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Sweden says it aims to completely wean itself off oil within 15 years – without building new nuclear plants.

The attempt is being planned by a committee of industrialists, academics, car manufacturers, farmers and others.

The country aims to replace all fossil fuels with renewables before climate change damages economies and growing oil scarcity leads to price rises.

According to the Guardian newspaper, a Swedish minister said oil dependency could be broken by 2020.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is worried that oil supplies are peaking, shortly to dwindle, and that high oil prices could cause global economic recession.

“Our dependency on oil should be broken by 2020,” said Mona Sahlin, Sweden’s minister of sustainable development.

“There shall always be better alternatives to oil, which means no house should need oil for heating, and no driver should need to turn solely to gasoline.”

The Scandinavian country, which was hard hit by oil price rises in the 1970s, now gets the majority of its electricity from nuclear and hydroelectric power. In 2003, 26% of all energy consumed came from renewables, compared with an EU average of 6%.

The oil committee is to report to parliament in several months. Swedish energy ministry officials said they expected the panel to recommend further development of biofuels derived from its substantial forests.

It was also expected to expand other renewable energies such as wind and wave power.

Source

Maybe I will ride my scooter to work tomorrow?

NEW YORK (AP) — A record-breaking storm buried sections of the Northeast under more than 2 feet of snow on Sunday, marooning thousands of air travelers and making even a walk to the corner store treacherous.

The National Weather Service said 26.9 inches of snow had fallen in Central Park, the most since record-keeping started in 1869. The old record was 26.4 inches in December 1947.

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* The latest public figure to stand accused of defiling the Prophet Mohamed is not some Danish cartoonist, or French newspaper editor, but a hapless British Page 3 girl called Emma B.

Yesterday, the erotic retailer Ann Summers unveiled Miss B as the “face” of its new range of products.

Not 24 hours later, she finds herself on the front line of Islamic protest after Muslim leaders discovered that the range includes a new blow-up doll, called “Mustafa Shag”.

Unfortunately, Mustafa was one of the names given to the Prophet Mohamed. Bestowing it upon, in the words of its catalogue, “an inflatable escort for your hen-night adventures” is considered highly offensive.

The Manchester Central Mosque has already written to the firm, calling on it to withdraw the product, right.

“You have no idea how much hurt, anguish, and disgust this obnoxious phrase ["Mustafa Shag"] has caused to Muslim men, women and children,” reads their letter.

“We are asking you to please relent on compassionate grounds, and have our Most Reverend Prophet’s Name “Mustafa” (Peace Be Upon Him) and the afflicted word ‘shag’ removed as soon as possible.”

Ann Summers was last night examining options, though its chief executive Jacqueline Gold was reluctant to withdraw the item from sale.

“We don’t want to offend, but this feels like political correctness gone mad,” she said. “If anyone has a better name for a blow-up doll, please let us know.”

Source

This is why the people of the world must fight ALL fundamentalist / extreme religious groups. Religion is one of the only true evils in this world. We must fight every Taliban, even the American ones:

FORT CAMPBELL — Six members of the controversial Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., brought their mixed message of hate for homosexuals and God’s judgment on America to the main entrance of the 101st Airborne Division’s home yesterday.

Their spiteful rhetoric did not play well. Nor did their brightly colored signs, including one saying: “Thank God for dead soldiers.”
“Can you believe that? I can’t believe that,” Danny Calhoun said after spotting the sign.

The Vietnam veteran from Somerset, Ky., has been to several protests of the Westboro group, which has focused on soldier funerals and memorials in the past year. The group targeted Fort Campbell because a memorial service for 101st Airborne soldiers killed in Iraq was being held on post yesterday evening.

The sign made Calhoun angry.

“Giving thanks for dead soldiers is not right.”

The Westboro church members — three adults, two teens and a 10-year-old boy — were outnumbered, out-yelled and out-honked by a crowd of more than 170 flag-waving citizens, many of them spouses of 101st soldiers now deployed to Iraq. The voices of the citizens protesting the church members were joined by the honking of hundreds of cars streaming by on busy Fort Campbell Boulevard.

Margie Phelps, daughter of the church’s outspoken pastor, the Rev. Fred Phelps, was not fazed by the jeers, stares and occasional profanity hurled at her and the others. She stood on the sidewalk, her waist draped in an upside down American flag. Her father did not participate.

According to Phelps’ daughter, Westboro believes God is angry at America for its tolerance of homosexuality. That’s why soldiers are dying, she said.

“My job in this, the last of the last days, is to show America her abomination. What we’re supposed to do is show America her sin. Stop worshipping the dead. Stop worshipping the flag. Stop worshipping perverted patriotism,” said Margie Phelps, an attorney for the church.

I have not been able to find a follow up to this horrific story:

(CBS4 News) HIALEAH A bizarre accident in Hialeah today when a person riding a scooter is hit by a pick up truck and trapped underneath the vehicle.

The accident took place at 16th Avenue West 49th Street.

When Hialeah Fire Rescue crews arrived, they had to pull the victim out from underneath the truck. Video from Chopper 4 shows parts of the scooter still jammed underneath the truck.

The victim was taken by ambulance to Palmetto General Hospital in unknown condition.

