Panama's Copa Airlines has ordered four more Boeing 737-800 aircraft, Boeing said today.

That brings Copa's 737 orders to 34. The carrier already has 24 of the aircraft in service. Ten more, including today's four, are on order from Boeing.

Boeing said the ordes are already reflected in it's order table. Previously they had been listed as from an unidentified customer.

The large-cap Russell 1000 Index closed at 815.68 today, a quarter of a point higher than its previous all-time close on April 25.

Russell Indexes are leaders in institutional usage and now account for more than half - an industry leading 52% share - of the benchmarks in funds used by corporate pension plans and other institutional investment organizations.

More than $3.8 trillion in assets are benchmarked to Russell indexes.

Safeco Corp., a home and car insurer based in Seattle, raised its quarterly dividend by a third to 40 cents a share, Bloomberg News reported.

The increase applies to shareholders of record as of July 6, and will be payable July 23, Safeco said in a statement. The action brings the annual dividend rate to $1.60 a share.

Safeco last raised its dividend to 30 cents on May 3, 2006. It has more than doubled its annual dividend rate in the past four years, the company said.

As goes the Dow, so goes gas.

While the nation’s most-watched average of stock market prices soared to a new record this morning, so did the price of gasoline in the South Sound. A gallon of regular cost $3.332 in Tacoma on Tuesday, and by Wednesday morning it rose to $3.345.

Bellingham retained its place as the place for the state’s dearest gas, at $3.411 per gallon (also a record high on Wednesday), while Spokane closed relatively lowest at $3.154.

The Dow climbed above a record 13,240, while the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index beat a six-year high. In the "Huh?" department, crude oil fell below $64 a barrel in New York after an Energy Department report showed that refiners increased fuel output last week, and oil futures dipped 1.1 percent to $63.67. Futures are down 15 percent from a year ago.

I was perusing the Inside the Editorial Page blog this morning when I came a post by editorial writer Patrick O'Callahan. He's discovered an possible twist in the Puyallup Tribe/SSA Marine deal announced Monday.

Read on:

Legally, the Puyallup Tribe's plan to let SSA Marine build a shipping terminal on 128 acres it owns on the Tideflats is uncontroversial.

But Ladenburg raises a question about SSA's plan to add 52 acres it owns – which are adjacent to the Puyallups' property – to the deal.

Not that he's opposed to the transfer. But SSA's 52 acres would be put into tribal trust status, exempting them from Tacoma taxes. Talking to me via a bad cell-phone connection Tuesday, Ladenburg said the 1988 tribal land claims settlement, which he helped negotiate, bans any "fraudulent transfer to avoid city taxes."

He emphasized that he's not calling SSA's plan fraudulent – just that it could take 52 acres of extremely valuable real estate off the city's tax rolls. "The City of Tacoma must sit down and talk to SSA," he said.

We'll keep you posted.

Airliner acquisition contracts often contain specific performance guarantees, manufacturer promises meet certain fuel economy, range and weight guarantees for their products.

But an agreement signed last week between Virgin Atlantic Airways and The Boeing Co. added a further performance stipulation: That Virgin Atlantic CEO Sir Richard Branson and Boeing Chairman James McNerney would shed some weight.

According to London's Daily Mail, the agreement regarding testing biofuel in a Virgin 747, stipulates in the fine print that each CEO must lose at least one stone (14 pounds) over the next four years to reduce carbon dioxide emissions on the delivery flight.

According to Virgin Atlantic's spokesman, staff members inserted the provision in the contract to see if their bosses would read the contract before signing.

"Clearly, neither of them reads contract properly before they sign them," said spokesman Paul Charles. "They had no idea they had until their signatures were down on the dotted line. They thought it was very funny."

The ever vigilant British press said Branson could stand to lose the poundage. Boeing isn't saying how much McNerney weighs though he appears already to be height and weight proportional.