Sunday Papers: May 18

Here’s a round-up of news and notes for your Sunday reading pleasure!

Wisconsin Man Says “No” to Gas for One Month
Brian LeFave of Sheboygan Falls, WI, has “parked his pick-up truck and refused to buy gas for a month.” He’s biking to work instead — no small feat for a third-shift worker with an 18-mile round-trip daily commute. Says LaFave: “I think just with the gas prices being so high, everybody complains about it but no one ever really does anything about it. People continue to drive nonstop and not think about it.” Go, Brian! (Courtesy AP)

Bush Administration Bars Drilling in Arctic Wetland
I had to read this twice, but it’s true. The same Interior Department that last week declared polar bears a threatened species yet vowed this would not inconvenience business interests — yep, the same folks on Friday officially banned any drilling in “potentially oil-rich [Arctic] wetlands, in a reversal of its earlier plan.” (Reuters via Environmental News Network)

Volvo vows to end crash deaths by 2020
Car crashes kill 1.2 million people worldwide each year and injure 50 million more. Car maker Volvo says: Enough. Their engineers believe they can end all fatalities in their cars by the year 2020. Gotta love engineers. Go, Volvo! Marty Finestone’s Activitybook has video. (Reuters)

Burma Aid Situation “Improving”
Briain’s Lord Malloch Brown says aid supplies are beginning to move (finally) in Burma/ Myanmar. It’s a slow process, unconscionably delayed by the country’s military junta. But world pressure may have finally produced movement to help the hundreds of thousands of victims of Cyclone Nargis. According to the BBC while “the relief effort had not been what many Western nations considered sufficient, thanks to support from the governments of the region and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) a compromise had been struck that the ‘Burmese can work with.’ ” If you’e interested in donating for Burmese cyclone or the China earthquake relief, see my Burma and China tags for posts that discuss different charities operating in each region.

And that’s your Sunday news round-up!

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