Washington
Old North Church’s George Washington bust revitalized (Photos)
After well over a century, everyone starts showing their age.
But there’s good news for the marble bust of George Washington housed at the Old North Church: a specialist named Christopher Gutierrez knows all the tricks to fix any blemish.
“Today we are working on the restoration cleaning of the sculpture of General George Washington, president George Washington to the rest of us,” Gutierrez said Saturday as he approached the bust with an ultraviolet light. “First steps are going to be to give it a thorough inspection and both visually and with a black light to make sure that there are no defects within the marble. … My guess is there’s probably nothing wrong with it, just it needs a cleaning.”
That wasn’t the case for the four wooden angels across the church, up on the balcony with the organ, which had been busted up pretty badly in years past. Gutierrez said they’d just returned from the shop of the company where he works as lead technician and art handler for the Boston-based Manzi Appraisers & Restoration.
The bust was donated to the church, then known as Christ Church, by Shubael Bell Warden in 1815, according to its plaque. And it quickly got a reputation as one of the truest representations of America’s first president in art, even according to someone who should rightly know: Washington’s own revolutionary friend, the Marquis de Lafayette of France.
“In 1824, the Marquis de Lafayette did this tour in America and came to the church and said that this bust was the best likeness ofGeorge Washington he’d ever seen,” said David Manzi, owner of Manzi Appraisers and Restoration.
The New England Historical Society quotes the Marquis as saying this: “Yes, that is the man I knew and more like him than any other portrait.”
And after all that time, Washington might just need a quick dusting to get back to looking his best.
“We’re not talking very high tech with the stuff,” Gutierrez said. “That’s the funny part part, but it’ll be Swiffer to get the big dust and I’ll be using a Dust Buster to vacuum up the dust so we’re not just redistributing the dust.”
Gutierrez also applied a paste he hopes will give the marble a good cleaning and shine. He put a sample on the back of the bust so that if it doesn’t work or fouls the marble, the visible part of the bust won’t be affected.
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Washington Spirit goalkeeper Aubrey Kingsbury has announced that she and her husband Matt are expecting a baby in July.
The couple made the announcement in a video on the Spirit’s social media channels, holding a baby goalkeeper jersey on the pitch at Audi Field.
Kingsbury becomes the most recent Spirit star to go on maternity leave, following defender Casey Krueger, midfielder Andi Sullivan and forward Ashley Hatch.
Sullivan gave birth to daughter Millie in July, while Hatch welcomed her son Leo in January.
Krueger announced she was pregnant with her second child in October.
Kingsbury has served as the Spirit’s starting goalkeeper since 2018, and has been named the NWSL Goalkeeper of the Year twice (2019 and 2021).
The 34-year-old has two caps with the U.S. women’s national team, and was named to the 2023 World Cup roster.
The club captain will leave a major void for the Spirit, who have finished as NWSL runner-up in back-to-back seasons.
Sandy MacIver and Kaylie Collins are expected to compete for the starting role while Kingsbury is on maternity leave.
The Spirit kick off their 2026 campaign on March 13 against the Portland Thorns.
YAKIMA, Wash. — Yakima could soon take a major step toward redesigning Sixth Avenue after the Washington State Public Works Board awarded the city a $985,600 loan.
The loan was approved for the design engineering phase of the Sixth Avenue project. The funding can also be used along Sixth Avenue for utility replacement and updated ADA use.
The Yakima City Council must decide whether to accept the award. If the council accepts it, the city’s engineering work will move forward with the design of Sixth Avenue.
The cost of installing trolley lines is excluded from the plan. The historic trolleys would need to raise the funds required to add trolley lines.
The award is scheduled to be discussed during next week’s City Council meeting.
Microsoft will ramp up its investment in the University of Washington.
Brad Smith, the company’s president, made the announcement at a press conference with University of Washington President Robert Jones on Tuesday.
That means hiring more UW graduates as interns at Microsoft, he said.
And he said all students, faculty, and researchers should have access to free, or at least deeply-discounted, AI.
“ Some of it is compute that Microsoft is donating, and some of it is pursuant to an agreement where, believe me, we give the University of Washington probably the best pricing that anybody’s gonna find anywhere,” Smith said. He assured the small group of reporters present that it would be “many millions of dollars of additional computational resources.”
The announcement today didn’t include any specific numbers.
But Smith said Microsoft has already invested $165 million in the UW over several decades.
He pointed to Jones’ vision to spur “radical collaborations with businesses and communities to advance positive change,” and eliminate “any artificial barriers between the university and the communities it serves.”
Microsoft’s goal is for AI to help UW researchers solve some of the world’s biggest problems without introducing new ones.
At Tuesday’s announcement, several research students were present to demonstrate how AI supports their work.
Amelia Keyser-Gibson is an environmental scientist at the UW. She’s using AI to analyze photographs of vines, to find which adapt best to climate change.
It’s a paradox: AI produces carbon emissions. At the same time, it’s also a new tool to help reduce them.
So how do those things square for Keyser-Gibson?
“ That’s a great question, and honestly, I don’t know the answer to that,” she said. “I’m highly aware that there’s a lot of environmental impact of using AI, but what I can say is that this has allowed us to make research innovations that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.”
“If we had had to manually annotate every single image that would’ve been an undergrad doing that for hours,” Keyser-Gibson continued. “And we didn’t have the budget. We didn’t have the manpower to do that.”
“AI exists. If we don’t use it as researchers, we’re gonna fall behind.”
Microsoft reports on its own carbon emissions. But like most AI companies, it doesn’t reveal everything.
That’s one reason another UW student named Zhihan Zhang is using AI to estimate how much energy AI is using.
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