US travel bill to charge tourists $10

Bill for U.S. travel promotion group headed to Obama's desk

The Travel Promotion Act calls for a nonprofit group that will promote the U.S. as a travel destination to international visitors.

"This is a historic victory for the U.S. economy and one in eight American workers whose jobs depend on travel," Roger Dow, president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association, said in a statement.(CNN) -- A bill that will create a tourism promotion organization for the United States has received its final passage in the Senate.

The Travel Promotion Act calls for a nonprofit Corporation for Travel Promotion that will promote the United States as a travel destination and explain travel and security policies to international visitors.

President Obama is expected to sign the bill, which the Senate passed 78-18 Thursday, in the next 10 days, according to the travel association.

A $10 fee charged to visitors from countries included in the Visa Waiver Program will partially fund the public-private organization. These visitors will pay the fee every two years when they register online using the Department of Homeland Security's Electronic System for Travel Authorization.

The rest of the funding will come through a matching program of up to $100 million in private sector contributions. If the corporation is able to raise the projected $200 million annually, the organization would be the largest national tourism communications program in the world, Dow said.

National tourism organizations in countries including Greece, Australia and Mexico each spent more than $100 million on tourism marketing in 2005, according to the U.N. World Tourism Organization. The United States spent about $6 million the same year -- the last year for which figures are available.

Oxford Economics, an economic consulting and forecasting company, estimates a well-executed promotional program would draw 1.6 million new international visitors annually and generate $4 billion in new visitor spending.

Some opponents of the legislation said that charging overseas visitors a fee to promote the United States will deter them from visiting.

"We don't want foreigners to have to jump through so many hoops that they just give up and don't bother coming to the U.S.," Steven Lott, a spokesman for the International Air Transport Association, told CNN before final passage of the bill. The IATA represents airlines around the world.

Lott said improving entry and exit procedures would help U.S. tourism more than a promotional organization.

Dow acknowledged the legislation is not a magic bullet for the industry.

"Let's not be naive here. Travel promotion is not a panacea for our international travel issues. There's many things we have to continue to work on such as ... continuing to improve our visa process and all the entry processes."

Dow said he does not think the $10 fee will have a negative impact on visitation, particularly when compared with entry and exit fees for other countries that are rolled into airline ticket prices.

source: cnn

How to Get the Best Seat in Coach

 

iStock

As airlines begin charging for seat selection, T+L explains how to get the one you want without paying the price.

The days of reserving an airline ticket and then selecting a seat for free are numbered. Increasingly, carriers are charging passengers a fee to reserve in certain rows in coach. It’s the latest move in what the airlines call “à la carte pricing.”
Last October, British Airways began charging as much as $30 per preselected coach seat ($75 for one in an exit row). And they’re not alone. US Airways tacks on an extra $5 to $30 each way for a spot on an aisle or window at the front of the plane. United, AirTran, JetBlue, and others add on $9 to $109 for reserving exit-row or other premium seats, such as those by the bulkhead. The majority of coach seats on most airlines are still preselected at no additional fee, but on two domestic carriers, AirTran and Spirit, a preassigned seat—even the much-dreaded one in the middle—costs more.
If you’re paying for a preassigned seat, you should know what you’re getting for your money. Obviously, aisle and window seats near the front, where the ride is smoother and you can disembark faster, or exit-row and bulkhead seats with extra legroom, are preferable to ones near lavatories and galleys. But it’s a mistake to choose a seat based on its location alone. Although exit-row and bulkhead seats almost always provide greater legroom, they can have drawbacks. Bulkhead seats don’t have floor storage, are sometimes narrower to accommodate tray-table storage in the armrests, and are given to passengers with infants, so your extra legroom may come with a braying baby nearby. And some exit-row seats don’t recline fully or at all.
My go-to site to learn the nuances and measurements of individual airplane seats—especially now that I’m paying extra to reserve them—is SeatGuru (seatguru.com), which has the most detailed descriptions, including power port locations and comparison charts of coach cabins across various airlines. Other good sites include SeatExpert (seatexpert.com) and SkyTrax (airlinequality.com). At all of these, you will find advice on the most (and least) desirable seats for all plane models.
My vote for the worst seat ever? The limited-recline middle seat in the very last row, next to the lavatory, on a 757-200. (Seat 36E, I’m talking to you!) At least no one is charging a fee to preselect that one. For now.

source: cnn

Facebook Your One True Login

Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login

Facebook and AOL announced last night a partnership that will integrate a user's Facebook friends into their AOL Instant Messenger. The announcement came on a day when Google announced its new attempt at capturing your social attention with Google Buzz and Yahoo! reminded us from the outskirts that they've been at this game for a year now.

According to Mercury News, about 70% of AOL users also use Facebook and the move is a sign of where AOL is heading, but we wonder if it isn't more a sign of where Facebook is heading and has been all along.

The partnership will use Facebook Connect to import a user's Facebook friends into their AIM contacts, enabling chat directly between the two services. This will allow AIM's 17 million users to continue using AIM while being able to keep in touch with their existing friends on AIM.

Dear visitors from Google. This site is not Facebook. This is a website called ReadWriteWeb that reports on news about Facebook and other Internet services. You can however click here and become a Fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook, to receive our updates and learn more about the Internet. To access Facebook right now, click here. For future reference, type "facebook.com" into your browser address bar or enter "facebook" into Google and click on the first result. We recommend that you then save Facebook as a bookmark in your browser.

