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A proposal to ban sales of new gasoline-powered cars in Norway from 2015 could help spur struggling carmakers to shift to greener models, Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen said on Saturday. "This is much more realistic than people think when they first hear about this proposal," she told Reuters, defending a plan by her Socialist Left Party to outlaw sales of cars that run solely on fossil fuels in six years' time. "The financial crisis also means that a lot of those car producers that now have big problems ... know that they have to develop their technology because we also...

From a local dog club regarding another blow against freedom in FL: February 14, 2009 Dear Members, You've no doubt seen a slew of information on the various legislation over the past few years across the United States and creeping it's way into Florida. Some of it is regarding 'dangerous breeds', some of it pushing mandatory/spay neuter, some regarding the sale of dogs and cats, and so on. There have been pleas to help fight the legislation filling our e-mail boxes for quite some time. Hopefully, many of you have participated. Regardless if the Bills are for our state or...

Things I learned at Miskatonic University: 1. Non-Euclidian Geometry.2. Keeping a detailed journal is a good idea. It allows future investigators to more accurately determine the cause of your death.3. Those are not rats in the walls.4. Whippoorwills should be on the endangered species list.5. If you are going to dabble in Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, make sure you have a good (and complete) translation from which to work.6. They're called "Things Man Was Not Meant To Know" for a reason.7. Rural Massachusetts is not a good vacation choice.8. Rural Michigan is worse.9. The Providence, R. I.,...

A federal judge has ordered the Bush administration to release 17 detainees at Guantánamo by the end of the week, the first such ruling in nearly seven years of legal disputes over the administration's detention policies. The judge, Ricardo Urbina of U.S. District Court, ordered Tuesday that the 17 men be brought to his courtroom Friday from Guantánamo, where they have been held since 2002. He indicated that he would release the men, members of the restive Uighur Muslim minority of western China, into the care of supporters in the United States, initially in the Washington area. "I think the...

WASHINGTON AND TORONTO — It's just one sentence buried in an 800-page U.S. energy bill that passed into law last December. Yet it has morphed into a potential threat to Canada's oil sands boom, a contentious political football in Washington, and an early warning sign of an epic environmental battle over bitumen. Stripped to its bare essentials, Section 526 of the U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 bans federal agencies from buying alternative fuels that produce more greenhouse gases than conventional oil. This would include purchases by the military and the postal service - far and away the...

Women earn most of America’s Ph.D.’s but lag in the physical sciences. Beware of plans to fix the ‘problem.’ difficult undergraduate math class in the country.” It is leg­endary among high school math prodigies, who hear terrifying stories about it in their computer camps and at the Math Olympiads. Some go to Harvard just to have the opportunity to enroll in it. Its formal title is “Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra,” but it is also known as “math boot camp” and “a cult.” The two-semester fresh­man course meets for three hours a week, but, as the catalog says, homework...

VIRGINIA BEACH -- Monday, Virginia Beach Police dropped obscenity charges stemming from two poster advertisements for Abercrombie & Fitch at Lynnhaven Mall. Police confiscated the ads Saturday, saying they violated the city's obscenity law because some of the models were partially nude. One showed a group of shirtless male models and one has his jeans low enough to show a part of his buttocks. Police say they received several complaints about the ads and had met with local store officials, in which police informed them they were in violation of the code. The window displays went up in 363 stores...

16-year-old's love of dancing, fashion and photography brought her into conflict; father now faces murder charge Aqsa Parvez was largely estranged from her family and sleeping away from home in recent days. The 16-year-old's friends said she returned to her home in Mississauga on Monday only to collect her belongings. Shortly afterward, she was taken to hospital, where she died early Tuesday morning – leaving friends grief-stricken and igniting a public debate on religious extremism in Canada. Her father, 57-year-old taxi driver Muhammad Parvez, is charged with murder. Her brother, 26-year-old Waqas Parvez, is charged with obstructing police. Ms. Parvez's...

U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., faces fines and penalties topping $800,000 for leaking an illegally taped phone call after the Supreme Court refused to review the case. The decision, made without comment, ends a nearly 10-year legal fight. The court left in place a U.S. appeals court ruling that McDermott had acted improperly in giving reporters access to a recording of a 1996 telephone call in which Republican leaders discussed the House ethics case against former Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.

Every year, tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars are quietly added to the national debt -- on top of the deficits that we hear about. What's going on here? Consider the proud trumpeting that came from Washington at the close of fiscal 2007. The deficit for the unified budget was, politicians crowed, down to a mere $162.8 billion. In fact, our government is overspending at a far greater rate. The total federal debt actually increased by $497.1 billion over the same period. [snip] Federal deficits versus increases in the federal debt Fiscal year Reported surplus/deficit Debt increase Debt...

