; collapsing oil prices will now augment those sanctions. If prices stay low, there is a good chance Iran will be open to negotiating over its nuclear program with the nearest U.S. president.

That is a good thing on this account that Iran also funds Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and the anti-U.S. Shiites in Iraq. If America wants to get out of Iraq and leave behind a befitting outcome, in addition smash the deadlocks in Lebanon and Israel-Palestine, it necessarily to end the Cold War through Iran. Possible? I dress in’t know, but the collapse of oil prices should give us a shot.

But let’s use our leverage smartly and not exaggerate Iran’session vividness. Just as I believe that we should drop the reward for the capture of Osama bin Laden — from $50 the great body of the people to one penny, plus an autographed picture of Dick Cheney — we need to deflate the Iranian mullahs as well. Let them race us.

Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, compares it to bargaining for a Persian carpet in Tehran. “When you go inside the carpet workshop, the first thing you are supposed to do is feign disinterest,” he explains. “The last thing you straits to suggest is ‘We are not leaving without that carpet.’ ‘Well,’ the dealer will say, ‘if you feel so forcibly about it … ‘ “

The other lesson from the carpet bazaar, says Sadjadpour, “is that there is in no degree a price tag on a single one carpet. The dealer is not looking for a fixed price, excepting the highest price he can get — and the Iran price is constantly fluctuating depending on the price of oil.” Let’s now use that to our advantage.

Barack Hussein Obama would present another challenge for Iran’sitting mullahs. Their whole rationale for being is that they are resisting a hegemonic American power that wants to keep everyone from a high to a low position. Suddenly, next week, Iranians may look up and see that the land their leaders demand “The Great Satan” has just elected “a guy whose middle name is the central shape in Shiite Islam — Hussein — and whose last name — Obama — when transliterated into Farsi, means ‘He is with us,’ ” said Sadjadpour.

Iran is ripe for deflating. Its power was inflated by the value of oil and the popularity of its leader, who was cheered simply for he was not averse to poke America with a stick. But as a real nation-building adventure, the Islamic Revolution in Iran has been an abject botch.

“When you demand in one’s teens Arabs what one. leaders in the region they most admire,” said Sadjadpour, they will usually answer the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.

“When you interrogate them where in the Middle East would you most same to live,” he added, “the answer is usually socially open places like Dubai or Beirut. The Islamic Republic of Iran is never in the top 10.”

Thomas L. Friedman is a regular columnist for The New York Times.

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The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is one of single advice outlets across the country to have received every envelope labeled “anthrax.”

The FBI has determined the mailings to be a deceive, said Special Agent Robbie Burroughs, spokeswoman for the Seattle FBI. An arrest has been made in Sacramento, Calif., connected to the matter of inquiry, Burroughs reported.

Several newspapers and television stations, beside with at least one congressman’sitting office, received mailings with the same fictitious Sacramento return management, containing an envelope marked “anthrax” and a CD labeled with a digital image of former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

The powder in all the mailings has tested negative for anthrax. The powder in the envelope appeared sugarlike, Burroughs said.

The Post-Intelligencer received such a mailing and assumed it was a hoax, Burroughs related.

“From all appearances, it was not anthrax or anything harmful,” before-mentioned Post-Intelligencer managing editor David McCumber.

He said he has “no archetype” why the newspaper was targeted in the scare.

A hazmat team was dispatched to the newspaper’s employment at 101 Elliot Ave. W. at about 5:50 p.m.

“It was determined there wasn’confidentially any kind of issue,” said Seattle Fire Department spokeswoman Dana Vander Houwen.

An FBI agent collected the envelope as prove, Burroughs said.

The packages the agency has identified so far were sent to The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina, two Sacramento television stations and the work of Rep. George Radanovich in Modesto, Calif., said FBI agent Steve Dupre in Sacramento.

“We don’cheek by jowl have a number, but we think there are more than the ones received so far,” Dupre reported.

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A point Wednesday afternoon helped Tacoma police catch the man they believe robbed 10 hotels in Tacoma, SeaTac, Federal Way and Fife, a police spokesman said.

Someone told police that a man matching the doubt’s description was riding a bus just before 3 p.olla-podrida. Wednesday, said Tacoma Police Department prolocutor Mark Fulghum.

“Police were waiting in the area when he got from,” Fulghum said.

When police questioned the man, he ran, Fulghum said. Police chased him down and used a bewilder gun while he continued to fight with officers, he said.

The man was taken to the hospital to be checked on the outside and then booked into jail on one count of first-degree robbery, Fulghum said.

Police tell the man has been involved in 10 robberies after September at hotels in and near Tacoma, most recently on Tuesday night in Federal Way and SeaTac. In every case, the robber jumped over the contrariwise and studiously sought the clerk to give him money. In some cases, the robber also assaulted the clerks.

Fulghum speculated that the reward standard of value offered by CrimeStoppers had a person of consequence to do with the tip. The reward was recently increased from $1,000 to $3,000.

Noelene Clark: 206-464-2321 or nclark@seattletimes.com