Economy

It’s been five months since the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., sparked a national gun debate. In Colorado, the state legislature there pushed through a ban on high-capacity magazines – the kind that were used to kill 12 people at a movie theater in Aurora, Co. last summer.

The White House says President Obama will sign a fast-tracked Congressional bill to end the furloughs of air traffic controllers. Operators of smaller Northwest airports hope the measure also stops the planned closure of their control towers.

As of now, more than a dozen of the less busy airport control towers in Oregon, Washington and Idaho remain on a list to be deactivated in early June. They're potential casualties of across-the-board federal budget cuts at the Federal Aviation Administration.

If you use solar panels or wind turbines to generate your own power, you can sell the electricity you don’t use back to your utility. But one Northwest power company wants to stop sending checks to customers who are big energy producers.

Idaho Power awards a credit against customers’ utility bills for the solar and wind power they put onto the grid. If they still have unused credits when the year ends, Idaho Power sends them a check.

The head of Alaska Airlines has choice words for the air traffic controller furloughs that started Sunday. Alaska Air Group C-E-O Brad Tilden today called the travel impact of automatic federal budget cuts "unfathomable."

Sister carriers Alaska and Horizon Air say delays and cancelations have been most noticeable on flights to Los Angeles this week.

The deadly explosion at a fertilizer facility in West, Texas Wednesday, has put a spotlight on the industry.  According to NPR, 12 people died and 200 were injured. 

Driver’s license data show more people moved to Idaho than left the state in 2012. But that data finds at least 29,253 Idahoans did move to another state last year.

Idaho is no stranger to population growth. The number of people in the Gem State has steadily grown from about 710,000 people in 1972 to 1.59 million in 2012. That’s a 124 percent increase.

Some Northwest cities and counties are exploring whether to use local or private money to keep their airport control towers open. By mid-June, the federal government plans to close the control towers at 13 small to medium sized airports across the region.

It’s been more than a month since the federal budget cuts took effect. The across-the-board spending cuts impact federal agencies including the Pentagon and the FAA. American Indian tribes in Idaho are now beginning to see the impact of those cuts.

Amber Ebarb is a policy analyst at the National Congress of American Indians. She says for many tribes, the sequester could not have come at a worse time. She says there are nearly 18,000 American Indians eligible for services in Idaho.