Disney World unveils solar facility

Disney World unveils solar facility

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla.

It’s only fitting that solar panels (above) that will help with the power needs of Walt Disney World are shaped like the famous ears of the mouse that started the Disney enterprise.

Officials with Disney World, Duke Energy and Disney’s private government recently flipped on the switch to a Mickey Mouse-shaped solar facility on 22 acres near Epcot.

The facility is made up of 48,000 solar panels.

In addition to helping power parts of Walt Disney World, the energy will be used to power hotels along Hotel Plaza Boulevard, as well as the Four Seasons Resort.

Louisiana tourism

BATON ROUGE, La.

The number of tourists coming to Louisiana keeps going up.

Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser says 28.9 million visitors came to Louisiana last year, up by 200,000 from 2014. He says it marked the fourth-consecutive year of record-breaking tourism in Louisiana.

The data on tourism is part of the University of New Orleans’s Louisiana Tourism Forecast Report for 2015.

State officials estimate spending by visitors grew in 2015 to $11.5 billion, a 2.7 percent increase over the previous year.

The travel and tourism industry generated $843 million in state tax revenues in 2015.

Mascot vote trouble

Frontier Airlines has ended a contest to pick a mascot that would be depicted on the tail of one of the carrier’s planes. And the carrier blames it on fraudulent voting.

The carrier launched the contest in March, asking for online votes to choose a mascot of a school, club or organization to be painted on the tail of one of 19 new planes that the Denver-based carrier will add to the fleet this year.

Before the contest was killed, one of the top vote- getters was Harley, a one-eyed Chihuahua representing a group opposed to puppy mills, said Jim Faulkner, a Frontier Airlines spokesman.

But the airline ended the contest after discovering that many votes for several proposed mascots were submitted by bots – an automated online tool – not individual voters.

The carrier is considering whether to relaunch the contest under different terms.

Geography quiz

Q. Croatia’s coastline is on which sea?

A. Adriatic. The country also borders Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hungary, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia.

Combined dispatches