| Killeen Daily Herald
There could be a new addition to the Killeen family soon.
At its workshop Tuesday, the Killeen City Council discussed the possibility of adding a new sister city.
Members of the Killeen Sister Cities Inc. nonprofit organization asked the city to consider adding San Juan, Puerto Rico, as a sister city.
Council members agreed for the city to pursue the possibility of adding San Juan as a sister city and said it would be easiest to keep it under the current Sister City organization.
"There's nothing wrong with looking at the opportunities," Councilman Billy Workman said.
Currently, the city has one sister city: Osan, South Korea; Central Texas representatives visit Osan annually and representatives from Korea visit Killeen annually.
GRIEGO: Politics, race mix
Upon being given the opportunity to cajole Obama supporters into joining the Clinton camp or vice-versa, first-time caucus-goer and Denver Public School Board member Arturo Jimenez, an Obama supporter, said in Spanish: You have a great opportunity to support a candidate who offers hope to many communities. It doesn't matter, your race, age, gender. I wished Sergio Bendixen were there. Bendixen is the Clinton pollster quoted in a recent interview with the New Yorker as saying, “the Hispanic voter — and I want to say this very carefully — has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates." Let us lay that canard to rest. If that were true, Wellington Webb would never have become Denver's mayor. And he was just one African-American mayor buoyed by Latino support in this nation.
Buyout offer draws less response than initially estimated
It looks like the Fayetteville School District will be waiting until after Jan. 25 to see if participation in its voluntary buyout program for experienced teachers matches expectations. Educators Preferred Corp., the Michigan-based firm administering the program, had predicted about 70 employees would participate. With eight days left until the deadline to register, the number of employees who have submitted paperwork to participate is less than 25 percent of that amount. "So far we have had 17 that have actually submitted the paperwork," said Greg Mones, human resources director for the district. Mones said he anticipates there are some employees who will participate that are currently undecided or haven't yet turned in their paperwork. He said assumes most of the early submittals were from employees who knew early on they wanted to participate.
A slippery slope for health?
Most European countries operate an insurance-based health care scheme. Citizens are obliged to pay into state-operated or state-recognised insurance funds. Hospitals and general practitioners (and specialists who offer primary consultations) claim back all or part of the costs of treatment from the relevant insurance providers. There have long been difficulties in citizens getting costs covered by their state-recognised schemes when they seek treatment in a neighbouring country whose facilities are more convenient to travel to (e.g. the German-Dutch border area around Aachen). Regulation 1408/71 was supposed to deal with this but clearly doesn't. That Regulation, insofar as it covers healthcare, is designed essentially to allow the government of one country to get back from other governments the money spent on treating their citizens.
Syria seizes drugs destined for Saudi Arabia
Syrian customs authorities have seized hundreds of thousands of smuggled stimulant pills bound for Saudi Arabia, reported AP.More than 400,000 pills of the amphetamine-like drug Captagon hidden in bathroom tissue rolls were seized last month at a shipping company office in the northern city of Aleppo.The pills were bound for Saudi Arabia and a Syrian man from Aleppo who was involved was later arrested in the Syrian port city of Latakia. Captagon, also known as fenethylline, was listed by World Health Organization in 1986 as a pyschotropic substance, and is banned in most places and was once prescribed as an antidepressant or to treat hyperactive children. .
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