The first indications of constructed roads date from about 4000 BC and consist of stone paved streets at Ur in modern-day Iraq and timber roads preserved in a swamp in Glastonbury, England. Read about roads and link to parking meters and traffic lights at: http://inventors.about.com/od/rstartinventions/a/History-Of-Roads.htm

On October 3, 1893, General Roy Stone, a Civil War hero and good roads advocate, was appointed Special Agent in charge of the new Office of Road Inquiry (ORI) within the Department of Agriculture. With a budget of $10,000, ORI promoted new rural road development to serve the wagons, coaches, and bicycles on America's dirt roads.
In the Roaring 20s the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR), as ORI was then called, was authorized by the Federal Highway Act of 1921 to provide funding to help state highway agencies construct a paved system of two-lane interstate highways. During the 1930s, BPR helped state and local governments create Depression-era road projects that would employ as many workers as possible. When America entered World War II in 1941, the focus turned toward providing roads that the military needed. After the war, the nation's roads were in disrepair, and congestion had become a problem in major cities. In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed legislation authorizing a network of rural and urban express highways called the "National System of Interstate Highways." Unfortunately, the legislation lacked funding. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, FHWA worked with the states to open 99 percent of the designated 42,800-mile Interstate System--now officially called the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blcar3.htm

Paint the town red engage in a riotous spree
The allusion is to the kind of unruly behaviour that results in much blood being spilt. There are several suggestions as to the origin of the phrase. The one most often repeated, especially within the walls of the Melton Mowbray Tourist Office, is a tale dating from 1837. It is said that year is when the Marquis of Waterford and a group of friends ran riot in the Leicestershire town of Melton Mowbray, painting the town's toll-bar and several buildings red. That event is well documented, and is certainly in the style of the Marquis, who was a notorious hooligan. To his friends he was Henry de la Poer Beresford; to the public he was known as 'the Mad Marquis'. In the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography he is described as 'reprobate and landowner'. His misdeeds include fighting, stealing, being 'invited to leave' Oxford University, breaking windows, upsetting (literally) apple-carts, fighting duels and, last but not least, painting the heels of a parson's horse with aniseed and hunting him with bloodhounds. He was notorious enough to have been suspected by some of being 'Spring Heeled Jack', the strange, semi-mythical figure of English folklore. Melton Mowbray is the origin of the well-known Melton Mowbray pork pie - which could hardly have originated anywhere else. The town's claim to be the source of 'painting the town red' is more doubtful. It is at least plausible that it came from there of course, but no more plausible than Stony Stratford, Buckinghamshire being the source of 'cock and bull story' or Ashbourne, Derbyshire being the source of 'local derby' (which they aren't). The phrase isn't recorded in print until fifty years after the nefarious Earl's night out. If that event really were the source of the phrase, why would anyone, or in this case everyone, wait fifty years before mentioning it? http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/paint-the-town-red.html

The Canary Islands is a region of Spain, but geographically and geologically it is part of Africa, situated just about 60 miles off the southwest coast of Morocco. There, on a scattering of volcanic islands, lie some of the most unusual, visually striking vineyards seen anywhere on earth, none more so than the eerie, almost extraterrestrial vineyards of Lanzarote, the easternmost of the Canaries. Vines on Lanzarote grow in the black soil of volcanic ash, which is carved into circular hollows that resemble craters on the Moon. On the sea side of the hollows, low stone walls are constructed to guard the huddled vines from the hot, humid breath of the Atlantic, which blows in mercilessly. Often the vines are the only things growing. Not all of the Canaries’ vineyards are so exotic. But many are highly unusual, planted at high elevations on terraces carved into steep volcanic hillsides and in myriad microclimates. Wine has been made on the Canary Islands for more than 500 years. Lanzarote is a relative newcomer, though. Vines there have been traced back only to the mid-18th century, perhaps because of a volcanic eruption — the source of all that rich, black earth — that lasted for six years. Much of the island is now protected as Timanfaya National Park. Because the Canaries are so isolated, they have never known phylloxera, the ravenous aphid that almost destroyed Europe’s grapevines in the late 19th century. The wine industry was reborn when scientists discovered that European vines could be protected from phylloxera by grafting them onto American rootstocks, which were naturally immune. But on the Canaries, vines can be planted on their own roots, offering the relatively rare opportunity to drink wines made from ungrafted vines. Isolation has also resulted in a variety of grapes that, if not exactly unknown elsewhere, are not often seen, especially in the production of still wines.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/dining/reviews/wines-of-the-canary-islands-review.html

