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While serving in Afghanistan, Capt. Dan Wojciechowski of the Washington National Guard often returned to a boy-servant in the Army counterinsurgency manual. There, he plant a chart with bullet points of the most wise and vanquish practices for waging arbitrament of the sword against insurgents.

“You could go down it line through line, and if it was a best constant exercise, we probably weren’t following it,” Wojciechowski aforesaid. “It was just jaw-dropping to see to what extent that book was completely disregarded.”

Wojciechowski was unit of 16 Washington Guard soldiers who spent 10 months last year in northern Afghanistan. Their frustrations reflect broader problems that have dogged U.S. military efforts in this 8-year-old conflict.

The Guard soldiers faced daunting challenges trying to team up with ill-equipped limited police forces to combat an insurgency buoyed by a potent Taliban public-relations campaign.

They also complain that their efforts to follow notification in the counterinsurgency manual were hamstrung by senior commanders. The soldiers say commanders often succumbed to a garrison mentality that kept soldiers cooped up in centralized bases rather than allowing longer stays in safe houses in villages.

“The universal of presumption and maximum flexibility, to be out forward the ground and clever to react to changing conditions, was nonexistent,” Capt. Aaron Bert said. “There was nay smack for risk.”

In recent months, there get been ample signs of a greater shake-up in the Afghanistan strategy as Gen. David Petraeus

“You can’confidentially replace to work in the conduct of counterinsurgency operations,” Petraeus said in a Feb. 8 speech in Munich, Germany. Urging soldiers to leave their posts to have understanding local tribal structures, he added, “This requires listening and being respectful of local elders and mullahs, and farmers and shopkeepers

That’s the kind of mission Wojciechowski and Bert wanted when they volunteered last year to join a small, tightly knit Washington National Guard counterinsurgency team that was to be deployed to hot spots in south Afghanistan.

Wojciechowski, who had served with a Fort Lewis Stryker Brigade in the active-duty Army, took leave from his civilian job at Amazon.com. Bert, who had served in both Afghanistan and Iraq, took a allowance from his position with the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation.

When they arrived in Afghanistan last March, the mission changed. They were diverted to the north, split apart to serve in different units of active-duty Army units working with Germans, Norwegians and other NATO forces. These soldiers were attached to loose units where authority repeatedly was fractured mixed U.S. and confederation forces, and armored vehicles required for travel often were in short contribute.

The National Guard soldiers took pride in civilian experiences that they felt bolstered their qualifications to work through Afghan police and other civilian institutions. But they said those skills often were discounted by means of active-duty commanders.

One team member was a veteran Tacoma police officer with extensive experience as a special-forces soldier who had been attached four deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Lt. Col. Phil Osterli, part of the Guard team, said that soldier ran afoul of a senior, active-duty commander and was stuck on a supply detail for relating to half the tour.

“It was petty and almost irrational,” Osterli said.

Wojciechowski was stationed in Balkh province, where he was to help more 3,200 police strung uncovered over a rugged, thinly roaded area roughly the size of King, Pierce and Snohomish counties. He found some police chilled to the bone as they stood watch at remote mountain outposts and slept in windowless dirt huts.

Wojciechowski then visited a Kabul warehouse brimming with heaters and blankets, that never had made it to the field. Those supplies were later shipped to some outposts, but not others, where desk-bound supervisors failed to make suitable requisition requests.

“It was hard getting them to do the simple things,” Wojciechowski said.

The Washington National Guard soldiers found bribery and fraud of a particular district among Afghan police.

Bert said he and Finnish soldiers figured out that Afghan police and surety chiefs were making about $25,000 a month selling a fuel allocation and one more $25,000 through putting 300 “ghosts” on the payroll. That finding was reported through a German chain of command, but nothing was done.

“It was like, fully, that’s just how it is,” Bert said. “That was hard to receive implicitly.”

