From all four corners of the US

China against Greyhound

The legendary Greyhound bus gets competition - Chinese immigrants are conquering the market with cheap offers. The modern buses going from Chinatown A to Chinatown B are already an insider's tip among students. Bus station sounds too classy for the sidewalk in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge where the Dragon Coach buses are stopping. But this is the exact purpose of the forgotten corner that's not mentioned in any travel guide. Tickets are being sold at a Chinese dry-cleaner's and a restaurant. Everything is in Chinese here, only very few sign are bilingual. Behind the windshields of the buses are signs with their destinations - Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, even Detroit. What started as a transportation service for Chinese waiters and dishwashers in the 90s has by now become an alternative transport system along the East Coast. The buses starting several times a day, sometimes even hourly, to the Chinatowns of the big cities. In order to cut costs they don't have waiting rooms. They just stop at certain street corners.

Price war with kung fu The first Chinese bus lines had been established in the mid-90s. For a long time, they existed peacefully side by side. The company New Century had the monopoly for the route between New York and Philadelphia. A one-way ticket for the mini bus was $15. But then Dragon Coach entered the market and the price wars started. Dragon Coach's parent company Dragon Expressways is actually a travel agency. The company organizes group tours for the people of New York's Chinatown. But since business had decreased by 80 percent after the September 11 attacks, the company started looking for another source of revenue. So in June 2002, Dragon started the line operation to Philadelphia - with an initial price of $10 for a one-way ticket. Top dog New Century responded - and also leased larger buses and introduced the $5-ticket. Dragon followed. For months, the competitors kept eying each other. And the fight didn't always remain peaceful - at the end of September, they actually fought under the Manhattan Bridge. Three employees of the two companies were arrested.

Crisis for US Ivy League schools

Economizing - something that's not just important for US companies at present, but also for private US universities. During the boom, Ivy League universities such as Stanford improved a lot - and now have bills to pay. The economic downturn in the US doesn't go easy on US universities either. First, numerous public US universities already had to cut costs over the past year. And now the same applies to the formerly wealthy Stanford university - up to now known for its heavenly study conditions. When the costs are going up, benefits for graduates and research funds are going down and there's loss of investment. And so the Californian elite school has to live with drastic cuts. In the meantime, it has come up with rather unusual saving measures - During the Christmas week, most of the employees are being more or less forced to take a vacation, and students are virtually being locked out of campus to lower the costs. After all, Stanford's annual budget of $500 million so far will drop by eight percent in the next year, according to the university administration.

Wealth decreased by roughly $600 million Just a few years ago, Stanford graduates who had become rich thanks to the boom of the high tech sector and the stock market still thanked their school with donations of up to several hundred million Dollars - among them Yahoo creator Jerry Yang. In addition, Californians themselves were very successful with the stock trading and made high profits over the last years. According to the university itself they still had investment income benefits of 39 percent in the financial year of 2000, by June 2002, however, there were already losses of almost three percent. In the course of the high tech mania the university had hired a lot of new staff in addition to improving their academic offers. Since 1998 the staff has increased from 6,700 to 7,900.
However, Stanford isn't alone with these problems. Throughout America, colleges are complaining about financial difficulties. As the National Association of College and University Business Officers said, US universities currently have to deal with an average five percent drop in revenue. Other private universities such as the University of San Francisco, the Emory University in Atlanta or the Santa Clara University are complaining about a loss in assets of up to 20 percent. And just raising the tuition to counter the economic development doesn't seem to be such a good solution either - many non-public universities are afraid of raising their tuition because the students may simply attend competitive universities. Not Stanford, though - they have raised their fees by five percent from $24,500 to $26,000 anyway. The national average is roughly $18,000.

Decision for exchange students

Freedom calls - the student exchange is the perfect opportunity for many students to finally spend some time without their parents. However, even overseas you have to live by the rules - the rules of the host family, according to a decision by a German court. According to this, exchange students have "respectfully accept and follow" the rules established by their host family. Otherwise they might be sent back home without being reimbursed for the costs of the complete stay, decided the district court in Frankfurt. The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Reiserecht (German association for tourism law) describes the specific case in ReiseRecht aktuell (journal for tourism law) - it was about an exchange student who had downloaded porn websites and films off the internet onto his host families computer to make money with them.
The teenager had to leave the family immediately and was sent back to Germany by a staff member of the exchange organization after only three weeks in the US. His parents then sued the organization - they wanted to be reimbursed for the exchange and travel costs of €6,220. However, the claim was dismissed. The judges were of the opinion that the student had "violated the most elementary principles of a student exchange program." The exchange organization had not been obligated to find another host family for him. They did not have to risk him disregarding the family rules there as well.

