If you’re heading out on the roads this Thanksgiving, get ready for a record amount of company. Triple-A Alabama is predicting the heaviest traffic since 2007 on our interstate highways and other roads. The holiday is expected to put two million more cars on the road compared to last year. That’s a four and a half percent increase overall. Triple-A spokesman Clay Ingram says there’s a lot more going on than just Thanksgiving to keep traffic busy…
“There’s going to be a combination of factors. Not just people traveling for Thanksgiving, but local people heading to football games and shopping malls and things like that. So, it’s going to be really busy, no question about it.”
Ingram adds that Thanksgiving will mean an equal mix of cars on the Interstates and smaller roads. That’s different from other holidays, when motorists typically stick to the bigger highways to get to destinations like the beach or Florida’s theme parks.
Birmingham officials say they're disappointed the city is no longer in the running as a site for the Democratic National Convention in 2016. The party announced Monday that New York, Philadelphia and Columbus, Ohio, are finalists to host the event. The decision eliminates Birmingham and Phoenix from consideration. Birmingham spent about 275,000 dollars promoting the city's bid for the convention.
A University of Alabama student is heading to Lima, Peru next month for a United Nations conference on climate change. Catherine King is a chemical engineering major with a focus on green chemistry. She's one of eight students across the country the American Chemical Society selected to attend the conference. King says the issue of climate change has become too politicized.
"Actually the United States is one of the only countries who's still debating whether it exists at all. A lot of places have accepted it. And I don't think it should be a political debate. I think it's kind of a problem that it is."
The conference runs from December 1st through the 12th. King and the other students will be observing and blogging about the event at the website studentsonclimatechange.com. And you can find an interview with her at apr.org.