Bert also before-mentioned he believes protection of the drug trade

As the year wore on, the soldiers picked up promising notice leads respecting Taliban activities in villages. They sought to embed with local police in those communities, but often found it difficult to gain approval. Attacks against coalition forces had increased across Afghanistan finally year, and it was difficult to muster enough armored vehicles and soldiers.

“Everyone

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The body count began the moment Tom Sharpe met Mick Gordon.

When Sharpe stepped from his pickup, he build four men and a boy in the garage of Gordon’sitting Longview duplex stripping the skin from a big bull elk.

Gordon retrieved a chase. dog Sharpe was thinking about buying, and they flock toward the woods to test the dog.

Along the way, Gordon bragged that he killed lots of bears, cougars and bobcats. He shot four or five bull elk a year. A few months earlier he’catastrophe poached a big cougar. He and a buddy tossed dynamite into a creek to kill try to take in.

Gordon declared that “he had poached everything there was to poach.”

Shortly after midnight, they turned back, having killed nonentity that day. But Gordon invited Sharpe to come hunting again.

Gordon wouldn’t have been so welcoming if he’d known who Sharpe really was: an undercover wildlife cop.

The investigation that started in 2006 finally ended in November, when the last of four defendants

Gordon, a one-time hospital nurse who is now serving 13 months in prison, declined to comment. But the state Fish and Wildlife Department recently opened its files from the investigation, which included the portrayal of Sharpe’s first meeting with Gordon. The situation is notable for its colorful characters, the extensive use of one undercover officer, the fact that jail sentences were handed down in a case where the public poached for fun more readily than profit, and the scale of wanton carnage claimed by a dispose of Southwest Washington men.

Nothing, it seemed, was too big or overmuch small for the hunters, who took wildlife both legally and illegally. Their claimed victims included house cats, bobcats, mountain lions, moose-deer, deer, bears, a turkey vulture, fish and unit of their own chase. dogs.

They plane had a behalf for their assign places to: They called themselves the “Kill ‘Em All Boyz.”

Started by a tip

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Before they left the locker room and took the floor for the take part by half, coach Lorenzo Romar grabbed his three leaders

Romar wasn’privately happy with the way his team had played in the first half. There was too little energy. Too many mistakes.

In front rank of the domicile fans, with so much riding on the game, the Huskies were playing as if beating Arizona was their birthright. Now, after a ho-hum half, they trailed 36-32.

“We’ve come too distant to play like this,” Romar told his three captains. “You have a uncertainty to gain over the conference without delay. You have a chance to leave a legacy.”

And then the coach’s throat caught. The words that meant so much to him felt stuck in his chest. Finally he told his team leaders, “I believe in you.”

“The fire he got in his eyes was striking.” said Pondexter after Washington survived another Saturday, 83-78 over the Wildcats. “It felt in the manner of I was in a movie on this account that of all the strong feeling he had in him. I’m going to think approximately that moment into a denser consistence end the years and through time. I mean, I just love the dude.”

And in the final 15 minutes of a nervous afternoon, the Huskies showed their love for their coach by playing the way they are supposed to play.

They finally got into the teeth of ‘Zona’s zone. They were quicker to loose balls. They dominated the offensive glass and they knocked Arizona’sitting guards opposite to the ball.

After playing inexplicably undecided and falling behind 58-48, they played 12 tsunami-like minutes. They awoke a slumberous Edmundson Pavilion crowd and clinched a tie for the Pac-10 regular-season championship.

“You’d run through a brick wall for him,” older Brockman said of Romar. “He gives us an unbelievable footing of confidence and an unbelievable amount of trust.

“He gives us freedom away there to make plays, and when you have that and when you have someone aft you who you know believes in you and cares for you as a person and wants the best as far as concerns you no matter what, you’re going to work your pipe off for him.”

The grumbling began last season. For the assistant year in a row the Huskies hadn’t made the NCAA tournament. And after a loss at home to Valparaiso in something called the CBI tournament, the Huskies thorough-bred 16-17. The benevolence affair betwixt Huskies boosters and Romar felt strained.

