The Transportation Security Administration offers a number of helpful Web sites for air travelers during the holiday season. At the TSA’s comprehensive page, you’ll find packing tips along with an online video to help point you in the right direction.

If you’re bringing gifts with you, the TSA reminds you. Any package the TSA considers suspicious for any reason is subject to unwrapping. The agency suggests either mailing gifts separately or wrapping them after arrival. There’s also a page with special considerations for travelers with  and a comprehensive checklist of list. Download for a pocket able reference. Anyone who has traveled during peak times knows there will likely be a wait at security checkpoints—particularly when people are traveling with gifts.

Looking for something special to do during the winter months? Check out the 2007-08 New York State Winter Travel Guide! The full-color, magazine-format guide is available free from Assemblyman Jim Hayes, R-Amherst. One section lists more than 100 special events across the state, from December through March, along with important information about snowmobiling safety and best places to go. If skiing is your game - downhill or cross country - there is information that pinpoints ski centers by region.

The cover shows the expanse and beauty of Georgian Bay with the photography being provided by Thomas Willard. Additional photographs are provided by Ingrid Saaliste, owner and operator of the Right Side Gallery located in Penetanguishene and Gary Scott Breithaupt, a television studio cameraman with Global Television Network. Breithaupt has always been drawn to the Georgian Bay area and now owns an island between Midland and Parry Sound. Winter Getaways, the New Year kicks in with a variety of winter getaway packages including x-country skiing, snowshoeing, alpine skiing, snowmobiling and family fun adventures.

The Best Western Highland Inn and Conference Centre in Midland offers snowmobiling, ice fishing, and winter eco tours, cross-country and downhill skiing packages. Delawana Inn Spa and Conference Centre has received the award as “Canada’s Number One” Summer Family Resort for 3 years in a row. Delawana offers early bird booking discounts where families can save up to 10% on summer vacations by booking their summer vacations by February.

After a spooky visit to Preacher’s Cave, we were hungry and in the mood for something not fried on the island. We were also in transit. We were moving from the northern end of the island towards the center to a town called Governor’s Harbour. Again, the best way to travel Eleuthera is to rent a car which you can do at the airports.

Bahamians drive on the left side of the road but the steering wheels is on the left, not on the right. It’s a little disconcerting at first but you’ll get the hang of it. Governor’s Harbour is the capital of Eleuthera and houses a lot of the government offices (including the ministry of tourism) but it’s still pretty low-key, like the rest of Eleuthera. While we shacked up at the new Pineapple Fields Resort (pineapple used to be Eleuthera’s biggest export), we popped in to an unassuming restaurant across the street on the beach called Tippy’s.

Frank Partridge takes the long view of the greatest spectacle on earth, and follows the torch as it flickers towards the capital of the Chinese Republic. The world’s first sporting arena was at Olympia in the Greek western Pelopponese. A five-day festival of chariot and horse-racing, long-jumping and foot-racing was held every four years from 776BC until the Games were abolished nearly 1,200 years later. Happily, a fair amount of ancient Olympia is still intact. Down the centuries, the site has been hit by two earthquakes and severe floods, and the site was almost consumed by forest fires that engulfed the region last August, claiming 63 lives. The field and the surrounding buildings and temples are now overlooked by a hillside of charred trees.

The flames came within a few meters of the rectangular field that was rediscovered only in the 19th century. Years of careful excavation have made sense of the tangle of fallen columns and stones, assisted by scale models in the adjacent museum. The temple of Zeus, three times the size of the Parthenon, has not survived but another, dedicated to Hera, has been almost wholly reconstructed, and its magnificent 4th-century BC statue of Hermes is on display in the museum.

Other sights include a monument containing the heart of the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who died in 1937. Ancient Olympia (which reopened within two days of the fires) opens every day from 8.30am-3pm (November-March) and 8am-7.30pm (April-October). The admission charge of €9You can reach Olympia by flying to Athens and travelling overland to the far west of the peninsula.

That time of year has come again when you’re making plans with your friends about where you want to go for spring break, buying new swim suits, stocking up on the essentials for the big car ride and planning a medical procedure in a foreign country? Instead of going on that classic road trip to Rocky Point with friends, recently some students have been going abroad for operations.

This trend is aptly named medical tourism. “It is a term used to describe pre-planned travel abroad to receive a pre-planned surgery,” said Patrick Marsek, the managing director of MedRetreat, the premier medical tourism company. Josef Woodman, author of the medical tourism how-to guide Patients beyond Borders, wrote that as many as 150,000 Americans, Canadians and Europeans packed up their bags last year to get medical procedures performed by foreign doctors overseas. Woodman also said that students may elect to go abroad, but for different reasons than their elderly counterparts.

In the book, Barton Cottage is home to the key characters - the sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood - as they search for love and happiness. In real life, the 15th-century cottage belongs to Sir Hugh and Lady Stucley, who own and run nearby Hartland Abbey and Gardens. For several weeks last spring, camera crews, production assistants, directors and actors swarmed over Blackpool Mill, turning the rustic four-bedroom home into the romantic hub of Jane Austen’s novel. Set designers took the cottage more firmly into the 19th century, adding a porch at the front as well as dormer windows, fake shutters and an extra chimney.

