Organizers for the Democratic National Convention and party leaders have touted the official greenness of the upcoming convention in Denver, including everything from biodiesel buses and recyclable materials to carbon counting.
But in the rush to secure everything green -— even setting up a “hybrid-only parking lot” at the Pepsi Center -— it seems one simple and fairly obvious LEED-certified step was overlooked: Installing bike racks.
Indeed, there will be no bikes allowed within the DNC perimeter of the Pepsi Center, nor at Invesco Field, where Barack Obama will deliver his acceptance speech, DNCC organizers confirmed this week.
Repeatedly citing the Secret Service and the Denver Police Department as making all security-related mandates, including not allowing delegates, volunteers and gathered media to park a bike within the convention perimeter, organizers said not accommodating leg-powered transportation is the exception to the rule when talking about the true greenness of the event.
LELAND, Miss. — Catfish farmers across the South, unable to cope with the soaring cost of corn and soybean feed, are draining their ponds.
“It’s a dead business,” said John Dillard, who pioneered the commercial farming of catfish in the late 1960s. Last year Dillard & Company raised 11 million fish. Next year it will raise none. People can eat imported fish, Mr. Dillard said, just as they use imported oil.
As for his 55 employees? “Those jobs are gone.”
Corn and soybeans have nearly tripled in price in the last two years, for many reasons: harvest shortfalls, increasing demand by the Asian middle class, government mandates for corn to produce ethanol and, most recently, the flooding in the Midwest.
For many, it was enough that Nutter unambiguously endorsed a major plan for the Delaware River waterfront and the creation of a Design Review Committee.
No doubt many in the audience pinched themselves when Nutter described Philadelphia as if it were a progressive West Coast city rather than a Rust Belt survivor:
"We are a walkable city, increasingly home to bicycles," Nutter declared. "We want to preserve our urban form. We do not want the automobile and its design requirements to dominate the landscape."
Platitudes, maybe. But what stirring ones.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Americans drove 1.4 billion fewer highway miles in April than they did in April 2007, the Department of Transportation said Wednesday.
That marks the sixth consecutive monthly drop and coincides with record gas prices and an increase in transit ridership, Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said.April's drop is more than three times larger than the drop from March 2007 to March of this year, which was 400 million fewer highway miles.
Peters said vehicle miles traveled on all public roads for April fell 1.8 percent from April 2007.
It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials. The Supreme Court now has struck down many of their legal interpretations.
The lawyers drafted legal opinions that circumvented the military's code of justice, the federal court system and America's international treaties in order to prevent anyone — from soldiers on the ground to the president — from being held accountable for activities that at other times have been considered war crimes.
An aside: oddly, when people see you riding a lot, hear you talking about biking and see more than one bike a piece they tend to think that you know something about bikes and bicycling in general. I help when I can and I'm a vocal proponent of whatever I believe in and I'm sure me darlin' Mrs can back me on that. Actually, she'd call me a F*(%in' Know-it-all. But enough about me...
We think of grass as soft and hospitable stuff, but once it's been dried in the sun and shredded by machines -- once it's become hay - grass is sharp enough to draw blood and dusty enough to thicken lungs. I was covered in chaff, my forearms tattooed red with its pinpricks.
The others -- Joel Salatin, whose farm this was; his grown son, Daniel; and two helpers -- had gone off to the barn for something, leaving me with a welcome moment in the pasture to gather myself before we cranked up the baler again.
A screening router is an appropriate firewall for a situation where:
- The network being protected already has a high level of host security.
- The number of protocols being used is limited, and the protocols themselves are straightforward.
- You require maximum performance and redundancy.
Huge increases in Metro Transit ridership for first quarter
More people rode Metro Transit buses and trains in the first quarter of 2008 than had in the same time frame over the last 20 years.
Some 19.2 million riders rode buses and trains the first three months of the year — up 1.3 million rides, and the most since 1984, according to a Metro Transit news release.
Metro Transit recorded ridership increases across all types of its service, paced by a 16.4 percent increase on the Hiawatha light-rail line. Three-month ridership was 2.1 million, the first time first-quarter ridership topped 2 million in the four-year history of light-rail service.
Locally, ridership was up 8.3 percent, and express bus ridership was up 4.3 percent.
Metro Transit officials said they are on track to meeting their goal of 78 million rides in 2008.
To make it easier to take the bus or train, Metro Transit implemented two new trip-planning features during the first quarter, enhancing online trip planners and adding maps.
Metro Transit, overseen by the Metropolitan Council, operates in metropolitan Minneapolis and St. Paul. For more information, go to www.metrotransit.org.