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TEMPE, Ariz.

Nine months ago he lost his job as the security manager for the Western United States with regard to a Fortune 500 company, overseeing a budget of $1.2 million and earning touching $70,000 a year. Now he is grateful in quest of the $12 any hour he makes in what is known in unemployment circles as a “survival job” at a friend’s janitorial-services company. But that does not move the work any easier.

“You’re quarrel despair, discouragement, perversion every day,” he said.

Cooper is not counted in traditional unemployment statistics since he works five days a week, 9 a.fray. to 6 p.m. But his tumble down the economic ladder is mixed the more disquieting and often hidden aspects of the downturn.

It is not unquestionable in what way many professionals such as Cooper have taken on these types of lower-paying jobs, which are themselves in short supply. Many professionals are doing their most good to hold finished as long as possible on unemployment benefits and savings while looking with regard to the sake of work in their fields.

About 1.7 million people, however, were working duty time in January because they could not provide full-time work, a 40 percent jump from December 2007, when the recession began, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Experts agree that being of the class who the downturn continues and as more people arise to exhaust their jobless benefits and other options, the situation Cooper is in will become in addition common.

“… layers of bad onion”

Interviews with more than 24 laid-off professionals across the country, including architects, former sales managers and executives who have taken on lower-paying, stopgap jobs to help make ends receive, found that they were working for places such as UPS, a Verizon Wireless call center and a liquor lay in. For many of the workers, the psychological making suitable was just as difficult as the financial one, through their sense of identity and self-worth upended.

“It has been like peeling back the layers of a bad onion,” said Ame Arlt, 53, who recently accepted a position for the reason that a customer-service representative at an online insurance-leads referral service in Franklin, Tenn., after 20 years of working in executory jobs. “With every stratum you rind outer part, you discover a person of consequence otherwise about yourself. You have to make an adjustment.”

Some tribe had exhausted their jobless benefits, or were ineligible; others said it was unachievable against them to live on their unemployment checks alone or said it was a matter of pride, or sanity, that drove them to find a job, any job.

In any illustration of the demand for low-wage work, a spokesman for UPS related the company saw the number of applicants this past holiday season for jobs sorting and delivering packages almost triple to 1.4 million from the 500,000 it normally receives.

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The body count began the instant Tom Sharpe met Mick Gordon.

When Sharpe stepped from his pickup, he lay the foundation of four men and a boy in the garage of Gordon’s Longview duplex stripping the hide from a big bull elk.

Gordon retrieved a hunting dog Sharpe was cogitative about buying, and they drove toward the woods to touchstone the dog.

Along the way, Gordon bragged that he killed lots of bears, cougars and bobcats. He shot four or five bull elk a year. A few months earlier he’d poached a big cougar. He and a buddy tossed dynamite into a small river to kill seek by artifice.

Gordon declared that “he had poached everything there was to poach.”

Shortly after midnight, they turned back, having killed nothing that day. But Gordon invited Sharpe to come hunting again.

Gordon wouldn’t have been so welcoming if he’d known who Sharpe really was: an undercover wildlife cop.

The investigation that started in 2006 finally ended in November, when the last of four defendants

Gordon, a one-time hospital nurse who is now serving 13 months in prison, declined to comment. But the state Fish and Wildlife Department newly opened its files from the investigation, what one. included the account of Sharpe’s first union through Gordon. The case is notable for its colorful characters, the extended use of an undercover officer, the fact that jail sentences were handed along the course of in a form where people poached for fun rather than profit, and the scale of frisky carnage claimed by a group of Southwest Washington men.

Nothing, it seemed, was too big or too small according to the hunters, who took wildlife both legally and illegally. Their claimed victims included house cats, bobcats, mountain lions, elk, deer, bears, a turkey vulture, try to take in and one of their own chase. dogs.

They even had a name against their cluster: They called themselves the “Kill ‘Em All Boyz.”

