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LOGAN - Though it will play differently when it airs on national television, the arrival of the "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" bus in Logan on Sunday will hardly be a surprise to those involved.
Cleanup already has begun at the home of the winning family - whose identity is being kept hidden - to prepare for the project, which calls for removal of the existing house and construction of a new one in one short week.
On Friday the trees surrounding the home had been trimmed to make way for the heavy equipment.
When ABC's Ty Pennington and his crew roll up Sunday, operators and their bulldozers will be on site to raze the home. Construction workers and hundreds of student volunteers from Utah State University and Logan High also will help with the fast-track project.
A few weeks ago, sunlight beat down on the ocean. A drop of water went through a phase transition, rising into the air where it joined millions of others. Winds carried the clouds to Virginia. The gray mountains in the sky disgorged their burden. The drop splashed down on Blacksburg. It soaked into the ground, following subterranean paths until it burst free from the darkness in a spring behind nondescript, multi-unit housing along Giles Road -- the headwaters of Stroubles Creek. It did not like what it found as it babbled with its brethren toward the Virginia Tech Duck Pond. The other drops, the ones that had fallen on yards and pavement and stayed above the filtering ground, had carried dust and dirt into the creek. Living things coughed in the heavy water.
Widening its presence in the water industry, Palm Water LLC, a company owned by Istithmar, has said it had been awarded an US$400 million contract by Nakheel to design, build, own and operate (DBOO) a sewage treatment plant as well as sewage and irrigation networks that will cater to a number of high-profile property development in Dubai. The award comes close on the heels of an AED1 billion contract recently won by Palm Water for setting up a similar project for Nakheel at International City, Dubai. The new sewage treatment plant (STP) will serve Dubais premier golf developments including Jumeirah Golf Estates -- being constructed by Istithmar Leisure, an arm of Istithmar that invests in strategic leisure projects. Planned near Jumeirah Golf Estates, the new STP will have a capacity to treat about 220,000 m3 of sewage each day.
SPOKANE -- Sen. Maria Cantwell and Republican opponent Mike McGavick disagreed about what the United States should do in Iraq and how to address the North Korean nuclear threat at two face-to-face forums here Thursday. Neither candidate landed any crippling blows during the two polite face-offs -- a televised half-hour debate before the Spokane Downtown Rotary Club and a 90-minute session with The Spokesman Review newspaper editorial board. That wasn't good news for McGavick, who needs something to boost his lagging poll numbers. .
Gov. Haley Barbour has called a special session of the state legislature for today (Thursday) when he will ask legislators to cut the state tax on modular homes for Gulf Coast residents to by $4,000, thereby reducing the total cost of the homes to $6,000.
At least one state representative beleives the issue could meet some opposition in the House and drag the session out over a number of days.
Barbour said that reducing the cost of modular homes is one of the most effective ways to remove barriers to housing for those whose residences were destroyed or damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
The proposal was part of a bill during the last regular legislative session this year that passed the Senate, but was not brought to the floor for a vote in the House of Representatives.
A proposed cure for financial problems at some of the nation's Federal Home Loan Banks might be worse than the ailments it is designed to remedy, critics say. They worry that the proposed capital requirements might shrink the banks' mortgage loan programs, including funding for low- and moderate-income housing, while damaging financially sound institutions like the Home Loan Bank of Cincinnati, which serves Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. The network of 12 regional banks, created in 1932 during the Great Depression, and its 8,100 member banks are the nation's largest source of residential mortgage money and, in many areas, the only source of low-income housing money. "They are the only game in town," said William R. Embry Jr., chairman of the Faith Community Housing Foundation in Lexington.
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