Calypso Marine, a Greek Shipping Company, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Tacoma earlier this week in connection with illegally dumping oily waste at sea.

The company agreed to pay a $1 million criminal fine as part of the plea agreement, according to a news release from the U.S. Coast Guard.

The illegal dumping practices were discovered in an investigation by the U.S. Coast Guard Sector Portland and in Kalama, on the Columbia River.

The shipping line calls at the Port of Portland and does not visit Tacoma.

The ship's record book indicated that the vessel properly disposed of all oily waste. However Coast Guard inspectors located hidden pipes that allowed the vessel to bypass approved oily waste procedures and pump large quantities of harmful pollution directly into the ocean during overseas transits.

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Turn on the fans people, because the DVD rental market rivalry is heating up.

Online DVD rental leader Netflix is lowering its monthly fee for one its most popular prescription plans by $1, the company announced today, to match a reduction made by rival Blockbuster earlier this month.

The Associated Press reports that Netflix is now charging $13.99 per month to rent up to two DVDs at a time, down from $14.99 previously. The service mails another DVD after subscribers return one of their other discs in postage-paid envelopes.

The price cut comes less than three weeks after Blockbuster began charging $13.99 per month for the same kind of plan. Dallas-based Blockbuster charges $14.99 per month for a two-DVD-at-a-time program that gives subscribers the flexibility of returning movies to a store instead of through the mail.

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American Airlines will advance delivery of 47 Boeing 737-800 aircraft it had ordered in March by as much as three years, the airline said today.

The first six of those fuel-efficient aircraft will be delivered in the first half of 2009.

American will replace 20-year-old MD-80 aircraft with the more fuel-stingy 737s.

American's move to accelerate deliveries of 737s comes at a time when its Texas rival, Southwest Airlines, is delaying some deliveries of 737 to allow its passenger growth to catch up with its acquisition of new planes.

Southwest had been using its new aircraft in large part to expand its network while American plans to use its 737 to replace less efficient planes.

Contractors will begin laying concrete for Sea-Tac Airport's 8,500-foot third runway beginning in mid-July.

That date is about three weeks later than orginally planned, but the delay isn't expected to materially affect the runway's opening date, now scheduled for November next year.

The runway project from conception to completion will have taken some 15 years by the time the first plane lands on it next year.

A coalition of cities and neighborhood organizations challenged the runway project repeatedly in court, and the runway's actual construction has taken more than three years.

The paving will require some 133,000 cubic yards of concrete and 35,000 tons of asphalt. The runway concrete will be about 17 inches thick to withstand the pounding it will receive from planes landing at high speed.

The most difficult and sensitive part of the project is now behind the contractors. That phase required acquisition and demolition of homes on the airport's west side and cleanup and rerouting of several creeks in the area. Bringing the land surface up to the level of the airport's other two runways required thousands of dump truck loads of soil to be brought from off-site areas and the construction of huge retaining wall to keep the soil in place.

At last report, the runway's construction and associated environmental mitigation activities was budgeted at $1.2 billion.