Free Republic

CINCINNATI - U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, will highlight in downtown Cincinnati this morning key infrastruture projects, such as the Brent Spence Bridge, as he outlines a framework to rebuild and repair the country’s infrastructure which will create millions of construction jobs. The northern Ohio Senator will be joined by Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley, Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority President and CEO Laura Brunner, and OKI Regional Council of Governments Deputy Executive DirectorRobert Koehler. President Donald Trump previously promised $1 trillion of investment in American infrastructure during his campaign. Brown joined Senate colleagues to release a roadmap for making...

TULSA, Okla. (AP) — Authorities say 31 pounds of cocaine that was accidentally discovered stashed in the nose of an American Airlines aircraft in Tulsa is worth around $434,000. Tulsa County Sheriff's Office spokesman Justin Green says the plane arrived in Miami from Bogota, Colombia, on Sunday. It was flagged for maintenance and sent later that day to Tulsa International Airport, where American Airlines has a maintenance base.

An apparent construction error six decades ago could have caused the fracture discovered Friday in a steel beam that forced the closure of the Delaware River Bridge, an engineering expert who viewed pictures of the cracked truss said Sunday. An image of the cracked truss - a supporting piece - on the bridge that runs between Bucks County in Pennsylvania and Burlington County in New Jersey shows signs of holes that had been mistakenly drilled into the steel beam and then filled with plug welds, a typical solution in the 1950s when the bridge was built, said Karl Frank, professor...

<p>Tweefie Millspaugh has a relatively short commute from her home in North Baltimore's Abell neighborhood to her job at a downtown law firm. Without traffic, she says, it takes about 15 minutes.</p> <p>But lately, the 54-year-old has found herself yelling fruitlessly in the driver's seat as she sits for 45 minutes on streets jammed by road closures across the city's center. After work, she waits again in a crawling line before finally inching out of her parking garage and into the gridlock.</p>

One day in the first week of November, Pete Pringle and his brother, Luke, were talking about car accidents involving deer. Pete and Luke work at Pringle Auto Body, 2720 S. 34th St., Kansas City, Kan. It is a family business started by their grandfather in 1968 and now is run by their mother. It was natural for them to have a conversation on deer accidents this time of year. It’s when a higher percentage of collisions involving deer occur because it’s the breeding season for deer. “We are getting into that season,” Pete Pringle said. Bucks and does will...

(Reuters) - If technical problems with the U.S. government's new healthcare website are not fixed in November, hundreds of thousands of Americans could lose easy access to lower-cost coverage, jeopardizing the Obama administration's goal of making affordable insurance broadly available in 2014. Consumers in 36 states are relying on Healthcare.gov to qualify for tax subsidies that will reduce coverage costs under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which was expected to cover 7 million people next year alone through new private insurance marketplaces. But if glitches in the marketplaces that operate chiefly online fail to be resolved, the government might have...

ANNAPOLIS -- Republican Sen. Richard Colburn of Dorchester voted against Maryland’s recently passed gas tax increase, but now hopes some of the new money will go to replacing the Dover Bridge in his district. The new taxes, initially expected to raise prices at the pump by 4 cents a gallon this July, might help to expand funding for the rehabilitation and replacement of Maryland’s deteriorating bridges. As of April, 87 of the 2,572 Maryland State Highway Administration maintained bridges were structurally deficient, which doesn’t mean they are unsafe, but that they have areas that need to be repaired or replaced,...

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Engineers for Maryland's most high-tech highway are nearly half way to mending hairline fractures found in 10 of the bridges that carry the Intercounty Connector between Gaithersburg and Laurel. Repair work has wrapped up on four of those bridges and is set to start this week on three more. But who’s to blame for cracks at two other bridges remains at question. The contractor who designed those bridges is disputing the state’s assessment that the cracks are the contractor's fault. The ICC’s western third opened in February 2011 amid a flurry of both fanfare and skepticism. Eight months later, inspectors...

A prominent feature of Mission San Xavier del Bac - which has graced the desert southwest of Tucson for two centuries - faces unchecked decay now that critical funding has been cut. Work to repair and restore the mission's deteriorated east bell tower was supposed to be under way this spring, but not a dab of new mortar has been applied. A previously approved $150,000 grant from the Arizona Heritage Fund to kick-start the project was abruptly canceled last year. Persistent efforts to get the funding restored have failed, so the bell tower will languish for the foreseeable future -...

CUPERTINO, CALIF. (TheStreet) -- AppleNASDAQ" PRIMARY="NO"/> makes changing the batteries of new iPod models increasingly difficult by soldering them to the device's casing. Consumers would know this if they repaired such items instead of replacing them. Apple's obstacles to repair and ToyotaNYSE" PRIMARY="NO"/> and Ford'sNYSE" PRIMARY="NO"/> recent spate of recalls highlight the deteriorating relationship between the buying public and the products it owns. Though Kelley Blue Book and Edmund's say the value of troubled Toyotas dropped more than 4% since recalls were announced, some consumers see replacement as a more viable option than addressing complex electrical and mechanical problems they...

