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Traffic: Can't live with it; can't live without it. That's the dilemma Dallas leaders face as they survey the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor, Gov. Rick Perry's plan for a new network of highways crisscrossing the state to be built as toll roads by private companies. Dallas' interstates are choked with traffic, but if Mr. Perry diverts that traffic – especially the long-haul commercial trucks – beyond the city limits, he will siphon off the city's economic lifeblood. No wonder city leaders are squawking over preliminary maps that show the new corridor being located as far as 50 miles from Dallas' doorstep....

(from email received Friday 1/28/2005) Dear ______: As you may already know, AlwaysOn, in partnership with Speedera, will be bringing you live webcasts of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland all week long. Go to www.alwayson-network.com to see what's on now! Below is the schedule for the coming day's webcasts. All times are PST: 12:20am-1:00am | Special Message - Gerhard Schroeder 12:50am-2:15am | Is the Peace Process Poised for a Resurrection? 3:20am-5:00am | Addressing the Role of the United States in World Affairs 6:05am-7:30am | A View from the Hill on US Foreign Policy in Bush II 6:20am-8:00am |...

The UN's disaster chief has outlined a 10-year plan of investment to avert a natural disaster that could be 100 times worse than the Asian tsunami. Jan Egeland proposed diverting 10% of what is currently spent on emergency relief to tackle disaster prevention.

Time has always passed this town by. Created a century ago by legendary "Sugar King" Claus Spreckels to provide homes for his factory workers, Spreckels evokes an era when neighbors gathered on the front porches of sturdy Craftsman houses, stately Victorians and storybook cottages. People here still do that. But now, ironically, the distant past is reaching out to pull the town into the present. Monterey County officials have decreed that a 1907 map permitting 73 new homes is as valid today as when it was drawn. The development would immediately increase the size of Spreckels by 40 percent. Despite...

BANJUL, Gambia Liberating Liberia Twenty-five years of dictatorship and civil war, preceded by a century and a half of misrule, have made Liberia one of the world's poorest countries. But Liberia's development failures have paradoxically led to a success. Liberia has something that the world values now more than ever: a vast rain forest. . Liberia's status as a republic with strong ties to the United States kept out European colonizers, so no Western power came in to slice rails and roads into the interior. Nature flourished in splendid isolation, and today more than a third of the country is...

BRIAN SCHMIDT has a problem with the county. And the city. And, well, most other municipalities in California. Schmidt, a staff attorney for the Committee for Green Foothills, a local environmental organization, tells Fly that Santa Clara County isn't playing fair. His concern involves environmental impact reports (EIRs) that local governments draft prior to large-scale developments. Normally, after the EIR is written, the public and developers are permitted a specific amount of time (usually 45 days) to review the report. Then, the local government publishes a revised EIR, which answers questions and makes necessary changes. The two reports—the draft and...

Exploration teams believe the Bohai Bay Basin in northern China may hold 20.5 billion tons of oil reserves, enough to sustain the country's energy needs for a "considerable" time, state press said. So far, nine billion tons have been proven with the remaining 11.5 billion still needing to be further explored, the China Daily reported. Bohai is one of China's major oil-producing centers and the find comes as China is trying to build up its domestic oil reserves as part of measures to cope with rising global oil prices and possible fuel shortages. Jin Zhijun, president of the Exploration and...

The latest incarnation of a "single-rate sales tax" plan to remodel Utah's sales tax structure would provide significant new monies for transit projects in Utah's most populous counties. While that might be good news for Salt Lake City leaders who generally favor transit, there is some concern the flat-rate system would injure Utah's capital city by taking away sales tax generated by the LDS Church's downtown mall development. The latest plan is making the rounds in city halls across the state as the Utah League of Cities and Towns presents it to many of the state's 217 municipalities. Thursday, the...

Md. Officials Celebrate End of 8-Year Fight to Build Complex Developer Milton Peterson joined elected officials from across Maryland yesterday to mark the culmination of an eight-year political fight to begin transforming 220 acres of shrubs and dirt on the banks of the Potomac River into National Harbor, a $2 billion complex of hotels, shops and restaurants. The groundbreaking ceremony also signaled the beginning for construction crews preparing to build the project's centerpiece, Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, which alone is expected to cost $565 million. Described by some as the largest single commercial venture in state history, National...

The January/February issue of Foreign Policy magazine has an insightful article by Josef Joffe, the publisher and editor of Die Zeit and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution titled " A World Without Israel." While advocates for Israel often point out the tremendous technological, medical and agricultural advances Israel has produced (including those by this year's Nobel Prize winners in medicine) which have benefited so many people around the world, this intriguing article constructs a counter-factual history of the Middle East which would exist without Israel. Since there are a surprising and distressing number of people who blame the...

