BrainySkeeta
Trust female - 59 years, New Orleans, United States
Blog 18
Hello New Friends!
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Are We In A Recession ?
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This To Shall Pass ...
[photo]8540149[/photo]
If I can endure for this minute
Whatever is happening to me,
No matter how heavy my heart is
Or how dark the moment may be ...
If I can remain calm and quiet
With all the world crashing about me,
Secure in the knowledge God loves me
When everyone else seems to doubt me ...
If I can but keep on believing
What I know in my heart to be true,
That darkness will fade with the morning
And that "this will pass away, too!" ...
Then nothing in life can defeat me
For as long as this knowledge remains
I can suffer whatever is happening
For I know God will break all the chains
That are binding me tight in "the darkness"
And trying to fill me with fear ...
For there is "no night without dawning"
And I know that "my morning" is near.
~ Helen Steiner Rice ~ -
Recyling Tips
Please Click On Link:
http://www.recycling-guide.org.uk/ -
FAA Alerts
WASHINGTON - The Federal Aviation Administration is going to begin alerting its top headquarters officials when field inspectors miss airline safety inspections, Transportation Secretary Mary Peters announced Friday.
Peters also demanded that the FAA and American Airlines explain to her within 14 days why 250,000 U.S. air travelers endured canceled flights last week. American grounded its MD-80 jetliners and canceled 3,100 flights in order to inspect or redo wiring that was supposed to have been completed between Sept. 5, 2006, and March 5, 2008.
"No one at all was well served by what happened last week," Peters told a news conference outside FAA headquarters.
She said she didn't think federal regulators had overreacted in the wake of revelations about the FAA's lax supervision of Southwest Airlines. Last month, it was revealed that the FAA allowed Southwest to fly dozens of Boeing 737s without inspecting them as required for fuselage cracks and that Southwest's system for complying with FAA safety directives had not been inspected by the FAA since 1999.
But Peters wanted to know "why so many aircraft had to be grounded and so many travelers had to be inconvenienced" in order to "help us avoid similar disruptions" as the FAA completes an audit of all major airlines' compliance with safety directives. The audit was ordered after the Southwest debacle came to light and helped uncover the MD-80 wiring problems.
Flanked by acting FAA administrator Bobby Sturgell, Peters announced a series of steps to improve safety in a system she insisted was already the safest in history:
_FAA is setting up a national safety inspection review team to examine airlines for problems mostly likely to occur and in a comprehensive way.
_FAA will begin requiring senior field office officials to sign off on voluntary safety disclosures by airlines. These voluntary disclosures must show the immediate problem has been fixed and steps have been taken to ensure it won't recur. In return, the airlines will avoid penalties for the safety problems.
_The FAA general counsel and Transportation officials will begin meeting with airlines to be sure they have plans for accommodating passengers if there are future mass aircraft groundings.
_Peters named five outside aviation and safety experts to recommend improvements for the whole system within 120 days.
"This plan appears to address some of the main problems that created the current safety crisis," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. "But the question remains: Will the FAA devote the resources and manpower to get it done right?"
Many of the steps had been recommended by Transportation Department Inspector General Calvin L. Scovel III, particularly the new system to alert top headquarters officials when safety inspections fall behind schedule. Scovel concluded in a highly critical report that the FAA had "developed an overly collaborative relationship" with Southwest.
The lack of headquarters supervision of inspections was evident when Sturgell was unable to give a number when asked how many inspections were currently overdue, but he said the new alert system would remedy that.
Sturgell also denied that the audit of all carriers represented a new, tougher approach by his agency. "This is not a crackdown; it's not getting tough," Sturgell said, but rather an attempt to verify the system is working effectively. He reinforced that by noting that during the audit the FAA had given nine different airlines approval for 14 different alternate methods of complying with FAA safety orders, including on the wiring problem.
Peters did not address Scovel's recommendations that FAA come to better grips with massive retirements and resignations among its air traffic controllers and safety inspectors. Scovel noted that controllers-in-training now comprise 25 percent of the controller work force, compared with 15 percent in 2004, and that half of its safety inspectors are eligible to retire in the next five years.
"The real problem is there aren't enough FAA inspectors to keep tabs on the burgeoning number of outsourced maintenance facilities," said Teamster Union President Jim Hoffa, "especially overseas where foreign repair stations don't have to meet the same standards as U.S. facilities do." He called Peters' plan "window dressing."
The FAA had already announced it would adopt one Scovel recommendation: lengthening the "cooling off period" before former FAA inspectors can work for an airline they used to oversee or interact with the agency.
Peters emphasized that since the late 1990s the death rate in commercial aviation has dropped from 45 for every 100 million people flown to a record low five-to-eight deaths per 100 million flown. But she said, "A good system can always be made better," and asked her panel of outside experts to help do that.
