Airline was charge passengers by weight. Samoa Air has become the first airline in the world to base fares on a passenger’s weight. The national carrier of the South Pacific island nation has discarded the traditional pricing model of asking fliers to pay for a seat and instead has moved to a price=per=kilogram structure. The airline flies domestically between the country’s two main islands and has started international flights to American Samoa and Tonga. Travelers pay a price of around US $1 per kilogram on shorter routes, and over US $4 on longer flights. Samoa Air CEO Chris Langton said: ‘The new initiative would help promote health awareness in Samoa, which has one of the world’s highest rates of obesity. Reaction to the new pricing scheme has been mixed.’ A spokeswoman from the New Zealand-base campaign group Fight the Obesity Epidemic vehemently opposed the new fares. She said: ‘’I think that’s absolutely appalling. It’s a stigmatization of people, and really, just powerfully discriminating.’’ A Samoan community leader said he appreciated that weight was key for airlines. He told the New Zealand Herald: ’’ I weigh 200kg. I would be okay to pay the fare, provided it’s reasonable, but I don’t think it’s a good excuse saying that they’re trying to promote healthy living- that’s a lame reason.’’ Many industry analysts believe other airlines will follow suit in charging overweight passengers extra.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good with a gun. They are doing everything they can make all our progress collapse under the weight of fear and frustration or their assumption is that people will just forget about it. Any bill that doesn’t include a universal background check is a mistake. This idea of private individuals transferring their weapons and having to go get through the background check makes no sense. Each senator is going to have to make up his own or her own mind ad I respect that. It’s very different ideas surrounding the issue of guns in the U.S. Today, we are starting by telling you about a school safety plan released by the National Rifle Association. The NRA is American’s biggest gun rights group. Its leader says the organization has more that 4.5 million members. It’s recommending several steps to make school safer: enforcing school visitor policies, making sure doors are always secured. It also wants to train arm adults in schools to protect students. The NRA says if an attack happens, response time us critical, and having an armed adult on campus would decrease that response time and save lives. In recent polls, the American public has been divided on whether or not schools should have more armed guards. Another idea is involving guns, a proposal in Connecticut that could give the state the nation’s strongest gun laws. It would add more than 100 types of guns to a list of illegal weapons, it would limit the amount of ammunition that guns could have in them and it would require background checks for all gun sales. The thinking here is that more legal limits on guns and ammunition would mean less gun violence. Critics say criminals would ignore the new laws, and that they wouldn’t have stopped last year’s school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. A third perspective is on the issue form the town of Nelson, Georgia. It just passed the law that requires citizen to own a gun and ammunition. Felons and the mentally ill are exceptions, and anyone can opt out. There is only on police officer in Nelson, a town of 1300 people. And he says: ‘‘Having a gun would help folks protect themselves.’’ One resident says the law is pointless because there’s been no violent crime in Nelson in years, but all of this indicates how different the approaches are how gun laws are largely determined by states and communities, not at the federal level. A lot of folks wouldn’t mind striking crude in their backyards, but they sure don’t want to a spill there by someone else. A pipeline transports unrefined oil from Canada towards the U.S Gulf coast, ruptured last week. The gash was only two or three inches, but it spilled thousands of barrels of crude into a neighborhood in central Arkansas. Look, it’s only (inaudible) our house is here, which is seemingly unaffected, but the smell is unbelievable. I mean-look, Incredible, and that is oil. The damaged pipeline is more that 60 years old, it’s owned by the company ExxonMobil, who said they inspected it recently and found no problems. Exxon is promising to make things up to the community of May flower. Meantime, Lisa Sylvester looks at the method of transporting oil that can be both a blessing and a curse. There are 160,000 miles of pipeline, crisscrossing the United States. The Arkansas oil spill comes as President Obama is weighing whether to approve a new Keystone Xl pipeline. It’s about 1700 miles of pipeline carrying 700, 000 barrels of crude a day, stretching through the country’s heartland. The Keystone pipeline carries a dense Canadian tar sands oil. Critics say this lower quality oil can corrode overtime. Keystone Excel is a dirty and dangerous pipeline. It’s literally going to cut our country in half, carrying a very dangerous