Sir Hugh and Lady Stucley are bracing themselves for a flood of interest in the holiday home following Tuesday night’s showing.” We have had all sorts of inquiries since it appeared on the television,” said Lady Stucley. “It is just in a stunning location, it is at the end of a track looking out over the Atlantic - next stop, America.” It has been in the family since before the days of Henry VIII and we have spent all our holidays there with our children and grandchildren.”

Some renovations, however, had to be made over the years, said Lady Stucley. “It used to have a mud floor but we have tried to make it more comfortable without ruining the atmosphere - it is very untouched really. It doesn’t have a television or a telephone and we only put i central heating last year.

Sears Holdings Corp. said Monday that sales at stores open at least a year fell 3.5% in the holiday period and warned that fiscal fourth-quarter profit could be less than half that of a year earlier, sending its shares down 5%.

The retailer run by hedge fund manager Edward Lampert blamed the weak holiday sales on increased competition, the crumbling U.S. housing market and the credit crunch — problems it had flagged in November. The company’s shares fell $4.79 to $91.38. They sank to as low as $86.04 during regular trading. The stock, which was created by the merger of Kmart Holding Corp. and Sears, Roebuck & Co., has fallen 30% since it began trading as Sears Holdings in March 2005. It is down more than 50% from a high of $195.18 last April.

Wall Street analysts downgraded Sears Holdings’ stock, citing its vulnerability to an economic downturn.” We expect the retailer to experience accelerated share loss and profit pressures in an increasingly tough macro backdrop,” Goldman Sachs analyst Adrianne Shapira said in a research note. She downgraded Sears to “sell” from “neutral.” In the nine weeks ended Jan. 5, so-called same-store sales fell 2.8% at U.S. Sears stores and 4.2% at Kmart stores. Such sales have fallen at both chains for the last seven quarters. Weakness in apparel, tools and seasonal products offset a rise in home electronics sales, Sears said. The company said it expected net income of $350 million and $470 million, or $2.59 to $3.48 a share, for its fourth quarter ending Feb. 2, down from $5.33 a share a year earlier. Analysts expected $4.37 a share, according to Reuters Estimates.

The trend, which is further evidence that Brits are reining in their spending habits, emerged when Taylor Wimpey gave a trading update to the market this morning. The UK’s second biggest house builder warned that profits from its mainland Spain business would be “well below” those achieved in 2006.While sales in Gibraltar were stable, mainland Spain, where the majority of Taylor Wimpey’s customers are Brits and Germans buying second homes, remained tough. In 2007, Taylor Wimpey sold 47pc or 167 fewer homes in Spain and Gibraltar compared with 2006.

However, Spain remains a relatively small part of the business, with 212 unit sales last year compared with 379 the year before. In the UK, completions fell as expected, by 6pc to 20,645 homes, but operating margins actually improved by about 2pc to 14.5pc. Chief executive Peter Redfern said that margin improvement, rather than volumes, had been the main ambition for 2007.He said it was achieved as cost-saving benefits from the combined businesses of Taylor Woodrow and George Wimpey, which merged last July to create Taylor Wimpey, began to filter through to the bottom line.” This puts us in better shape to withstand the current trading conditions,” said Mr Redfern, referring to the current slowdown in the UK housing market.

BridgeHealth International, Inc., a premier health care service provider with a focus on serving businesses for the delivery of international medical care, today announced it had purchased the assets of Medical Tours International (MTI), the nation’s leading professional organization serving North Americans, Canadians and residents of other nations seeking medical care in foreign countries. MTI president and CEO Stephanie Sulger, RN, MS, CIPC, a pioneer and recognized thought-leader in medical tourism, will become vice president of BHI’s Consumer Division. 

“MTI’s sophisticated processes and reputation for excellent coordination of medical travel will enhance BridgeHealth’s commitment to serving customers seeking medical treatment abroad,” says Victor Lazzaro, Jr., CEO of BHI which primarily serves health plans, insurance carriers, employers, third party administrators, and individuals accessing benefits via voluntary benefits plans, health card programs or Consumer Directed HealthCare Plans (CDHP). “Stephanie is a recognized spokesperson in the medical tourism marketplace and adds significant industry and clinical expertise to our management team.”

Sulger is a U.S. Registered Nurse who specialized in operating room nursing and staff management until 2002 when she founded MTI. To date, MTI has assisted in the procedure arrangements and travel for several thousand patients seeking dental and surgical procedures in specialties such as orthopedics, neurosurgery, general surgery, cosmetic surgery, GYN, urology, cardiac and vascular surgery and stem cell transplants. MTI nurse coordinators and health care professionals have arranged medical procedures at health care facilities throughout Costa Rica, Brazil, Panama, Mexico, Singapore, Thailand, and India.

Hallmarks of their service portfolio are a commitment to patient safety and dedication to offering patients affordable and timely options for accessing medical care outside the United States. Sulger designed the MTI Traveling Patient Information Packet which provides patients with information and education about their individual procedure prior to leaving the United States, as well as detailed documents regarding travel arrangements. Additionally, she helped develop the International Patient Identifier (IPED) device used to house patient information and reduce the risk of medical errors resulting from lost records or communication errors such as transcription and translation mistakes.