Word: autos
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...late July, the Center for Auto Safety (CAS) released hundreds of pages of a previously buried 2003 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) study that identified the cell phone as a serious safety hazard when used on the road. A bill introduced last month in the Senate would require all states to impose a ban on texting while driving; 17 states (including, most recently, Illinois, on Aug. 6) and the District of Columbia have passed such a ban, and seven states have outlawed driver use of handheld communication devices altogether. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood considers cell phones such a problem...
...Read "Auto-Tune the News...
...especially hard-hit Tennessee county stirred Governor Phil Bredesen to get creative. As first reported in the New York Times, the result is a "novel use of stimulus money." In remote, tiny Perry County, where the unemployment rate had soared to 27% with the closure of an auto-parts factory, Bredesen decided a New Deal-style WPA program was the order of the day. Some of the jobs are with the state parks and transportation department, but two-thirds of them are new jobs in private sector businesses - including a pie company, a hotel and a factory that needs painting...
...Cash for clunkers (the official name is Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save, a.k.a. CARS, but nobody calls it that) had customers scrambling to car dealerships in droves after it went live on July 27. Despite being in effect for only a few days, the program helped drive July auto sales to an annualized rate of 11.2 million vehicles, from just 9.7 million in June. In reaction, Wall Street economists have ratcheted up forecasts for third-quarter economic growth...
That left room in the top 10 for just one rowdy-guy movie aside from G.I. Joe, and it was a clunker. The used-car farce The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard fell hard, cadging just $5.5 million and instantly qualifying for an federal auto bailout. Of the other new releases, Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo, which had made $165 million in its native Japan, earned $3.5 million in the English-language version - which is not much, but is also not bad, considering the modest returns for Miyazaki's previous theatrical releases in North America (Princess Mononoke, $2.4 million; Spirited Away...