• River Action Inc. reports that Greenway Habitat, the organization responsible for planting and maintaining more than 7,000 trees in Davenport and the Quad Cities, is up and running again. The Greenway Habitat Project is in a transition stage now as Davenport's City Forestry gears up to start street tree-planting.
In a slide lecture for her new exhibition, Lauren Greenfield begins with 15-year-old black-and-white photographs of French aristocrats who have status but little money. The pictures are handsome and filled with minutiae but seemingly worlds away from her recent work: vibrant, often disturbing photos of women and girls.
• Iowa House File 65 has passed both the House and Senate and now awaits the governor's signature. The bill lowers the level of alcohol needed in a person's blood to be presumed drunk, from ten hundredths of one percent (.
Efforts to enhance higher-education offerings in the Quad Cities got a boost last week with a new study identifying a need for more public-tuition-rate undergraduate programs and suggesting the expansions of two local educational institutions.
• The City of Rock Island says that May 3 is the date that tolls will be removed from the Centennial Bridge. It's hoped that by the time the tolls come off the 63-year-old bridge, construction should be finished on the on-ramps in Rock Island and Davenport, which have been reconfigured to safely accommodate more traffic.
Activists trying to ensure that the City of Davenport improves public access to cable-television-production and -broadcast services are competing against some tough opponents: a public vocally concerned about cable rates and a cable provider threatening to pass increased public-access costs onto consumers.
The River Cities' Reader's first-ever short-story contest generated a tremendous response, with 86 entries, including one from halfway around the world (Australia). Most of the stories came from right here in the Quad Cities, though.
• Five new vehicles have recently joined the City of Davenport's CitiBus fleet. The five buses are part of the normal fleet-replacement process and bring to 21 the total number of buses in the CitiBus fleet. Each vehicle cost $241,068, with the Federal Transit Administration funding 80 percent of the replacement cost and the City of Davenport funding the remainder.
• Renovation has started on the Great River Plaza, covering Second Avenue from 17th to 19th streets in downtown Rock Island. The Plaza was constructed in 1978 and has not had any major renovations since. The east block of the Great River Plaza will be re-constructed in two phases, with work finished by early summer.
As the first large-scale United States military operation to take place in the age of the Internet, the current conflict in Iraq is for many of us an overwhelming experience. We not only have a virtually unlimited supply of news sources, but the minute-by-minute coverage rarely pauses.

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