Eideard

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Dutch luxury sportscar maker Spyker may be the unlikely buyer of Saab but it is set to struggle with the real challenge: converting two loss-making companies into a profitable one.

After months of tortuous negotiations, Spyker sealed a deal with General Motors to buy Saab for $74 million cash and $326 million in deferred shares, sparking celebrations at its headquarters in the small Dutch town of Zeewolde.

Spyker CEO Victor Muller also bought out his largest shareholder, bank tycoon Victor Antonov, as part of the deal…

“It seems like a gamble. They’ve got the new 9-5, the 9-4X coming out next and the new 9-3 should be coming out in 2012, which could be quite lucrative, but whether they can attract customers back to the brand and make it profitable again is the billion-dollar question,” IHS Global’s Ian Fletcher said…

Hans van Rennes, Spyker’s vice president of marketing, said a Saab dealer sent the company a cake and one-time Saab suitor Koenigsegg called with congratulations. Outside, a Dutch television show organised a parade of old and new Saab cars.

“I still have a hangover but it’s a pleasant one because it’s from the champagne,” said Jantje Schaap, 50, a Saab dealer from the town of Lemmer who joined in the impromptu auto show.

And Spyker CEO Victor Muller and Saab head Jan Ake Jonsson were greeted with applause as they met with employees of the Swedish carmaker at a hastily organised rally in Trollhattan, the town in southwest Sweden home to Saab’s main plant and headquarters.

“I am really stunned to see all here today. Nothing prepared me for seeing so many people, so enthusiastic and it only confirms that we did the right thing,” Muller said to the around 3,000 staff crowding the stage.

RTFA for the not-so-boring details on financing. Both Spyker and SAAB have designers capable of both advanced engineering and contemporary industrial design. Yes, that means making stuff sell as well or better than it runs.

There probably are Swedish counterparts to Jonathan Ive hanging around town, looking for a gig.

No one ever quite realizes how much traffic is engendered by an announcement from Apple and Steve Jobs. I’ll be updating this right through my usual post time of noon MST.

Yes, it is called the iPad.

Click on the photo for Gizmodo’s first hands-on experience.

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Bristol Palin, poster child for abstinence-only results
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

After more than a decade of declining teenage pregnancy, the pregnancy rate among girls ages 15 to 19 increased 3 percent from 2005 to 2006 — a turnaround likely to intensify the debate over federal financing for abstinence-only sex education.

The teenage abortion rate also crept up for the first time in more than a decade, rising 1 percent from 2005 to 2006, according to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit research group…

While teenage pregnancy rates for whites remain far lower than for Blacks and Hispanics, the pregnancy rates increased for all three groups…

The Guttmacher analysis examined federal data on teenage sex, births and abortion, along with the institute’s own abortion statistics…

“This new study makes it crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work,” said Cecile Richards, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

The Clinton administration began financing abstinence-only programs as part of welfare reform, but such programs got a large boost in the Bush administration.

The Obama administration has moved away from abstinence-only programs, creating a new teenage-pregnancy initiative in which most financing will go to programs that have been shown to prevent pregnancy, with some experimental approaches…

There are continuing efforts to reinstate financing for abstinence-only education as part of the health-reform legislation.

A definition of insanity includes repeating something over and over and expecting a different result.

Hopefully, a majority of this ill-educated nation will eventually come to an age of reason.

Peruvian doctors amputated the healthy leg of an 86-year-old man, then amputated the other leg when they realized their mistake.

“I was shocked when I lifted the sheets and saw they had taken his left leg,” the man’s daughter, Carmen Villanueva, told Peruvian radio station RPP.

“The ulcer was on his right leg and they had to amputate that one too to keep the infection from spreading,” she said.

The Alberto Sabogal Hospital in the coastal district of Callao just north of Lima said it had suspended the doctors involved in the botched surgery for a life-threatening ulcer, pending an investigation.

I wouldn’t allow a surgical procedure unless it was sketched out on my body – and signed by the doctor in charge – beforehand.

