Shop owners at Meadowmont Village will be billed $1,056 for “background music” this year. The problem: Tenants said they’ve never heard a note outside their stores.
Although recent pleas temporarily boosted their supplies, local blood centers are still in the midst of a donation shortage.The local chapters of the American Red Cross announced Jan. 10 they had only one day’s supply of blood — about 1,600 pints — available for hospitals in a region that includes Charlotte, Greensboro and the Triangle.
A record-setting cold snap has deprived Chapel Hill farmer John Soehner of his cabbage, collards and brussels sprout crops.“It’s the coldest winter I’ve seen,” Soehner said. “My collards never freeze. It’s a couple of weeks making no money.”
One of Chapel Hill’s main shopping destinations is getting a multi-million dollar makeover.Improvements to University Mall, which include the addition of tables and comfortable seating as well as physical enhancement of the mall’s exterior, will be completed by summer, said Paul Harnett, the senior vice president of Madison Marquette.
Despite the poor economy, the town of Chapel Hill government is doing well financially, Town Manager Roger Stancil said.The town has a surplus of $1.4 million for the 2009 fiscal year, Stancil said at Monday’s Town Council business meeting.
While working as a sailor in the Mediterranean and Caribbean seas in the late 1990s, Sammy Slade was longing to right the ship to the United States.He said he felt a responsibility to come back and become politically active.“America is an empire. A lot of people don’t have a say in the empire,” Slade said.
Jobs might be slowly returning to Chapel Hill.Chapel Hill’s unemployment rate was 5.2 percent in September, down from a year high of 5.8 percent in June and July, according to the latest estimates by the N.C. Employment Security Commission.“5.2 percent is about where the national economy sits where it operates prosperously,” economics professor Ralph Byrns said.
Correction (Nov. 6, 2009):Due to a reporting error, and earlier version of this story misstated that Eileen Nixon chose to move Citrine Salon to the development. Nixon actually opened a new salon. The story has been changed to reflect the correction. The Daily Tar Heel apologizes for the error.
Hasan Abdullah’s bicycle was stolen on campus two years ago. And now, he wants to ensure other local bicycle owners don’t suffer the same fate.With WeCycles, the company he founded, Abdullah hopes to create a bike rental service on campus and around Chapel Hill and Carrboro.Abdullah said the program, if approved, would use 24-hour electronic kiosks where customers could swipe their One Cards or credit cards to rent bikes at an hourly fee. Yearly memberships would also be available.
A Chapel Hill 12-year-old studied Chinese culture, history and geography three days a week with her classmates and more with her mother at home.“She made me study how deep the lakes are,” Caroline Liu said of her mother.All of that hard work paid off. After scoring near perfect on a national test, Liu has earned the right to represent the United States in an international competition held in China next month.Liu, a seventh grader at Smith Middle School, took the 100-question test in February 2008 when she was in the fifth grade.
