JetBlue Airways — famed for its low-cost but full-service flights — has announced that it will begin flying to the Dutch Caribbean island of St. Maarten beginning on Jan. 17, 2008. The daily flights from New York to Princess Juliana Airport also will provide new access to the French side of the island, St. Martin. Fares will start at $159 each way.

The airline also announced that it is adding another Dominican Republic destination, with new New York-Puerto Plata flights commencing on Jan. 10, 2008. JetBlue already flies to Santiago and Santo Domingo. Fares on the Puerto Plata flights will start at $109 one-way; the flights will provide more access to the Dominican Republic’s north coast resorts.

(CAPA) vivaAerobus is expected to commence operations to Austin, Texas by Spring 2008, pending the completion of a new, low cost terminal. The carrier changed its original start date in Nov-07 to Spring so that it may launch its services out of the new terminal rather than provide interim service from Austin-Bergstroms main terminal. The carrier has filed with the US Department of Transportation (DOT) to seek approval to operate from Austin to six destinations in Mexico.

“A November start date was always an aggressive target, and whilst we are delaying by a few months, we are delighted to announce that we will now have a fully operational terminal in Spring 2008,� said Mike Szucs, CEO of vivaAerobus. “We – vivaAerobus, Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and GECAS – have been making outstanding progress to start Mexican services. An important part of these ultra low cost services is that they will operate out of a new terminal built exclusively for carriers such as vivaAerobus.�

Seems as if the world is congregating in Cancun (CUN) these days. Flights from all over are pulling up to the airports modern new international terminal and disgorging fliers by the planeload. Delta Air Lines will be sending a trio of new flights south in the not terribly distant future, initiating Saturday-only service from Orlando (MCO), Raleigh/Durham (RDU), and Hartford (BDL).

None of these new flights starts until next year. Orlando and Raleigh/Durham click in February 2, 2008; Hartford service starts on April 12.

Delta Air Lines has announced it will start a weekly nonstop flight between Orlando International Airport and Cancun, Mexico, beginning Feb. 2.

The new Saturday flight departs OIA at 10:10 a.m. and arrives in Cancun at 11:20 a.m. It leaves Cancun at 12:10 p.m. and arrives in Orlando at 3:15 p.m. All flight times are local.

If you could fly to Mexico for $5, would you? Before you pack your bags, however, there is one catch. Passengers won’t get to fly out of the fancy terminal.

Instead, the Austin City Council has approved building a very cheap terminal on the south side of the airport for the Mexico flights.

The jungles of the Yucatan peninsula look as wild as a forest can: dense, lush and filled with dozens of varieties of trees. It certainly doesn’t look cultivated in the way that Iowa does. But research suggests that the landscape was intensely managed before the Mayan civilization collapsed over a thousand years ago, and that what we see as “wild” bears the marks of thousands of years of human intervention.

“The species you see in Yucatan jungles are Mayan village community garden plants that have gone feral. That isn’t the forest that was there before humans landed in the Americas,” said Christine Hastorf, an archaeology professor specializing in long-term human-plant relationships at Berkeley.

It happened 160 million years ago in the inner asteroid belt: a massive space rock, around 60 kilometers in diameter, slammed into a planetoid with a diameter three times as large and broke it into small pieces. It was an anonymous catastrophe, and it took place in the silent emptiness of space hundreds of millions of miles away, somewhere between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars. Nevertheless, according to a recent paper published in Nature, this ancient collision ultimately transformed life on Earth and changed the course of evolution.

MEXICO CITY – Gangland-style murders and kidnappings reached record levels in Mexico during the first half of the year, a new report from Mexico’s Congress has found, making Mexico one of the world’s most dangerous countries.

One analyst who worked on the report said MexicoÂ’s murder rate now tops all others in the Western Hemisphere.

In May a severed head wrapped in newspaper was left in a cooler outside the office of Tabasco Hoy in Villahermosa, where drug violence is on the rise. Grenades have been tossed into newsrooms from Cancun to Nuevo Laredo in the past 18 months. The Paris-based organization Reporters Without Borders reported that Mexico was the most dangerous country for journalists in 2006, after Iraq.