It’s not known yet how the accident happened or if the driver of the pickup truck will be cited.

I have written about the new Labretta a number of times already. (see here, here & here) But as of yet nothing has come of the effort aside from a prototype which I saw on display at last year’s Gotham Rally.

NOW comes this press release that Hewson posted on the NY Scooter Forum. To give proper credit he says this info comes from stellaspeed by way of the yahoo stella forum:

Explanation of Change in CMSI’s Lambretta Styled Scooter Project

CMSI, Inc. and its partners KG (Khurana Group) of Seattle, WA reached an impasse late in 2005 in their discussions concerning how to proceed on the Lambretta project.

CMSI and KG are currently working to resolve this impasse and if needed, will submit to binding arbitration to resolve it as outlined in their agreement.

However, CMSI had already determined independently of KG , that the trademark Lambretta had been substantially compromised in many countries and was therefore not available for use in worldwide branding. Without clear branding rights, worldwide marketing and sales of the new scooter was in doubt and would make the sales needed for amortization of tooling costs impossible to clarify and achieve. This ambiguity and conflict was pointed out to KG and SIL many times but no resolution was forthcoming.

In addition, CMSI’s trademark counsel has advised it that several other users of the trade name Lambretta in their legal business names and/or their products related to motorcycles and scooters, have been in use for decades or longer and that due to the fact that SIL has not sold new scooters into the US market for the last five years, has probably resulted in abandonment of that trade name in the U.S. Because there are substantial royalties associated with licensing the trade name from SIL, these unresolved issues made the economic value of the name questionable, even in the USA market alone.

CMSI has substantial investments and commitments in this new scooter project and cannot sit by and do nothing. It is for the above reasons that CMSI has decided to move forward with the SCOMADI project. The new website will be completed soon and details and progress will be posted there periodically.

So from what I can understand, the folks that are trying to revive the Lambretta as a bike are having a hard time securing the branding for the bike. So they have given up and are naming it something else. This kind of leaves me scratching my head. Why do I want to pay $XX for a bike that may look like a Lammy when it isn’t branded as a Lammy. I mean that was going to be the big seller: the Lammy is BACK.

And to complicate matters Hewson goes on to say that there are engineering changes that are needed to the new Lammy:

the piaggo engineers have recommended a bunch of changes (engine ran too hot, needed bigger radiator, needed more instrumentation, riding position was uncomfortable)

He says these engineering changes would push the price past $5k for consumers. It really seems to be like the Lammy is DOA.

I just love gadgets and widgets and cool stuff. So when I see something like Demo my eyes light up! According to this Wired article Demo has been going on for 16 years in Phoenix, AZ. One thing in particular at the show that piqued my interest:

Truly desktop publishing: Blurb says its BookSmart application lets anyone create a professional-looking book using simple drag-and-drop tools in less than an hour (giving you something to do while waiting for glasses from LensCrafters). Available for Macs and PCs, BookSmart provides oodles of ready-to-go templates for cookbooks, poetry collections, novels and photo archives. Or you can design your own. And it automates many steps, like creating a copyright page and table of contents — even acquiring content.

I really love this idea, I am going to try this service out and I will write about it once I do it. The first thing that came to my mind? I took a ton of digital pictures when I was in Italy last year with my wife. This was the first time I did not take any 35mm film with me. So I have all of these pics and as much as I love having them digital I want them in an album. So why not have them printed out you say? Well sure, but it would be even BETTER if I could have them in a nice printed & bound hardcover book with comments on each, almost telling a story of my trip through Italy.

I don’t know how many have been following the collision of politics & pollicy at NASA. This is another prime example of interference by policy makers on scientific matters by someone who wasn’t even adequately qualified for the position in which he was appointed, let alone comment on scientific matters.

George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters’ access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word “theory” at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.

Mr. Deutsch’s resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted.

The resignation came as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was preparing to review its policies for communicating science to the public. The review was ordered Friday by Michael D. Griffin, the NASA administrator, after a week in which many agency scientists and midlevel public affairs officials described to The New York Times instances in which they said political pressure was applied to limit or flavor discussions of topics uncomfortable to the Bush administration, particularly global warming.

Mr. Deutsch, 24, was offered a job as a writer and editor in NASA’s public affairs office in Washington last year after working on President Bush’s re-election campaign and inaugural committee, according to his résumé. No one has disputed those parts of the document.

According to his résumé, Mr. Deutsch received a “Bachelor of Arts in journalism, Class of 2003.”

Yesterday, officials at Texas A&M said that was not the case.

read the rest here

Don’t be surprised if you see a sexily-clad sweet young thing riding a bright red scooter zipping by your local coffee shop or wet market.

She’s just one of several sexual health investigators who, starting this coming Valentine’s Day, will be going deep into the heartlands on Vespa scooters to conduct a year-long sex survey.

The study – which will poll 5,000 Singaporeans on areas like the quality of their sex life and views on unprotected sex – is the brainchild of Singapore’s resident sex guru, Dr Wei Siang Yu.

Most other surveys, said the 36-year-old medical doctor, are conducted online and are “not reflective” of Singaporeans as a whole.

Which is why he feels it is time for a survey in which participants are polled face-to-face, without relying on mediums such as the Internet.

read the rest here