| Luring clients and employees to shore
(FSB Magazine) Glendale, Wis. -- ShoreTrips' business is booming, so you'd think owners Julie and Barry Karp could relax a bit. The couple developed a niche - arranging land tours for Caribbean cruise ship travelers. While cruise vessels have been disgorging hordes of passengers into ports and onto buses and walking tours for decades, their operators faced increased competition from landlubbers when the Karps founded their firm in 2001. Since then, the Karps have located tour operators in scores of port cities and used them to deliver less costly and more intimate and original port experiences than the big ships offer. Clients come mostly through travel agents, who get commissions on any ShoreTrips tours they sell. The Karps put 75,000 travelers on their tours in 2006, and 100,000 last year.
Rob Zaleski: UW team aims to aid New Orleans bayou
Kate Tillery Danzer had been bracing for the worst. She had seen TV footage in August 2005 of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. She read numerous accounts of the horrifying aftermath and the shockingly inept response of FEMA and other government agencies. And she had talked to her colleagues on the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Water Resources Management team who'd already begun work on a project to determine the feasibility of restoring Bayou Bienvenue, a cypress swamp next to the poor Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, which had been particularly hard hit. But when the 33-year-old UW grad student was given a tour of the neighborhood upon arriving in New Orleans last June -- nearly two years after the worst natural disaster in U.S. history -- she was shaken to the core.
Quote of the day
It is a cut-and-paste rush job to refute "cut and run". It is also a representative document of the Bush administration: evidence is cherry-picked, slogans substitute for facts, falsehoods are sold as truth, and "victory" is promised. Connections between al-Qaida and Iraq are slyly hinted at. The old accusations against Jose Padilla as the "dirty bomber", no longer being pressed against him, reappear. The Pentagon document, eagerly seized upon by congressional Republicans as a treasure-trove of talking–points, accurately gauges the White House's estimate of their ability to assess information on their own. On the day the Pentagon talking–points were sent to the House Republicans, Bush reformulated compassionate conservatism to demonstrate his concern for the continuing loss of life in Iraq.
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