Business

Seattle plans to launch a new marketing campaign to showcase the city as an ideal setting for television commercials.  

Sure, we get more rain than Los Angeles, but it’s also about 30 percent cheaper to shoot a commercial in Seattle. And does L.A. have volcanoes? I don’t think so.

"You can get to the mountains. You can get to a rainforest. You can find beaches," says George Riddell, who produces commercials through his Seattle-based company Big House.

Pink slips are going out to hundreds of workers at the nation's most contaminated nuclear site because of automatic federal budget cuts.

About 9,000 people work at south-central Washington's Hanford Nuclear Reservation, which produced plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal beginning in World War II.

Airbus signed its biggest deal ever on Monday, an order from Indonesian's Lion Air worth €18.4 billion ($24 billion) that President Francois Hollande said should inspire the struggling French economy and all of Europe. 

Boeing said Friday that it expects to finish testing its battery fix for the 787 within two weeks. Then it will be up to the Federal Aviation Administration to decide when the planes fly again.

Boeing is testing several changes to the plane's lithium-ion battery aimed at preventing overheating and fire _ conditions that led to the global fleet of 787s being grounded for the past two months.

Boeing executives say commercial flights of its grounded 787 jets will resume "within weeks, not months" with a third of safety tests already completed.

They said Friday they had not pinpointed the causes of the two battery problems that resulted in the global grounding of the technologically advanced Dreamliner planes.

Boeing will soon start testing its redesigned Dreamliner battery. Battery experts say that means engineers will have to experiment with flammable lithium-ion batteries to see if, well, they explode. 

Engineers subject the batteries to something called safety abuse testing — crushing them, sticking nails in them — to see what happens.

So how do engineers manage to stay safe? 

The trick, according to battery expert Dan Doughty, is to not get too close.