A decade ago, Chris Paine was just a guy who happened to love his electric car. He and about 800 other Californians made up the first wave of pioneer-consumers who leased battery-powered vehicles from General Motors, Ford, Toyota and a handful of other companies in the full expectation that this was the future. The car companies, spurred on by tough Californian anti-pollution regulations, had been working on alternatives to the traditional internal combustion engine since about 1990, and several environmentally conscious Californian cities had joined in the effort by installing recharging stations at supermarkets and in car parks. But then, as the new millennium arrived and US dependence on foreign oil became a hot political issues, something weird happened. The car companies who’d leased out electric vehicles began demanding them back. And they wouldn’t take no for an answer. Paine, an internet entrepreneur who had also dabbled in film-making, knew something was up when he took his General Motors EV1 to a specialist car dealership in Los Angeles for a routine tyre rotation in early 2003. When he called to see if his car was ready, he was told he was never going to see it again. […]
Men are more likely than women to prefer marriage over lifelong singlehood and in many ways are as interested in serious family relationships as women, according to a study that provides the government’s first comprehensive glimpse into the male psyche. The survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention involved more than 12,000 men and women ages 15 to 44. It asked a variety of questions about sex, living together, marriage, divorce and parenting. This the first time men have been included in the agency’s study, which has been conducted periodically since 1973. The analysis, released Wednesday, focuses on their responses and offers some comparisons with women’s attitudes. For example, to the statement ‘It is better to get married than go through life single,’ 66% of men agreed, compared with 51% of women. To the statement ‘It is more important for a man to spend a lot of time with his family than be successful at his career,’ 76% of men and 72% of women agreed. ‘When asked about their attitudes about marriage and family and divorce, more men agree on the relationship of marriage,’ says Gladys Martinez, the study’s lead author. ‘The majority […]
A Palestinian security officer was killed and seven were wounded in clashes between rival Fatah and Hamas factions in Gaza on Thursday, underscoring growing tensions in the impoverished coastal strip. Earlier on Thursday, thousands of Palestinian security men fired automatic rifles and vandalized the parliament in Gaza in one of the biggest protests over unpaid wages since the Hamas government took office in March. Medics and a security official said Khader Afana, a Fatah member of the preventative security force, was killed by unknown gunmen in Gaza City. No one claimed responsibility for the shooting. In further violence on Thursday, three more security officers were wounded as their vehicle was attacked in a village east of the town of Khan Yunis, the security official said, accusing Hamas of the ambush. Hamas said the Fatah fighters fired at one of its senior commanders, which prompted them to return fire. A Hamas gunman was slightly hurt in the exchange. Demonstrators were protesting a plan by Hamas’ Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh to make partial salary payments only to the lowest paid workers in the Palestinian Authority in the next few days. ‘We want to know […]
JAKARTA, Indonesia — Indonesia averaged one human bird flu death every 2 1/2 days in May, putting it on pace to soon surpass Vietnam as the world’s hardest-hit country. The latest death, announced Wednesday, was a 15-year-old boy whose preliminary tests were positive for the H5N1 virus. It comes as international health officials express growing frustration that they must fight Indonesia’s bureaucracy as well as the disease. ‘We’re tying to fix this leak in the roof, and there’s a storm,’ World Health Organization spokesman Dick Thompson said. ‘The storm is that the virus is in animals almost everywhere and the lack of effective attention that’s being addressed to the problem.’ Indonesia, an archipelago of 17,000 islands with a population of 220 million people, has a patchwork of local, regional and national bureaucracies that often send mixed messages. The impression, health officials said, is often that no one is truly at the helm. ‘I don’t think anyone can understand it unless you come here and see it for yourself,’ said Steven Bjorge, a WHO epidemiologist in Jakarta. ‘The amount of decentralization here is breathtaking.’ He said Health Ministry officials often meet with outside experts to formulate […]
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Despite a major sales push by the Bush Administration and the electrical utility industry, nuclear power is viewed in a deeply skeptical way by a ‘strong and strikingly bipartisan majority’ of Americans, according to a major new Opinion Research Corporation (ORC) survey released today by the Civil Society Institute (CSI), a nonpartisan and nonprofit think tank that has conducted extensive public opinion research into the attitude of Americans about energy-related issues. According to the survey, Americans favor developing clean renewable energy alternatives and strategies – including increased conservation, solar energy and wind power — that can be delivered more rapidly than nuclear power. The new CSI survey found that more than three out of five Americans (61 percent) say the nation can’t ‘afford to wait ¦ to put in place part of the solution to the energy crisis and global warming’ if ‘building more nuclear power plants will take a decade or more in the U.S. and cost tens of billions of dollars.’ Only a third said the U.S. could wait for more nuclear power plants to come on-line as a way to dealing with today’s energy and climate woes. A key survey finding: Politics […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