The Great Migrations

If you think back to 2002, the big news was Friendster. For many of us, it was the first time we'd joined a social network and we went wild adding friends. Then, in 2003, Myspace came along and we slowly started adding these same friends on Myspace until one day the virtual cobwebs became too much and we left Friendster altogether. And then came Facebook and we did it again. Let's face it - if we can avoid it, we'd rather not do this again and that's precisely what Facebook wants. Facebook has already become the dominant platform for social networking, but as it expands its business in other directions, we will begin to see it pull users away from other businesses too. This partnership is not only about preventing that, but further solidifying Facebook's place as our one, true login.
The more integrated Facebook becomes, the less willing we'll be to recreate that same web of social connections we've reinvented time and again.
While many of us may complain about Facebook's on-site chat breaking down, being slow or crashing our browsers, the fact remains that Facebook is where we've based our online social life and chat is a basic extension of this. AIM used to be one of the industry standards in this realm, but now it looks more like the company is hedging its bets and trying not to fall prey to the same circumstances that caused us to abandon other platforms.

Your One True Login

As we wrote last month, users already prefer to use Facebook Connect by a margin of 2-to-1 and countless sites already let you make connections on their site by comparing their user base with your Facebook friends. In this case, however, it isn't the connections that are being imported - real-time interaction with an external user base is being imported. Whether or not a particular friend has an account with AOL is irrelevant. The partnership reinforces the idea that our Facebook profile is at the center of our online existence. Whether or not someone is signed into AOL is no longer what's at stake here, it's whether or not the user is logged into Facebook.
While other integrations attempt to replicate our social connections, to port them over to the site we're on, this one makes no such demands. We can continue using AIM while taking advantage of the particular friend set we've likely spent the most time cultivating and grooming - our Facebook friends.

source: readwriteweb

Monday, Feb. 01, 2010

How German Homeschoolers Won Asylum in the U.S.

By Tristana Moore / Berlin

Uwe and Hannelore Romeike are not like other asylum seekers, people fleeing war or torture in places like Afghanistan, Iraq or Somalia. They're music teachers from a village in southern Germany. And yet, in what appears to be the first case of its kind, the couple and their five children were granted asylum in the U.S. last week by an immigration judge who ruled that they had a "well-founded fear of persecution" in their home country for engaging in what has become a popular albeit somewhat controversial American practice — homeschooling their children.
The Romeikes, who are Evangelical Christians, took their three eldest children out of school in the town of Bissingen in 2006 because they were concerned about the impact the government-approved curriculum and the public-school environment would have on their social development. "Over the past 10 to 20 years, the curriculum in public schools in Germany has been more and more against Christian values, and my eldest children were having problems with violence, bullying and peer pressure. It's important for parents to have the freedom to choose the way their children can be taught," Uwe Romeike said in a statement provided by the couple's attorney, Michael Donnelly of the Virginia-based Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). (See pictures of East Germany making light of its past.)
But here's the problem: in Germany it's compulsory for children to attend school, and the Romeikes soon found themselves on the wrong side of the law. Local authorities slapped the couple with a $10,000 fine, and police even took their children to school when the Romeikes refused to send them. Fearing that they could lose custody of their kids or even be put in jail, the Romeikes fled to the U.S. in 2008, looking for a community where they could educate their kids as they saw fit.
That's exactly what they found in Morristown, Tenn., a town of about 27,000 deep in the Bible Belt. Donnelly says the Romeikes flourished in the environment, becoming "very disciplined" teachers tackling subjects like math, history and social science with the help of textbooks and other teaching materials, all in accordance with state law. The couple also joined a local group that organizes activities and field trips for homeschooled children in the area. Once they were settled in their new community, they applied for asylum in the U.S., claiming they'd be persecuted if they were sent back to Germany. (See pictures of Detroit school kids' dreams of the future.)
Memphis judge Lawrence Burman's ruling sparked outrage in Germany. Authorities in the state of Baden-Württemberg, where the Romeikes had lived, angrily dismissed suggestions that the couple had been persecuted. "We have compulsory schooling, and this law applies to everyone, including the Romeikes," says Thomas Hilsenbeck, a spokesman for the state Education Ministry. "If parents don't want to send their children to a public school, they can send them to alternative private schools."
While there is a thriving homeschool movement in the U.S. — some 2 million children are now taught at home, or about 4% of the total school-age population, according to HSLDA — it is still a very new concept in Germany. According to the German media, there are only between 500 and 1,000 families in the country who homeschool their children — most in violation of the law. According to the compulsory-education statute introduced by the Prussians in the 18th century, all children must attend school from the ages of 6 to 16. And it's traditionally been viewed as a child's right rather than an obligation. "Compulsory schooling is one of the greatest social achievements of our time," Josef Kraus, head of the German Teachers' Association, tells TIME. "This law protects children." (Read a TIME cover story on how to save America's schools.)
Kraus strongly disagrees with the asylum ruling, saying it "treated Germany like a banana republic instead of a democratic country with its own laws." He also argues that homeschooling deprives children of important social lessons. "No parental couple can offer a breadth of education and replace experienced teachers. Kids also lose contact with their peers," he says. Advocates of homeschooling, however, argue that children benefit from tailored one-on-one instruction and that they're able to learn at their own pace without distractions in the classroom. The HSLDA goes one step further, saying research suggests that homeschooled children score significantly higher than their peers on standardized achievement tests. (See pictures of the college dorm.)
The ruling is sure to ignite passions on both sides of the debate — and may spur other parents around the world to follow the Romeikes' lead. If this happens, the U.S. could see a flood of a new type of refugees —educational asylum seekers.
Read "A Homeschooling Win in California."

source: Time