In the Media

Count former Western Washington University men's basketball star Michael Duty among those most excited to see rival big man Blake Poole recently join a Bellingham Slam practice.

Duty, a versatile 6-foot, 6-inch forward, spent a good portion of his career with the Vikings banging up against the 6-5, 265-pound center from Saint Martin's University. Poole finished his senior season with the Saints as the Great Northwest Athletic Conference Player of the Year and a NCAA Division II All-American while Duty was named a GNAC first-teamer after leading Western in scoring at 16.4 points per game.

Though it is simply a line on a map, the border between Canada and the United States is an important part of Whatcom County. What happens at the border — and on either side of the border — affects the local economy. Take as an example last year's brouhaha over exempting residents of British Columbia from paying Washington sales tax.

So it naturally follows that it would be in our best interest to know about our neighbor to the north, who also happens to be Washington's number one trading partner.

This is where the Center for Canadian-American Studies enters the picture. Forty years ago, a group of people at Western Washington University recognized a need to better understand the relationship between the U.S. and Canada.

People will be able to learn about and discuss sustainability issues during a free event sponsored by the League of Women Voters Saturday, April 16.

The event, held at the downtown library, will be called "Sustainability - How do we get there? Economically, Environmentally and Socially."

The state House has advanced a spending plan authored by Democrats, and the Senate could approve its own bipartisan plan as soon as Friday. Next comes the negotiations. With just 11 days left in the scheduled legislative session in Olympia, there are major differences to work out between the two budgets. Here’s a comparison of the budgets on key issues:

State Sen. Ed Murray, D-Seattle, and Sen. Joe Zarelli, R-Ridgefield, will take reader questions today at 1 p.m. about the bipartisan budget proposal released by the Senate on Tuesday. Murray is the chairman of the Senate Ways and Means Committee that wrote the budget. Zarelli is the ranking Republican on the committee.

Late Tuesday night, the state Senate unveiled its 2011-13 budget proposal, which would cut about $4.8 billion in state spending.

While many of the cuts in the Senate budget proposal are similar to the House proposal, which was passed last week, a few areas are vastly different when it comes to education.

Washington is rapidly stripping support from its four-year public colleges and putting more cost burdens on students, at a time when brains trained at those colleges are needed to power the Evergreen State out of the Great Recession.

Students are paying more for less. But the hidden cost may be borne by the people of Washington.

What the state is doing and has done, summed up in words from University of Washington senior Andrew Lewis, is to deny students the chance "to pursue the American Dream."

Ilona Idlis is so brimming with intellectual passion that she'll engage random bus riders in discussions on tax reform – and win them over to her side. This spring, the University of Washington sophomore is studying in Prague to force herself outside of her Puget Sound comfort zone. She's studying journalism and political science and already has as many credits as a third-year student after taking advanced courses and community college classes while in high school.

Idlis chose the UW in large part because of its relative affordability. But since she enrolled, that has changed. Tuition has spiked more than 13 percent in each of the past two years. Scholarships from her freshman year are gone, and despite qualifying for state and federal financial aid and working part time at a Hallmark store, Idlis is coming up short.

Gone is the pride that she felt from putting herself through school her first year. By the end of this year, Idlis will have borrowed up to $6,000.

In the Spring of last year, a group of Bellingham youth hatched a plan to convert their homes into concert spaces for a gutsy, weekend-long endeavor: the area's first-ever youth-led underground music festival, catering to the community's bevy of hip Western Washington University undergrads and any out-of-towners willing to drive up to Whatcom County to scope it out.

Job seekers who want to connect directly with employers are invited to attend Western Washington University’s Spring Career Fair from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Thursday, April 28 in the Mac Gym of the Wade King Student Recreation Center.

The free event, sponsored by the WWU Career Services Center, allows students and the general public to meet hiring managers from a range of private-sector companies, non-profit organizations and government agencies.