| The Middle East's ultra-luxury hotels
Business and leisure travel to the region has climbed 18 percent a year since 2005 , according to Deloitte's annual Hotel Benchmark Survey, released this week, and is expected to grow another 6 percent this year, to 41 million visitors. This has fueled renewed interest in the palace-style hotels that once pampered kings and aristocrats more than a century ago. As a result, exquisite restorations of such ancient structures, including cave dwellings and Bedouin camps (some dating to the 1st century) coupled with modern luxuries such as air conditioning and Bulgari toiletries are now available to luxury travelers across the Middle East, from Bethlehem to the Turkish hinterlands. And new hotels are going up "at breakneck speed," says Lorna Clarke, director of the survey. .
ET Guide
In a way, though, it had already started back home in the late 1950s with the arrival of James Dean's Rebel Without a Cause at the Rivoli Cinema. By the time the film was screening, Dean had already been killed in a car crash. Looking back now, I realize that it was not the film's theme (the generation gap) that made Dean a legend. No, it was the blue denim jeans and the red zip-up jacket ‘Jimmie' wore in the film that really started the youth revolution. Klonaris, a Downtown sportswear shop (which still exists to this day) on Abdel Khalek Tharwat Street, offered a similar version of that zip-up jacket, but I arrived too late to buy the red one — they had sold out, and I had to make do with a khaki substitute. A few years later though, I had no problem buying an Aquascotum suit similar to Sean Connery's in Goldfinger (1964), but that was from a London store.
Computerworld: 15 iPhone 2.0 fixes
It's conceivable that Apple could update the current crop of iPhones via software updates. Are you listening, Apple? 1. Get on the 3G train Let's start with the most obvious shortcoming: The fact that the iPhone is tied to AT&T's old EDGE wireless data network instead of the technologically superior 3G network. One of the things that makes the iPhone revolutionary is its unprecedented use of the Internet. No other cell phone or handheld on the market offers the full-featured, Web-browsing experience of Safari mobile (to say nothing of YouTube, Maps or other Net applications). But the EDGE data service is too slow for many Internet tasks, especially downloading large amounts of data, such as a graphically intense Web page or a video from YouTube.
Major Weapon Systems Are Another Victim of Iraq
But a more damning set of figures emerge if one examines what has happened within the procurement accounts. In 2001, big ticket procurement items such as Navy shipbuilding and Navy and Air Force aircraft procurement, totaled nearly $35 billion (in 2007 dollars). Those activities accounted for about half of all defense procurement. By 2007, spending in those three categories accounted for only $38 billion, or less than 5 percent of the $60 billion inflation-adjusted increase in procurement spending. Where is the rest of the money going? Procurement for the Army and Marine Corps grew from $12 billion in 2001 to $55 billion in 2007—an increase of 350 percent. The single category of greatest growth was "Army Procurement Other," which includes among other things, trucks, mine protection equipment, and High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles.
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