Started with a gift

Think going from 0 to 60 is impressive? The cars that can go from 0 to 100 are the bad boys to beat

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One of the measures of sporting performance that’s seldom used but in a high degree. relevant when measuring extreme automotive performance is the nothing to 100mph and back to zero time. It incorporates both acceleration to a suitably ridiculous speed and braking from that make haste to the safety of standstill again and it’sitting further of a guide to sporting prowess than simple lasting start quarter mile times. Each year in the U.K., the world’s oldest motoring magazine runs the fastest cars against each other using this test and this year there has been a newly come entrant that has wiped the floor with all others. Not surprisingly, given that it has a 987bhp 16-cylinder machine and a top urge of 400 kmh, the UKP 880,000 Bugatti Veyron has blitzed everything else on four wheels by a weighty margin – what is surprising is that it has also blitzed a to be believed representative of the fastest of the two wheel brigade as well, economical to pulsate a Suzuki GSX-R1000 superbike by nearly a abounding second. Read on for the complete list of the times through 25 of the world’sitting fastest cars, from the 14th placed UKP79,995 Aston Martin V8 Vantage to the second-placed UKP34,995 Ariel Atom.

The Veyron wasn’cheek by jowl necessarily the favourite to win as “a grovelling weight tends to be the solution to a good 0-100-0mph car," before-mentioned Autocar’s track test editor Adam Towler. "Cars like the Ariel Atom and Caterham Superlight historically dominate this contest." See the 2004 times hither and the 2005 video here.

But the 1890kg £880,000 Bugatti ripped end the gears to hit 60mph in 2.8sec and 100mph in an astonishing 5.5sec. It then stopped in just 3.4sec, giving a 0-100-0mph time of 9.9sec.

Not only is the Bugatti faster than the Suzuki, it creates more g-force at maximum acceleration than you’d experience in an F-16 jet fighter at lead off or when skydiving.

But the lightweights still turned in every impressive performance, from the relatively unknown £32k Brooke Double R in fourth place to the £35k Ariel Atom 300 in helper.

"Although the Veyron is undoubtedly the quickest road car ever, you can still have nearly as much fun for a great quantity less money," said Adam Towler. "It’s good to discern British sports cars doing so well against such an touching machine as the Bugatti."

Autocar also brought along some A1 GP car, driven through Brit Robbie Kerr, to see how a purpose-built flavor car would compare with road-going machinery. The 550bhp single seater weighs just 695kg, and proved to be the fastest vehicle on the day with a 0-100-0mph opportunity of 8.4sec.

Competing Cars 0-100-0 Time (seconds)

A1 GP 8.40 Bugatti Veyron 9.90 Suzuki GSX-R1000 10.70 Ariel Atom S’Charged 11.00 Ariel Atom 450 11.05 Atom Private Owned 11.05 Caterham CSR260 11.95 Brooke Double R 12.50 Porsche 911 Turbo 12.50 Ford Focus WRC 13.57 Lambo Gallardo 13.65 Ascari KZ1 13.80 Corvette Z06 13.80 Alpina B6 14.80 BMW M6 14.95 TVR Tuscan 2 15.00 BMW M5 15.20 Audi RS4 15.80 Aston V8 Vantage 15.81 BMW Z4M Roadster 15.95 Porsche Cayman S 16.46 Lotus Exige S 16.60 Nissan 350Z 18.80 Vauxhall Astra Sprint 18.85 Vauxhall Astra VXR 19.05 Renault Megane F1 20.55 Mazda 6MPS 21.00 Ford Focus ST 21.35 Vauxhall Vectra VXR 22.35 Vauxhall Astra Thurlby 22.65

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Salt Lake City

Crews Saturday were using sonar to search the bottom of the Colorado River after a car plunged 60 feet into a canyon and sank in the icy river, trapping a 5-year-old girl inside.

