| OIA receives go-ahead to charge new rental-car tax
It's about to get more expensive to rent a car at Orlando International Airport.
Board members of the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority, the agency that runs OIA, voted Wednesday to adopt a $2.50-a-day tax on car rentals. The "customer facility charge," which would be capped at five days, could add as much as $12.50 to a customer's bill.
Backers said the tax will raise money for $102.6 million worth of rental-car upgrades planned at the airport during the next few years, including additional parking spaces, fueling stations and car-wash bays.
.
Musharraf’s outbursts
But, this has increased almost four-fold from nine million in 1980.
A heavy emphasis on industrialisation in Pakistan means that the rate of increase in emissions is going up. The energy sector contributes the most to emissions: 53 per cent.
At the same time, Pakistans decreasing forest cover is suffering from among the worlds worst deforestation rates, primarily from the large logging industry. Forest cover declined to 2.5 per cent in 2005 from 3.3 per cent in the late 1990s.
Some of the 11 climatic zones in the country are under threat of extinction, while the coastline of 990km is considered vulnerable to the rise in ocean levels. The agricultural sector is the most vulnerable to climate change, and changes in cropping and productivity are already affecting livelihoods.
WBKO Weather
The earth is their higher power and they wake up every day in fear that unless we all work together to change our dirty habits we're all going to suffer the consequences. I found a few of the responses quite frightening – even threatening. Things like “you should be fired" or “I will see to it that you never post your stupid comments ever again" came with an amount of foreboding. And therein lies the discovery of enlightenment. The man-made-global-warming-climate-change campaign is a campaign of fear. We're not becoming a lazy society – my friends, we're already there. We've grown accustomed to thinking less with our hearts and minds and more on computers and “experts". Through the years, we've allowed them to enlighten us with “a better way" than before. We've thrown common sense out the window because we've convinced ourselves reasonable judgment just doesn't work anymore.
Bill to ban teaching about homosexuality in schools killed
The bill was scuttled at the February meeting on a voice vote after critics said the bill was unnecessary, infringed on free speech rights and put the Legislature improperly in the business of dictating curriculum to schools. Campfield, R-Knoxville, had protested the voice vote authorized by the subcommittee chairman, Rep. Joe Towns, D-Memphis. House rules say that when a sponsor requests a roll call vote, that request must be honored. Towns declared at the time that Campfield had not made a proper request. He subsequently decided, after reviewing a videotape of the meeting, that Campfield had, indeed, made a proper request. Towns then agreed to bring the bill back for a second vote on Tuesday. The roll call vote was 6-4 in favor of House Education Committee Chairman Les Winningham's motion to send the bill to the Department of Education, in effect killing it.
8 wallet-friendly business travel tips
For the typical road warrior, who spends about $1,045 on airfare, hotel accommodations and car rental per trip, the cost of business travel is a necessary expense. After all, a global economy requires traveling far to pitch clients and deliver presentations. But the cost of representing a company off-site is expected to increase. The average domestic trip this year will cost 6 percent more than in 2007, or $1,110, while the average international trip will rise 7 percent to $3,171, according to the American Express 2008 business travel forecast. What's more, as the American economy weakens, companies are beginning to scrutinize travel expenses, and business travelers will be enlisted to help control spending. .
If history is kind, Bush might get a turkey named after him.
Back in the day, the conservative base might have lit up the White House switchboard, demanding to know what this administration will force America's schoolchildren to vote on next? "Will & Grace"? "Truman & Capote"? Alas, the White House remains a few centuries behind on gay rights, and "Jake & Tom" is not some gossip item about Gyllenhaal & Cruise. According to the National Wild Turkey Federation (NWTF), "Jake" is the term for a juvenile male turkey; "Tom" is the name for an adult male. You can tell the two apart by their feathers: the juvenile has an erratic tail. Father and son turkeys may not be quite the historical spin the Bush White House was looking for. But even 43 has something to be thankful for. At his first ceremony in 2001, Bush joked that one of the two turkeys he pardoned was in a secure and undisclosed location.
Stanford center goes to press to battle poverty
Grusky says Pathways magazine will be able to participate in what he calls a "smart" war on poverty, since there is increasingly more and better data due to breakthroughs in computing, information analysis and data retrieval. "We know what works," he said, "and what doesn't." Based on the data, there is some agreement about what succeeds, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, which benefits lower-income workers. Among the programs widely considered to have failed are inner-city housing projects, which have only further marginalized the poor. Grusky, 49, a third-generation sociologist, grew up in Los Angeles, where his father has long taught organizational sociology at UCLA. His grandfather was a professor of sociology at Harvard University. He had no intention of following in their footsteps when he went off to Reed College in Portland, Ore.
|