The 1953 Iranian coup d'état (known in Iran as the 28 Mordad coup) was the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh on 19 August 1953, orchestrated by the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom and the United States under the name TPAJAX Project. The coup saw the transition of Mohammad-Rezā Shāh Pahlavi from a constitutional monarch to an authoritarian one who relied heavily on United States support to hold on to power until his own overthrow in February 1979. The coup was carried out by the U.S. administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower in a covert action advocated by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and implemented under the supervision of his brother Allen Dulles, the Director of Central Intelligence. The coup was organized by the United States' CIA and the United Kingdom's MI6, two spy agencies that aided royalists and royalist elements of the Iranian army. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat

In Ireland, Frank Buckley, an artist based in Dublin has started to build a house using one point eighty-two billion dollars of shredded money. Frank Buckley, who is unemployed, has been working approximately twelve hours a day since the start of December. The shredded money he is using are decommissioned Euros that have been lent to him by the mint in Ireland. He said that living in the house is quite warm and that the Euro was a great insulator.
http://californiaexaminer.net/2012/01/30/shredded-money-used-to-build-a-house/

WASHINGTON Feb. 6 At a time when the U.S. Postal Service is considering deep cuts in services and jobs, an internal watchdog told Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that a big funding cushion already has been built into the mail service's retirement and health benefit funds. Millions of dollars owed to the funds have been cited by Postal Service managers as a main reason that it must cut 220,000 jobs and close 3,700 post offices and 252 mail processing plants - half of all the current sorting centers. In a letter to Sanders http://www.sanders.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/0206PostalIGLetter.pdf Postal Service Inspector General David C. Williams said the programs are flush with funds. He said the Postal Service has "significantly exceeded" the amount that the federal government and the nation's most profitable corporations have socked away for pension and retiree health care. "Using ratepayer funds, it has built a war chest of over $326 billion to address its future liabilities," Williams told Sanders. Armed with the new information from the inspector general, Sanders said the Postal Service should be released from what he called an "onerous and unprecedented burden" of being forced to put $5.5 billion every year into their future retiree health benefits fund. Sanders said, even if there are no further contributions from the post office, and if the fund simply collects 3.5 to 4 percent interest every year, that account will be fully funded in 21 years. Sanders also said the Postal Service should be allowed to recover more than $13 billion in overpayments it has made to a federal retirement systems. Thanks, Rick.
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=cb5cfdbf-8edf-4a31-9440-97f88ac03e43

The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA) - H.R. 6407 enacted on December 20, 2006, made several changes to the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC). Besides giving the body its current name, the PAEA significantly strengthened the Commission's authority to serve as a counterbalance to new flexibility granted to the Postal Service in setting postal rates. The Act requires the Commission to develop and maintain regulations for a modern system of rate regulation, consult with the Postal Service on delivery service standards and performance measures, consult with the Department of State on international postal policies, prevent cross-subsidization or other anticompetitive postal practices, promote transparency and accountability, and adjudicate complaints. The law also assigns new and continuing oversight responsibilities to the PRC, including annual determinations of USPS compliance with applicable laws, development of accounting practices and procedures for the Postal Service, review of the Universal Service requirement, and assurance of transparency through periodic reports. New enforcement tools given to the PRC include subpoena power, authority to direct the Postal Service to adjust rates and to take other remedial actions, and levying fines in cases of deliberate noncompliance with applicable postal laws. Find links to PAEA and the PRC Web site at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Regulatory_Commission