Muslim girl's story at odds with police report A police report in the case of the Muslim girl who says she was threatened at Azalea Middle School in St. Petersburg is at odds with the girl’s story. The report filed Monday by Officer William Stone states that an assistant principal at Azalea interviewed the girl after she reported that a boy in her science class threatened to bring a gun to school and shoot her. The assistant principal told Stone he asked the girl if she was threatened in any way and she said no. The administrator also said he...

WASHINGTON - Congress sent President George W. Bush its most forceful rebuke Thursday by overriding his veto of a water projects bill that directs billions of dollars toward restoration of the Everglades and recovery programs for Hurricane Katrina. The Senate voted Thursday to override Bush's veto, 79-14, far more than the two-thirds majority needed to overturn Bush's veto of the $23.2-billion Water Resources Development Act. Among the senators voting for the override were 34 Republicans, including Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla. The Senate vote followed a resounding 361-54 vote in the House on Wednesday. Together the two votes turned the bill...

Iraq vets say Pentagon is denying benefits When they came home from Iraq, 2,600 members of the Minnesota National Guard had been deployed longer than any other ground combat unit. The tour lasted 22 months and had been extended as part of President Bush's surge. And 1st Lt. Jon Anderson says he never expected to come home to this: A government refusing to pay education benefits he says he should have earned under the GI bill. "It's pretty much a slap in the face," Anderson said. "I think it was a scheme to save money, personally. I think it was...

EDMONTON — As students across Canada head back to classrooms in this high-tech Information Age, there's a question in the front row that demands to be heard: Why, in the Information Age, are students heading back to classrooms? Researchers say students weaned on collaborative learning with high-tech devices are suffering in classrooms ruled by defenders of lecture-based orthodoxy wielding overhead projectors and reciting from dog-eared history textbooks that climax with Paul Martin's run for 24 Sussex Drive. "It's not about using technology for technology's sake. It's allowing students to access the right information because of the information explosion," says Mohamed...

California still leads in raw home numbers, but Florida is quickly closing the gap. When it comes to home foreclosures, California, land of the million-dollar Silicon Valley shoeboxes, tends to dominate the list. But in foreclosure statistics released this week by Bargain.com, Florida is making a run on California's dominance. With less than half of California's population, Florida had 78,408 homes entering the foreclosure process in the second quarter of 2007. California was slightly ahead with 83,210 homes. Trends suggest that while California foreclosures might have peaked, Florida is poised for more pain. Compared with the first quarter of the...

Is the U.S. set to grant employment based green cards to everyone who has been waiting to apply for the passt several years? As some of you may know, I'm in the middle of the legal immigration process to the U.S. for the past several years. Everything has been going properly and I've been very patient, paying the expensive fees and making sure everything is done properly. At www.uscis.gov, the case processing times can be monitored. Every month, the application dates currently being processed were advancing and for some of my paperwork (the permission to travel documents and the work...

The 2007 Atlantic hurricane season should be "very active," with nine hurricanes and a good chance that at least one major hurricane will hit the U.S. coast, a top researcher said Tuesday. Forecaster William Gray said he expects 17 named storms in all this year, five of them major hurricanes with sustained winds of 111 mph or greater. The probability of a major hurricane making landfall on the U.S. coast this year: 74 percent, compared with the average of 52 percent over the past century, he said. [snip] The Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30,...

Two drink minimum? Think again. Under a bill endorsed by a Florida Senate committee Wednesday, bars could no longer kick out patrons just because they aren't spending money on alcoholic drinks. The bill is inspired by a case in Pinellas Park, where a man was booted from his favorite bar for drinking a soda. He reportedly told the bar owners he was the designated driver for his friends, but he was kicked out anyway and got into a scuffle in the process. Sen. Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey, who is sponsoring the bill, said the bar's policy encourages people to...

Those property insurance rate cuts state regulators promised beleaguered homeowners two weeks ago are flowing in, but they're far short of the amounts that were forecast. Officials for Allstate Floridian and its sister company, Allstate Floridian Indemnity, on Monday proposed lowering their premiums a statewide average 14 percent starting June 1 as part of the state's efforts to reduce the cost of property insurance. While that may seem like good news for Allstate's 350,000 policyholders, it is far less than the average 24 percent industry decrease state officials said homeowners should expect.

TALLAHASSEE - House Republicans are developing a proposal to eliminate property taxes for all homesteads while increasing the sales tax by a few pennies to make up the difference. The plan, which has quietly gained favor among House leaders in recent days but lacks detail and has yet to be announced, also calls for capping property taxes on businesses, second homes and other nonhomestead property. The cap would likely be tied to population growth and inflation.