Survival training of another kind

32-year old Robert Ward surely hadn't expected that his messiness might save his life one day. After a car accident he waited one week with a broken hip before he was found in a canyon. Fortunately, he had packet sauces and some old peanut butter in his car. Robert Ward was on his way home from work at the coal mine in Charleston, when suddenly his car left the road, crashed into a tree and fell down a 45-meter deep (147 feet) canyon, according to the Washington Post. The 32-year old couldn't leave the car, his hip was broken. And since the crash had destroyed both the light and the horn, he couldn't even attract attention. The next town was three kilometers away.

Despite his hopeless situation the fireman didn't give up hope, not even when the first snow fell in the region and temperatures dropped below the freezing point. In order to keep warm, Ward ripped the interior paneling off his car and used it as a blanket. He burned every shred of paper he found, melted snow and ate packet sauces. He even scraped the rests of some peanut butter out of an old glass. It was a bachelor's car, said his friend and rescuer Terry Likens of the local fire department to the newspaper. It took the captain and the other voluntary helpers one week to find Ward. The injured finally heard his friend's car and started yelling. "I don't think he would have made it another night," said Likens. "When we found him he said he had been ready to fall asleep for the last time." With some bad frostbite on his feet Ward was taken to a hospital.

Senior citizen crusades against US post

You can read it on every banknote in the US, and now a senior citizen wanted it, framed in gold, in the local post office - "In God We Trust." The post refused and Frank Williamson in his holy rage wrote letters to newspapers and Congressmen. Now, the patriotic poster can be seen in all 38,000 US Postal offices.
All is still well with the US where Frank Williamson lives, in Montgomery. Big streets, well-kept front yards, full churches during Sunday service and at least one US flag in front of every house. You don't mess with God here, and not with the people who wish to spread his word. The US Postal Service had to learn that the hard way - at the beginning of November Frank Williamson showed up in the post office with a framed poster that he wanted to give to the staff - if they would hang it on the wall. It reads "In God We Trust" in golden letters, in the background a waving American flag. And underneath the discreet information that this sentence that had first appeared on a two-cent coin in 1856 had been made the country's motto by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Congress exactly 100 years later.

Letters to newspapers and Congressmen "The postal workers were thrilled and immediately hung it on the wall," Frank Williamson says. But then their boss had come up with one of these ill-fated federal laws that prohibits pictures and messages of any kind in post offices. However, the strictly religious Protestant didn't accept the post's counterarguments - and started writing. First, he wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper. Then he wrote to several Republican delegates and Senators. Even George W. Bush and his vice president Cheney got letters from Montgomery, denouncing this "unpatriotic act."

When Williamson even got an appearance in a popular TV show the whole thing was about to become embarrassing for the US Postal Service's PR department. Because ever since September 11 nothing makes you more unpopular than perceived or actual unpatriotic behavior. The postal service quickly retreated and announced that they would produce their own poster - with the Statue of Liberty in the center and the motto above her crown. For Williamson, this sounds suspicious, but he doesn't want to jump to a conclusion and rather keep an eye on the development.

America's sandwich revolutionaries

After coffee, the sandwich is now being refined in the US - several chains such as Cosí and Pret A Manger are competing to become the Starbucks of the seven-Dollar-sandwich. However, the competition is fiercer - and Cosí's going public can easily be a disaster. The idea imported from Paris with the freshly baked bread quickly became a big seller in the US. By now, customers are lining up in front of the stores around lunchtime. They are wiling to pay seven Dollars and more for a simple sandwich. Cosí uses the same trick Starbucks has used to make one cup of coffee worth $4 - better quality, nicer atmosphere, and the customer is willing to pay "a little more." In contrast to the cheap 99-cents burger in a depressive atmosphere, here the sandwiches are refined with arugula and served as a delicacy.

The sandwich experience By now, Cosí has 79 sandwich bars in eleven states. The company is growing rapidly, one day they want to be as big as their role model Starbucks (more than 4,000 cafés in the US). Cosí is going public and wants to collect $50 million. 30 of them are meant for expanding the business. Head of Cosí Andrew Stenzler wants to take the Starbucks concept to extremes. They want to define what an American café is. Even Starbucks creator Howard Schultz believes in the sandwich revolution. It was time to lift the experience of eating sandwiches to a new level, he told the Wall Street Journal. He himself has invested in two other chains. The trend towards the gourmet sandwich is highly visible. In the last five years the market had downright exploded, said Joe Paylak of the food industry consulting firm Technomic.

The sandwich's rehabilitation The British chain Pret A Manger was the last to show up in New York and open 14 restaurants, some of them right next to Cosí. In the suburbs, Cosí has to compete with market leader Panera Bread. Those cafés have not only sofas, but also fireplaces. So far, the market is still big enough for several chains and one thing can already be booked as a success for the sandwich makers - clearing the name of the sandwich that had been dragged through the mud by McDonald's Burger King and Subway fro decades. Important are now freshness and taste. In Cosí's restaurants, for example, bread that has been out of the oven for more than 30 minutes will be thrown out.