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Flying 20,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean to a foreign country 8,800 miles away was an unsettling experience for newlywed Yasmin Kidwai, who was traveling alone to a place she'd never been. Would New York City look similar to her bustling hometown in Pakistan? Would the man she married six weeks earlier be waiting at the airport? And what about snow? Kidwai read about the legendary nor'easters that paralyzed America's eastern seaboard for days. The 25-year-old medical school graduate found sleep elusive on the 20-hour flight from Karachi, Pakistan, to John F. Kennedy International Airport. Husband Farook returned weeks earlier to his job in Buffalo, N.Y. He was a freshly minted physician, but Pakistani medical schools did not offer adequate instruction in his chosen specialty of neurosurgery.
More major home builders, including some with significant Central Florida operations, reported weaker preliminary sales Tuesday. But analysts at one Wall Street firm upgraded builder stocks on grounds that the worst of the slump may be over.
D.R. Horton, one of the nation's largest home builders, said orders fell 25 percent in its fiscal fourth quarter. But the company, based in Fort Worth, Texas, was one of several builders on Tuesday that earned a stock upgrade by JP Morgan Securities.
Horton and Standard Pacific Corp., which builds homes in four Western states, had their stock raised to "overweight" from "neutral," and Toll Brothers, the nation's largest luxury builder, had its stock raised to "neutral" from "underweight."
Both D.R. Horton and Toll Brothers build throughout Central Florida.
For the next three years, based on a budget request recently approved by the Florida Board of Governors, campuses like Florida State University and Florida A&M University only will get money to complete construction projects already in the pipeline. .
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