With automakers patenting more parts to enhance dealers' service and repair revenues, the knockoff business is taking a big hit. The patenting of more run-of-the-mill auto part designs is roiling small body shops, many of which make their living by fixing cars with knockoffs of original equipment parts such as grilles, hoods, lights, mirrors, side panels and fenders. Such pieces are anywhere from 10% to 50% cheaper than the real McCoys, but increasingly, the law forbids their use. Automakers have long sought patents on certain extra-stylish ornamentation to prevent other automakers from cribbing the design for their vehicles. But the...

FORWARD OPERATING BASE KALSU — The road to economic prosperity south of Baghdad is being paved by Soldiers of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga. With assistance from the 2nd BCT embedded provincial reconstruction team, local government councils and Iraqi contractors, the task of restoring roads and improving roads damaged by war is in full swing. “It’s all about … helping the agricultural market in our area,” said Capt. Brian Love, ePRT military liason. The area, comprised of Arab Jabour, Hawr Rajab, Al Buaytha and Adwaniyah, is mainly agriculturally-based. The improvements, which began in October,...

http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070922/METRO/109220035/1001 The Army is proposing to replace the Tomb of the Unknowns' 48-ton white marble monument because of non-structural cracks. A senator has introduced legislation that would prohibit the Army from replacing the 71-year-old marble sarcophagus marking the Tomb of the Unknowns before submitting to Congress a report on the feasibility of repairing the monument. Sen. Daniel K. Akaka, Hawaii Democrat and chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee, introduced the measure Thursday as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act. "The senator wants to make sure before anything irrevocable is done, that we cross all our t"s and dot...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - NASA decided Thursday that no repairs are needed for a deep gouge in Endeavour's belly and the space shuttle is safe to fly home. Mission Control notified the seven shuttle astronauts of the decision right before they went to sleep, putting an end to a week of engineering analyses and anxious uncertainty — both in orbit and on Earth. "Please pass along our thanks for all the hard work," radioed Endeavour's commander, Scott Kelly. Mission Control replied, "It's great we finally have a decision and we can press forward." The astronauts had spent much of the...

LONDON - Big Ben's bongs fell silent Saturday as workers rappelled down Parliament's iconic clock tower, beginning a month of maintenance work on the clock and its world-famous bell. Time briefly stood still as the clock's hands were frozen shortly after 8 a.m. They then were wound to 12 o'clock as a team of specialist "industrial rope-access technicians" descended to clean the clock's four latticework faces, part of maintenance ahead of its 150th anniversary in 2009. Although the clock soon will be ticking again, the famed bell that sounds the hour at Britain's Houses of Parliament will be silent for...

Even as the cost of addressing disrepair in the state parks tops $1 billion, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to take back money that had been earmarked for the backlog. The list of deferred maintenance items in the 278 state parks, including several in the Bay Area, now includes nearly 8,000 leaky roofs, broken water lines, faulty sewer systems, brush fire hazards and other problems. A full 10 percent of the backlog — $123 million worth — is at Angel Island State Park in San Francisco Bay, where buildings from a military installation dating to the Civil War and a later...

BP announced Monday it will replace miles of key pipelines across the giant Prudhoe Bay oil field, and executives admitted the company's program to find and prevent corrosion-caused leaks is seriously flawed. The announcements came a day after BP decided to shut down the nation's largest oil field, news that drove up crude oil and gasoline prices across the country and raised financial, supply and labor worries in Alaska. BP executives said the oil outage could last weeks or even months. One member of Congress, Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., blasted BP for allowing sludge and corrosion to mount inside pipelines,...

President Bush on Thursday signed a $94.5 billion emergency spending bill to fund hurricane relief and the Iraq war that includes $30.4 million for Sacramento flood protection and levee repairs. The money includes $23.3 million targeted for 29 levee sites that state officials say represent an urgent risk. Last month, the state and federal governments agreed to allow expedited environmental reviews so those projects can be completed by Nov. 1. State officials now estimate the total cost of repairing those levees at less than $150 million. The remaining $7.1 million is for stream repairs in south Sacramento. The total was...

WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Jan. 11, 2006) -- The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is closing out the “Operation Blue Roof” program in Florida, with more than 42,000 homes receiving temporary roofing repairs since Hurricane Wilma made landfall in October. The Corps began the program on behalf of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Operation Blue Roof provides homeowners free temporary blue plastic roof coverings for eligible homes damaged by Hurricane Wilma. The program enables those affected by the hurricane to get back into their homes so that they can return to their routines as quickly as possible, Corps officials said....