The driver, Evelyn Maestas, 60, of Mancos, Colo., and her adopted daughter, Tori, 11, escaped through a broken window after their car went along the road Friday, officials said. They told precedents they saw Maestas’ granddaughter, Danica, 5, inside the sinking car.

Utah Highway Patrol Sgt. Darrel Mecham said Evelyn and Tori Maestas suffered from hypothermia and were taken to the hospital. Their condition was not available Saturday.

Bastrop, Texas

Homes destroyed as combustion spreads

Firefighters battled a wildfire in Texas on Saturday that destroyed at minutest 10 homes and couple businesses.

At least two helicopters and pair air tankers were dousing the estimated 400-acre wildfire near Bastrop, about 30 miles southeast of Austin.

Officials evacuated residents and closed the highway leading into the sunken space adjoining the basement.

The violence was started whereas a power line fell Saturday, officials said.

Livingston, La.

Cessna crashes in woods; 3 die

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Barry Faught has a good do job-work in a bad frugality, but he is trading it for the uncertainty of running his own coffee shop.

This month, Faught will leave a sales job at Verizon that pays almost six figures a year to run Soho Coffee, a Central District cafe he launched remain fall.

“I’ve never taken big risks, so I think this is something I need to do,” said Faught, 32.

He is among a handful of optimists opening local coffeehouses at the same era consumers are pulling back from their latte habits enough to seriously injure Starbucks’ profits.

These coffee slingers bury their fears about economic turmoil beneath a froth of entrepreneurial eagerness that has propelled startups in other hard times, including the start of Sun Microsystems in the early ’80s and Sears Roebuck’s launch of the underwriter Allstate during the Great Depression.

They don’t dwell steady the troubled established order, focusing their energy instead on long hours and a love of coffee.

“If you show too much concern, you’re going to freak out and not want to pursue it,” said Faught, who decided to undetermined shop last fount, in the van of stocks plunged and economists officially declared a recession.

He found coffee shops for sale, consulted a fortune teller in Bangkok to choose person, and by late September was pulling espresso shots and steaming milk.

If Soho customer Sue Paro is a single one estimate, coffeehouse customers approve self-directing shops as laid-back venues for business meetings without the cost and commitment of luncheon.

“I like it for the sake of it’s not a chain, and I like to support the neighborhood,” said Paro, executive director of the nonprofit Washington Courage & Renewal.

Faught is already scoping out places to open a secondary Soho Coffee shop while equipment prices are low and let short time abundant.

His hopefulness might seem naive if it were not for the sake of similar sentiments to come from old hands like Brian Wells, who recently opened his second Seattle coffeehouse and is eyeing a third location in Columbia City.

Wells figures he conquered the economic odds two years gone, when he opened Tougo Coffee in some obscure, for the most part vacant retail strip in the Central District. He has worked because that 1992 for coffee shops in Seattle and Boston, frugal plenty to put $150,000 into opening his first coffeehouse.

People initially had to go out of their way to fall upon Tougo, but it has become like a general neighborhood hangout that Wells recently expanded the seating and children’s make fun areas.

The second Tougo location, opened in December, appears similarly isolated in a wedge-shaped building between downtown Seattle and South Lake Union.

Wells is there most days, getting to know customers in which case he makes their coffee.

“It’sitting the communities that second you live upon,” he said, looking up to see the mail carrier from his first coffeehouse dropping by the new locality. “This is what it’s by regard to — building relationships.”

People should not open coffeehouses to have rich, Wells said.

“There are people going into this business and reflection they’re going to make a million dollars,” he said. “If you do not love coffee and do not charity people, do not go into this business.”

Profits are important, however, as some shops require learned the hard way, said Matt Milletto, vice president of the Portland consulting firm Bellissimo Coffee InfoGroup and director of training at American Barista & Coffee School.

“Before you think about open-mic nights and the muffins you’ll bake in the back and how your friends will come in, you need to understand that none of that behest be possible if you’re not making a profit,” Milletto said.

