Northwest Briefly

SEATTLE – Sound Transit will have to re-evaluate its proposed light-rail station at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport after the agency received just one bid to build the stop.

Mowat Construction presented the sole offer to do the job for $95.3 million, far more than the $51.8 million Sound Transit engineers and consultants had expected.

The agency had planned on spending up to $60 million for the station, spokesman Bruce Gray said Wednesday.

Light-rail director Ahmad Fazel said Sound Transit doesn’t intend to pay Mowat’s price. He’ll either negotiate a lower price, seek new bids or make the glass-lined station less elaborate.

Construction of the station was planned to begin in August and be finished by 2009, completing the 16-mile system from downtown Seattle to the airport.

A man convicted of beating and stabbing an acquaintance to death in 2005 has been sentenced to life in prison without chance of release under the state’s three-strikes law.

Skagit County Superior Court Judge John Meyer sentenced Terrance Irby on Tuesday. Irby was convicted on Jan. 25 of aggravated first-degree murder in the death of James Rock of Hamilton.

Aggravated first-degree murder is punishable either by the death penalty or life in prison without possibility of release. However, county prosecutor Rich Weyrich said Meyer chose to handle the sentencing under the three-strikes law.

Irby was convicted of second-degree statutory rape in 1976 and of assault with a deadly weapon in 1984.

A group of high school students suspended for refusing to move their morning prayer group from school grounds has returned to class.

Heritage High School suspended 11 students Friday after they ignored repeated orders to move the prayer group from the busy student commons, Assistant Superintendent Bill Bentley said. The group is not registered as a student-led group.

Five of the students returned to class Monday and six completed a reduced suspension that allowed them to come back after three days Wednesday.

The suspensions were reduced after administrators talked with students’ parents.

Several students and members of Vancouver’s Church of Truth gathered Monday to pray on a sidewalk just off school grounds.

Megan Gaultier, one of five students assigned in-school detention Friday, said the prayer group would continue to meet outdoors to avoid further penalty.

Army National Guard members on Thursday rescued three Korean backpackers stranded on an ice floe in the Bering Strait.

The backpackers were trying to walk across the ice pack between Russia and Alaska but somehow became stranded, said McHugh Pierre, a spokesman for the Alaska Department of Military and Veterans Affairs.

The Russians would not allow the backpackers to cross unless they made emergency arrangements with someone in United States, Pierre said. The backpackers made a deal with a private service, but that company’s helicopter had mechanical problems Thursday, Pierre said.

Instead, an Army National Guard helicopter picked up the backpackers, and took them to Nome, on Alaska’s western coast.

Associated Press