The panel includes J. Randolph Babbitt, former president of the Air Line Pilots Association; William O. McCabe, former Director of Aviation DuPont and member of the National Business Aviation Association safety committee; Malcolm K. Sparrow, a professor of public management at Harvard; Edward W. Stimpson, U.S. representative under President Clinton on the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization; and Carl W. Vogt, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.
"We fully support the formation of the commission," said John Meenan, executive vice president of the Air Transport Association, which represents the major airlines. -
"JAZZ" Festival In New Orleans
DANCING IN THE STREETS
With free music flowing, French Quarter Festival is all fans could ask for Sunday, April 13, 2008By Daniel Monteverde
The crowds were thick, the bands had people dancing and swaying, and the smells from innumerable types of food wafted through the air Saturday at the 25th annual French Quarter Festival.
Not to mention that a light breeze made the spring afternoon not only bearable, but enjoyable.
"What's to complain about? Nothing," said Adele King, who grew up "all over the place" in the United States but now lives in Paris.
King and her husband, Bruce, have made a monthlong pilgrimage to New Orleans each spring for the past "four or five years," and the French Quarter Festival is half of the reason. The other half is the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
"We come for the music," she said.
And if there was any question about that, all one had to do was look at Bruce King.
Only stopping when the music did, King's feet were almost constantly on the move: left, right, back, forward. His arms would go up in the air, his fingers fluttering, when the quick brass-band sounds of the Storyville Stompers reached a frenzied crescendo.
Along the riverfront, at Jackson Square and the French Market, and up and down several blocks of Royal and Bourbon streets, more than 400,000 fans of New Orleans music and food are expected to sample both at 16 stages and 65 concession stands this weekend. The festival began Friday and concludes this evening.
The French Quarter Festival began in 1984 when a group of civic boosters launched a small event to highlight traditional jazz and try to draw locals back to the largely tourist-populated French Quarter.
Today, even though visitors from around the globe make their way to the city for the festival, it still feels like a neighborhood block party, one festival-goer said.
"Since I've been here today, I've run into about six people I know," said Mid-City resident Gerry Wright. "I don't come down here (to the Quarter) much; neither do my friends. But this is real New Orleans here," he said amid a crowd of people who gridlocked the 500 block of Royal Street while local "gypsy jazz" band Vavavoom belted out "Brazil," a song made popular in the 1950s and '60s by artists such as Frank Sinatra and Ray Conniff.
So many people packed the French Quarter that cars trying to cross Royal Street were at a virtual standstill as a sea of people flooded the narrow street, flowing as steadily as the swollen Mississippi River.
One reason many people said they make the trek to the Quarter -- a place they otherwise tend to avoid -- is the festival's admission price: nothing.
"There's so much to see and do here, and it don't cost a penny if you don't want it to," said eastern New Orleans resident Lester Lewis, who said he has attended the festival off and on for the past decade.
"And with this weather . . . you couldn't pay for a better day."
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Bob Marley's Mom Dies
KINGSTON, Jamaica - Cedella Booker, the mother of Jamaican music legend Bob Marley, has died, a family spokesman said Wednesday. She was 81. Booker died in her sleep Tuesday night at her home in Miami, apparently from natural causes, spokesman Jerome Hamilton said.
Booker, a Jamaica native, was 18 when she married Norval Marley, a British man 32 years her senior. Their son brought Jamaican reggae music to international prominence, becoming its international image. Bob Marley died in Miami of a brain tumor in 1981 at age 36.
"Mrs. Booker was the matriarch of a movement so powerful that the mystical qualities of the Marley musical legacy remain strong and potent," Jamaica Information Minister Olivia Grange said.
After Norval Marley died in 1955, Booker married an American man and settled in Delaware. She wrote two biographies of her famous son and recorded two albums, "Awake Zion!" and "Smilin' Island of Song."
"She was a star in her own right," Jamaica Prime Minister Bruce Golding said in a statement. "Her life was one of hardship, struggle and eventual fulfillment, and through it all, she exuded hope, strength and confidence."
Everyone in St. Ann's parish knew Booker as "Mama B," said Harry Shivnani, a family friend and general manager of Bob Marley's mausoleum.
"She loved cooking," Shivnani said. "Mama would make you the best pudding ever."
Robert Lalah, a columnist for the Jamaica Gleaner, interviewed Booker in February while she celebrated her son's birthday.
"She was a typical Jamaican grandmother," he said. "She was very warm, very friendly."
Booker is survived by two children and several grandchildren, including Ziggy Marley, who won four Grammys with the Melody Makers, a band that included brother Stephen and sisters Sharon and Cedella.
Funeral arrangements have not been announced. -
VOTE 4 MY GRAND-DAUGHTER
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HAPPY BIRTHDAY 2 ME
HELLO PEEPS
MY BIRTHDAY IS SUNDAY, AUGUST 5TH.
JUST WANT TO WISH ALL LEOS A HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
~BRAINY SKEETA