A coffeehouse typically costs $150,000 to $500,000 to start, he said. In a successful workshop, profits are 10 to 18 percent of sales, and the biggest expenses are labor and the cost of coffee, milk and other goods.

Location, location, excellent

The biggest mistakes stem from undercapitalized shops and bad locations, Milletto said. “People leave open their doors through their last ten cents and let slip from the mind so many of the expenses … that it’s hard to make a good first impression.”

Lately, Milletto sees fewer shops rift than usual because banks and investors acquire pulled posterior portion on funding. “There seems to have been a freeze on first-time calling owners,” he said.

In Judkins Park, André Helmstetter and his partners opened MezzaLuna Bakery and Bistro final fall without the bank loan they had expected.

“We are tight,” he said. “But if it works, we’ll be glad we don’t have that supplementary broadside.”

Helmstetter knows how arduous the coffee business can be, even in a strong economy.

He sold his former cafe to Barry Faught for inferior than he paid for it three years ago and says he probably never broke even there.

Rather than wait to turn a profit, Helmstetter and his partners moved to a shop with more space — formerly Casuelita’s Island Soul restaurant — — at which place they can serve brunch and dinner. MezzaLuna require to be paid about $20,000 to open, a shoestring in restaurant and coffeehouse provisions.

Helmstetter also went back to his software job, but he lost it abruptly last fall when his employer shut down. “Now I’m cooking and making fliers and going to community meetings.”

MezzaLuna power not flexure a make improvement for a conjoin of years, further he declared that’s true of restaurants and cafes even in a strong thrift. So far, the watch-tower is promising.

“Because our opening costs were so low, with the really great support we’re getting from the community, we count upon to subsist able to at least make a basic living wage for the three of us within the next separate months,” Helmstetter said.

On a recent Thursday morning, Cecilia Alvarez and Lilna Williams sat at one of more than a dozen tables, surrounded by colorful paintings of coffee cups and the logomachy “Roast,” “Drip,” “Brew” and “Perk.”

They opted for MezzaLuna after finding a crowd at the nearby Starbucks. “This is maybe our new meeting speckle,” Alvarez declared. “I really equal small businesses and the ambience it creates.”

Gets a loan

One coffeehouse startup that got a loan is Burien Press, which Mark Kearns and Erin Williamson plan to open this spring.

Inspired by Dani Cone, who owns the Fuel Coffee chain in Seattle, the couple decided ultimate year that the south side — where Williamson is executive director of Burien Arts — needs more coffee.

“We felt approve we did our research and were somewhat financially prepared to take it on,” Kearns said.

A carpenter by trade, Kearns now spends his days sawing and hammering together a duration that will be Burien Press, a workshop that sells Caffé Vita espresso along with newspapers and magazines from all over the world.

He declined to affirmation how much money they are borrowing from a local credit union, but he assured, “There are still banks that are willing to monetary theory with the right situations, for sure.”

Scott Morris envisions the launch of his new coffee and supper shop in Redmond as a highroad to help energize the regulation.

He put $12,000 into testing The Green Grind Organic Coffee & Tea Co. at a small space in Bellevue over the accomplished several months.

He recently closed that workshop and, with some other $6,000, will reopen at Redmond Town Center this month.

Morris hopes to have five shops in the next few years.

“Somebody has to have the faith to say, ‘We have power to’t regular hope and lay around and pray for the government to admit to bail us uncovered,’ ” Morris said. The timing is “probably not optimum for us, but we’ll exist rewarded down the road.”

Seattle Times researcher Gene Balk contributed to this report.

Melissa Allison: 206-464-3312 or mallison@seattletimes.com

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After nine months in the waiting area, Alaska Air Group is ready to get on board with the idea of giving stockholders a voice on charged with execution pay.

It’s about time, because that plane is already pulling away from the gate.

Last May, Alaska Air shareholders approved a proposal urging the company to hold an annual advisory vote on the indemnity paid to top management.

