Bonneville Power head announces retirement

PORTLAND – The head of the Bonneville Power Administration, who weathered the 2001 energy crisis and longstanding court battles over making the Northwest’s hydroelectric dams safer for salmon, is retiring.

The agency announced Tuesday that Steve Wright will step down at the end of January 2013.

Bonneville manages power from 31 federal dams in the Columbia Basin and operates more than 15,000 miles of transmission lines that carry electricity across the West. It supplies about 40 percent of the power for the Pacific Northwest, and oversees much of the region’s salmon conservation projects.

Wright worked his way up through the agency, was named acting administrator in 2000 and got the permanent post in 2001.

South Carolina-built 787 makes its fourth flight

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. – The first Boeing 787 made in South Carolina has made another test flight.

The plane made a three-hour test flight over the Atlantic on Monday. It was the fourth flight for the aircraft.

The plane is the first manufactured at Boeing’s $750 assembly plant that opened in North Charleston last year. It’s being sold to Air India and has been painted with the company’s logos.

The plane is expected to be delivered to the airline by the end of the month.

Southwest suffers outages at airport kiosks

DALLAS – Southwest Airlines Co. says an outage of its airport-technology systems was preventing passengers nationwide from printing boarding passes for part of Tuesday.

Airline spokeswoman Christi McNeill said the problems affecting its check-in kiosks were fixed by late afternoon.

Some passengers posted comments and photos on Twitter of long lines at Southwest ticket counters and said agents were filling out boarding passes by hand.

McNeill said customers could check in from home or on mobile devices but not at airports, and reservations were not affected.

Developers can charge Facebook subscriptions

NEW YORK – Facebook is letting app developers charge subscription fees, in addition to existing one-time payments, for games and other applications on its site.

Facebook Inc. said on its developer blog Tuesday that the subscription feature will be available in July. The changes open up a new revenue stream for developers as well as for Facebook, which takes a 30 percent cut from all payments on its site.

People will still able to make payments on a one-time basis. Facebook is also replacing its own Credits currency with users’ local currency.

Payments for virtual items accounted for 17 percent of revenue in the first quarter.