Plan organizers are quick to point out that the program includes a range of colleges, including regional schools like Berry College in Mount Berry, Ga., and Drury University in Springfield, Mo. "There's a school for every student," said Nancy Farmer, president of the consortium that runs the plan.
AEG said its biggest objection to the project was the plan organizers have to skip a full environment review, and perhaps even a public vote.
The directive came too abruptly to make other plans, organizers said, and it angered some Filipinos who considered the site a slice of home.
During three months of planning, organizers had a rough idea of the limitations: no Chinese-language advertisements, no banners, no parades.
At the Israel Festival, the country's most prestigious arts festival held earlier this summer, all but one of the 28 groups and companies from abroad took part as planned, organizers said.
16 years on, it's become embedded into the city's cultural fabric; after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, instead of moving it to Memphis as they'd planned, organizers decided to stick it out at home, inviting the National Guard, police, and firefighters to join in.
This was the plan, the organizers informed us, as the train sped south through the Burgundy countryside.
Not a single worker in the survey reported receiving paid sick days, and only one said he had been offered a health care plan, the organizers said.
If all goes according to plan, the organizers hope to enter the Guinness Book of World Records in the category "biggest brunch at a live music event".
Without a very clear plan, the organizers hoped that the publicity stunt — seven train cars pulled by a two-thousand-horsepower locomotive with the number 1776 on the side — would result in a national "rededication," purging "cynicism" and "confusion".
But the government's actions this weekend angered an anti-Chávez group of influential business and political leaders, the Democratic Coordinator, which met on Saturday and today to plan what organizers said would be a large protest on Tuesday.