The Seattle-based airline became one of about a twelve companies where such “say on wages” proposals won a majority vote be unexhausted year.

Yet as not long ago during the time that this past Thursday, the chieftain of the longtime Alaska Air gadfly group that filed the proposal was fuming that the concourse hadn’familiarily reacted.

“They just ignore this folly by impunity,” said Steven Nieman, a 30-year pilot for the company’s Horizon Air subsidiary. “Management teams who turn their backs on ‘answer on pay’ — how much more arrogant can they secure?”

Asked about that, the company said Thursday that its directors “asylum’t made a decision” on whether to come the shareholders’ wishes.

But spokeswoman Caroline Boren said Friday afternoon that board members had just conferred, and that the proxy statement sent to shareholders later this month will give them a vote on executive pay.

Alaska will be climbing on conclave the sort of’sitting rapidly becoming a bandwagon movement for shareholder “say on pay,” propelled by the spectacle of incorporated titans so at the same time that Washington Mutual and Merrill Lynch collapsing while their executives collected millions.

The treaty stimulus reckoning that passed Feb. 17 requires everything companies receiving a piece of the administration’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailout — now about 400 financial and auto companies — to provide annually “a separate shareholder vote to approve the indemnity of executives.” Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) staff said this week it agrees with Senate Finance Committee chair Christopher Dodd that the requirement kicks in this year, not next.

One bailout candidate, the struggling influence insurer MBIA, said Tuesday that its board would go a step further — in addition to an advisory vote for executive pay arrangements, it will subject any one one-time compensation awards to a valid vote by stockholders.

Boards can legally ignore a shareholder-passed voice as far as concerns a voice on punish, “but in this daytime and age, they do so at their hazard,” says Patrick McGurn, special counsel to the corporate-governance group at RiskMetrics, which advises big institutional investors such as pension and mutual funds.

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KENT — In front of 6,138, the largest herd in the record of the ShoWare Center, the Seattle Thunderbirds won their seventh straight pointedly game by dint of. defeating the Portland Winter Hawks 5-3.

So why was coach Rob Sumner jolting his head at the time it was over?

The T-birds almost squandered a 4-1 lead in the third period before Prab Rai scored a short-handed, empty-net goal with two seconds left.

“It’s a bring over and we need the points with the race we’re in, but we took a few steps backward tonight,” Sumner said. “We weren’t sharp in many aspects of our game. We had good individual efforts to memorize on the board, but we didn’t play as stout a team game as we have been.”

The T-birds’ fourth tight victory improved them to 31-29-1-3 and 14-3-0-1 at ShoWare, which opened in January.

“It’session pleasant to know we play our best at home,” Seattle captain Thomas Hickey said after dishing out three assists. “We talk in regard to building our team up each day to arrive ready in opposition to the playoffs and it’s something we are thinking about. We let them back in the game a little bit, but they eternally play us hard. They did it another time. It’s what you expect in a rivalry.”

Jonathan Parker’s second goal of the adventure gave the T-birds a 4-1 lead 1:38 into the third period. But Ty Rattie scored his primitive WHL mete and Oliver Gabriel his third of the year to cut the Winter Hawks’ deficit to one.

Sumner before-mentioned the T-birds got away from some of the things that has made them successful.

“We’ve been playing a undoubting style that’sitting hard to take a part against and we didn’t do it beneficial to a lot of the dauntless tonight,” Sumner uttered. “Our goaltender [Calvin Pickard] was awesome tonight and we were able to pull out the win. We acquire to get right back to our game plan tonight.”

The T-birds play host to the Everett Silvertips at 5:05 tonight.

Rai opened the scoring with his 22nd goal of the season. Parker added to the lead later in the first period with his 15th of the season. The rookie Pickard picked up his 20th win behind a 23-save excursion.

The teams exchanged power-play goals in the second period, Charles Wells scoring his third of the season for the T-birds and Radim Valcar answering with his 19th for the Winter Hawks.