Panian

A Connoquenessing Township man received a $15,000 fellowship recently to attend the Pennsylvania Rural Leadership (RULE) program that meets in locations across the state and in Washington, D.C.

Chris Panian is one of 22 Pennsylvanians who completed the first year of the two-year program, a leadership development course based at Penn State University.

Panian, along with the other participants, attended a four-day legislative study institute in Harrisburg.

Each of the participants does public issue research that include topics in agricultural, community and economic development, health care and state and local government.

Graduation is scheduled for May 2007 in State College.

For his participation in the program, Panian was presented with a legislative citation from the state Legislature, sponsored by Rep. Brian Ellis, R-11th, and Rep. Art Hershey.

PHILADELPHIA — Comcast Corp. has begun rolling out a high-speed Internet feature that temporarily doubles customers' download speeds when they access big files.The PowerBoost feature will automatically kick in when subscribers download music, video or Web pages with a lot of graphics that typically take a longer time to view.PowerBoost will be free to customers of Comcast's six-megabits-per-second plan, priced at $42.95 a month, and its $52.95-a-month plan, which features speeds of 8 Mbps.Comcast said the technology, developed in-house, taps unused capacity on its network."This is just a continuation of our tradition of continually improving and enhancing the service for our customers," said spokeswoman Jeanne Russo.From wire and local sources