LYCOS RETRIEVER Beta Retriever Home  |  What is Lycos Retriever?   
Austin
built 234 days ago
Austin is a college town as well as a government and high-tech center. It draws its population from all over, and many students decide to stay. This gives Austin a high level of general education and a diverse cultural scene.
Source:
Hundreds of Austin telemarketers are being laid off today. The reason is The Do Not Call Registry. Created three years ago, its purpose was to give the choice to avoid receiving unwanted calls. Now that registry is leading to more than 1,000 layoffs within the Verizon Company. The company says 400 telemarketers at its Austin call center will be laid off as part of a shutdown of four former MCI LLC call centers nationwide. With the combination of the Do Not Call List and the company de-emphasizing its focus on residential services and focusing more on broadband and wireless, they say the call center is not needed.
The City of Austin has awardedthe project $37 million in sales and property tax rebates over 20 years. Of that, $1 million is designated to help local retailers with rent and allowances for finishing the interiors of their stores.
Austin has many high-end, destination restaurants, but it ... has many high-quality, unique, and inexpensive restaurants where the locals eat, drink, and socialize every day (all day). It's a town built for living in, and the affordable, excellent restaurants show it. Just so you know you're in Texas, Austin has a large number of places serving Texas Barbeque and Tex-Mex; many of them are venerable, famous, and exceptionally good eating.
Source:
(Austin) - NCsoft Corp., a giant South Korean gaming company whose U.S. operations are based in Austin, has cut 70 local jobs. The company laid off about 23 percent of its total Austin staff of 300. The employees worked in support positions and not in game development, according to NCsoft spokesman David Swofford. The company said the restructuring was needed as it shifts into a cycle of fewer game launches. NCsoft has published six games in the past 2 1/2 years. The cutbacks are the first since the company arrived in Austin in 2001.
[O]f the major party realignment that began in the 1970s, central Austin became a stronghold of the Democratic Party while the suburbs tend to vote Republican. One consequence of this is that in the most recent redistricting plan, formulated by former U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay and enacted by the Republican-majority legislature, the central city has been split among multiple, sprawling districts. Opponents characterized the resulting districting layout as excessively partisan gerrymandering, and the plan was challenged in court on this basis by Democratic and minority activists; of note, the Supreme Court of the United States has never struck down a redistricting plan for being excessively partisan. The plan was subsequently upheld by a three-judge federal panel in late 2003, and on June 28, 2006, the matter was largely settled when the Supreme Court in a 7-2 decision upheld the entire congressional redistricting plan with the exception of a Hispanic-majority district in southwest Texas. This may later affect Austin's districting, as U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett's district was found not to be sufficiently compact to compensate for the reduced minority influence in the southwest district.[1]
Source:
SEARCH
MORE ABOUT
  Austin