New and notes from around the interweb:
- How U.S. travelers can visit Syria (“Expect that officials will review your public social media posts…Additionally, your guide needs to get permits for every region you will visit. Most regions that can be visited can have the permits obtained in one business day. Palmyra can take up to two weeks.”)
- Would Trump’s Miami golf resort actually make a good venue for the next G7 meeting?
- Venezuela’s Armed Forces Bank slams Mastercard for halting card service “Mastercard also halted services to state-run Agricultural Bank. Phone numbers published on that bank’s website were disconnected.”
- The terrorist screening database – which can include even babies, and offers no opportunity for redress or removal even for people acquitted of terrorism charges – has been found to violate constitutional protections on due process by a U.S. district court. This database is used to generate the No Fly List.
- Woman boarding a Delta flight in Manila was found with a six day old baby in her carry on bag. She’s been charged with human trafficking. Apparently she was flagged due to the size of her carry on.
- Should airlines model their airport lounges on Starbucks?
The Starbucks advocate lady lost me after her “The coffee is fine”
I’ve never understood people who hang out at Starbucks. They are very cramped, cluttered and noise. They do not have enough bathrooms. I do not want to spend 30 minutes in a Starbucks, it would be pure hell to spend 2 hours in one.
Starbucks is the ultimate example of marketing trumping quality.
@747 always, when you write ‘Starbucks is the ultimate example of marketing trumping quality’, I would surmise you don’t remember the taste of North American coffee served in the 70s and 80s.
Starbucks is so passé: now full of clueless millennials slurping on sugar-laden , milky crap being passed off as coffee. Serve them instant coffee topped up with all the extras and they couldn’t tell the difference .
It has to be a really desperate situation before I’ll set foot in one.
@sullyofdoha sadly I was a kid at the time, so I have missed out on the horror that was “coffee” in the 80s. 🙂
Coffee in the 1970s and 1980a was horrible. The best that you could get to go was from the 7 Eleven convenience stores, but that depended upon how recently the pot had been brewed. I was thrilled when Starbucks came to the east coast in the early 1990s. I usually make my coffee at home, but I still pick up coffee at Starbucks if I need one when I am out. (And I don’t drink the sugary, creamy stuff. I drink my coffee black, always.)
@747 always & @Charlie
If you believe coffee was bad in the 70s and 80s, you wouldn’t want to have tried it in the 50s…when chicory ( a dandelion) was used as a partial ( even complete) substitute because of shortages.