• A proposal was unveiled in the Iowa Senate to replace Iowa's individual income-tax system with a single income tax rate of 3.5 percent, instead of the current "progressive" system with different rates for different income levels.
Early in his campaign for Iowa state representative, Wayne Hean was given a prescient piece of advice from one of his supporters, Bill Gluba. He "told me right up front, 'We're going to have to do it on our own.
• At a Buffalo City Council meeting in January, city leaders voted to seek funding for the Buffalo Mississippi River Trail. The trail would become an integral part of two nationwide trail systems: the headwaters-to-the-gulf Mississippi River Trail and the coast-to-coast American Discovery Trail.
For the seventh annual Best of the Quad Cities issue, we've gotten bigger than ever. We've added categories, and voting this year brought in the largest number of ballots we've ever had. (We allowed online voting for the first time.
• The Quad Cities affiliate of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation has announced its 2003 grant recipients for projects supporting breast-cancer education, screening, and treatment of the medically undeserved.
As Michael Blouin tells it, Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack wanted a fresh start on the issue of economic development heading into his second term. Blouin related that Vilsack told him, "I listened to the wrong people" when trying to formulate ways to jump-start the state's sagging economy.
• According to a General Accounting Office (GAO) report evaluating the long-term effectiveness of the DARE program, DARE does not influence graduates to refrain from experimenting with illicit drugs. DARE receives an estimated $230 million in federal and corporate subsidies to offer its curriculum in approximately 80 percent of public schools.
They viewed the glossy color photographs of meticulously tended marijuana mother plants flourishing under timed lights inside an Oakland, California, warehouse. Then they watched a videotape showing DEA agents uprooting nearby marijuana cuttings to determine which had roots, and could thus be considered "plants" under the federal sentencing guidelines.
Before the first rehearsal of Alison's House, I wasn't sure what to expect. Though I had already read Davenport native Susan Glaspell's script and endured six hours of auditions, my experiences as stage manager were just beginning.
• According to reports published in AdAge magazine, the office of the White House Drug Czar spent more than $4 million to air anti-drug public-service announcements during this past weekend's Super Bowl broadcast.

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