Sports

The Seattle City Council has approved a deal to build a new arena designed to lure the NBA back to town.

Seattle has a new deal for a sports arena to house NBA and NHL teams. If the full council approves the agreement later this month, lead private investor Chris Hansen will then face the possibly tougher job of getting a deal for the teams.

The revised deal has been officially announced by members of the Seattle City Council and addresses concerns by the Port of Seattle and others that traffic generated by events there would clog up the SoDo area.

Seattle councilmembers Sally J. Clark, Tim Burgess and Mike O'Brien made the announcement.

EATONVILLE, Wash. - Apparently Northwesterners are not afraid of heights and have a yen for adventure. We draw that conclusion because the industry of zip line tours and aerial adventure parks is booming in the Northwest right now.

Within the past couple years, fully a dozen commercial zip line attractions have opened in Oregon, Washington and Idaho... not counting at least twelve more in British Columbia and Alaska. The revenue potential has some municipal parks departments looking to add spendy zip line attractions in public parks.

Hope Solo is generally regarded as the best women's goalkeeper in the world. Fresh off winning her third-straight Olympic gold medal with the U.S. national team, Solo has been as busy off the field as on it, releasing an autobiography titled Solo: A Memoir of Hope.

The memoir details her rise as an international celebrity, but it also focuses on the complicated relationship she had with her father, who taught her to play soccer.

This is the face of perfection:

The Seattle Mariner's Felix Hernandez is now a part of baseball lore, joining 22 others when he threw a perfect game in a 1-0 win against the Tampa Bay Rays, this afternoon.

That means Hernandez retired 27 batters in a row, throwing 113 pitches, 77 of them strikes. No one got on base.

What's incredible is that this is the third perfect game this season. USA Today reports:

It's time to extinguish The Torch, and end NPR's three-week marathon of Olympic coverage. From the London Games' opening ceremony through 302 medal events, these Summer Olympics have fed fans a rich diet of history and spectacle. I only wish I'd been able to eat it all — but part of the Olympics' allure is that its smorgasbord is over-stuffed with intense competition.

The United States now has back-to-back golds in men's basketball, after beating Spain 107-100 in the finals.

The team celebrated midcourt, and we saw something unexpected: Kobe Bryant, the superstar, one of the best basketball players in the world, wept during what he said was his last Olympic appearance.

"Team USA is not a one-hit wonder," the commentators on NBC said. "Like the Beatles and Rolling Stones, they come to London and put out more gold."

It wasn't easy. The AP reports:

The closing ceremony to the London Games used fireworks, theatrics and music to celebrate the athletes and their countries who participated in the 2012 Summer Olympics.

The night included a shout-out to Winston Churchill and a performance from the Pet Shop Boys, to mark the end of two weeks of competition and stunning athletic displays.

The surviving members of the rock band Queen, The Who and the Spice Girls were on the schedule to entertain millions watching around the world.

Update at 5:11 p.m. ET: 'Imagine'