RUSKIN - Mangrove marshes and wetlands rise gently to upland hammocks of live oak and pine in this wilderness area along the tidal flats of the Little Manatee River. Many Ruskin residents say the 167-acre tract is a natural wonder and should remain so. But without a lot of money and a little luck, the land is fated to be just another wild place leveled by bulldozers in Hillsborough County. Little Manatee Bay Associates, a Fort Myers-based development company, wants to rezone the property in the Bahia Beach area for up to 538 single- and multifamily homes and up to...

Found this on the newswire at work a few minutes ago, thought I'd pass it along. NOTE: There IS NO URL. This came straight from our newswire. >>>Bombs Found in Lincoln (Lincoln, Ca) - Police in Lincoln made a startling discovery Monday evening. Three explosive devices were found in several homes under construction. The bombs had been placed in fairly expensive homes of a new development in the southeast corner of Lincoln. Numerous agencies have been called, including the FBI, to investigate who planted the bombs. prisoner6

Capitalism brings prosperity, while the socialist, centrally-controlled economy breeds poverty and corruption. If one divides the world’s economies into 5 groups, from the most capitalist 20% to the most socialist 20%, one finds that the most capitalist 20% have a per capita GDP of $23,450, the next 20% is $12,390, followed by $6,235, then $4,365 and finally $2,556 for the most socialist economies. Thus, we see that the most capitalist economies are almost 10 times wealthier than the most socialist ones. Looking at annual growth, we see that the freest economies grow at an average of 2.56% annually, while the...

What is Private Property? Wayne Hage's battle to protect private property -- his and yours After fourteen years of courtroom battles to regain control over the property he claims was taken from him, you could say that rancher Wayne Hage knows a thing or two about private property, the law and government coercion. Tonight, Michael Shaw, Abundance Ecologist, will host a discussion with Hage during a special two-hour edition of the Freedom 21 radio show. Hage, whose wife Helen is a former member of Congress, will tell of his winding journey through the courts after federal agencies pushed him off...

Growth Thwarts Va. Hunters The dawn is still, a faint brightening just above the dried husks of a Purcellville cornfield, the moon still bright. Jay McKeever freezes and slowly inches down into a squat. A white-tailed buck emerges from a thicket of bare trees, the "big boy" he has tracked all morning. The buck, colorblind to the blaze orange baseball cap McKeever wears, comes to a halt. It would be a perfect shot -- and a rack of antlers worth mounting. McKeever curses quietly, his Browning .270-caliber deer hunting rifle, with scope, untouched on the frozen ground next to...

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration said Friday it will allow developers to complete construction and other projects even after belated discoveries that the work could endanger protected species. The new rules from the Interior Department's Fish and Wildlife Service restore a Clinton-era initiative known as "no surprises." It will let federal agencies give blanket assurances to home builders, timber and mining companies and other developers that they won't have unforeseen requirements to protect rare species once a project has begun. A federal judge had blocked the rules last June, telling the government it needed to hear more ideas from the...

Throughout the 1990s, Turkish foreign policy analysts had an easy job. After all, Turkish foreign policy was predictable. Ankara cooperated enthusiastically with Washington, whether in the Middle East or in the Balkans. Turkey aligned itself with Israel and kept at arms length from Middle Eastern neighbors such as Syria and Iran. In Europe, Ankara traded heavily with the European Union (EU) but did not allow the EU to dictate foreign policy. The European Union's frequent allegations and criticism of human rights abuses in Turkey, especially with regard to Turkey's fight against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK, Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan) terrorists, soured...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Christopher B. Leinberger is a man on a mission - a real estate developer who is building to reclaim the past. When not spearheading an ambitious redevelopment of downtown Albuquerque, N.M., he crisscrosses the country, trying to sell builders, planners and the public on converting the nation's sprawling, car-addicted suburbs into more compact, walkable communities - like the neighborhood he grew up in outside Philadelphia. At stake, contends the silver-haired, Santa Fe, N.M.-based developer, is nothing less than our personal health, and that of the planet. "The way we're building our suburbs presents such difficult problems," Leinberger said yesterday, as...

SEASIDE - On a 15-mile stretch of highway called 30A, a debate on neighborhood design has thrived for 25 years. The conversation started with the development of Seaside, an experiment in new urbanism. Seaside was conceived as a reaction to sprawl and, since development began in 1981, it has become famous for its architecture, common spaces and accessibility to pedestrians, according to an article in New Urban News. The St. Joe Co. and other developers in the area were influenced by Seaside because of its success in bringing residents into community with each other. Featured in the 1998 film "The...