French lawmakers have recommended a partial ban on any veils that cover the face — including the burqa, the full-body covering worn by some Muslim women.

The ban on the “voile integrale” — which literally means “total veil” — would apply in public places like hospitals and schools, and on public transport, a French parliamentary commission announced.

It would also apply to anyone who attempts to receive public services, but it would not apply to people wearing the burqa on the street, the commission said…

They will now recommend that Parliament pass a resolution on the partial ban. Such a resolution, if passed, would not make the wearing of a full veil or burqa illegal, but it would give public officials support when asking people to remove it…

By recommending a ban on full veils in public places such as hospitals and schools and by anyone receiving public services, the commission members said they wanted to assist those working with members of the public when asking that full veils be removed. That would include school teachers who meet children’s parents or ticket agents at train stations.

There is nothing in the Quran that directs women to cover their faces, said Imam Hassen Chalghoumi, who runs the Islamic center in Drancy, a Paris suburb. He said it is ridiculous to do so in France.

France already has a law against Muslim girls wearing headscarves in state schools. It sparked widespread Muslim protests when the French Parliament passed the law in 2004, even though the law also bans other conspicuous religious symbols including Sikh turbans, large Christian crucifixes and Jewish skull caps.

Separation of the state from religion. What an idea!

James O’Keefe addressing teabaggers

Alleging a plot to tamper with phones in Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office in the Hale Boggs Federal Building in downtown New Orleans, the FBI arrested four people Monday, including James O’Keefe, 25, a conservative filmmaker whose undercover videos at ACORN field offices severely damaged the advocacy group’s credibility.

Also arrested were Joseph Basel, Stan Dai and Robert Flanagan, all 24. Flanagan is the son of William Flanagan, who is the acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, the office confirmed. All four were charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony.

According to the FBI affidavit, Flanagan and Basel entered the federal building at 500 Poydras Street about 11 a.m. Monday, dressed as telephone company employees, wearing jeans, fluorescent green vests, tool belts, and hard hats. When they arrived at Landrieu’s 10th floor office, O’Keefe was already in the office and had told a staffer he was waiting for someone to arrive.

When Flanagan and Basel entered the office, they told the staffer they were there to fix phone problems. At that time, the staffer, referred to only as Witness 1 in the affadavit, observed O’Keefe positioning his cell phone in his hand to videotape the operation. O’Keefe later admitted to agents that he recorded the event.

They…told the staffer they needed to perform repair work on the main phone system and asked where the telephone closet was located.

The staffer showed the men to the main General Services Administration office on the 10th floor, and Flanagan and Basel went in. There, a GSA employee asked for the men’s credentials, after which they stated they left them in their vehicle.

The U.S. Marshal’s Service apprehended all four men shortly thereafter.

Republicans are always supposed to be above the law. Especially when it came to spying on Americans.

BTW. They’re up for a fine of $250,000 and up to 10 years in prison – each – if convicted. Wanna bet?

ITV children’s TV presenters Anna Williamson and Jamie Rickers have revealed that they were once questioned by police under anti-terrorism powers – for carrying glittery hairdryers.

The pair, who front ITV1′s weekend kids show Toonattik, were filming a skit for the programme on London’s South Bank wearing combat gear and armed with children’s walkie-talkies and hairdryers…

“We were filming a strand called Dork Hunters, which is to do with one of the animations we have on the show. We were out and about doing ‘dork hunting’ ourselves on the streets of London,” Williamson said today.

“Jamie and I were kitted out in fake utility belts, we had the whole bulletproof flak jacket thing, we’ve got hairdryers in our belt, a kids’ £1.99 walkie-talkie, hairbrushes and all that kind of stuff, and we were being followed by a camera crew and a boom mike and we get literally pulled over by four policemen and we were issued with a warning ‘under the act of terrorism’.”

Rickers added: “We were stopped, not arrested, but they had to say ‘we are holding you under the Anti-Terrorism Act because you’re running around in flak jackets and a utility belt’, and I said ‘and please put spangly blue hairdryer’ and he was, like, ‘all right’.”

I know a few coppers who would feel dumber than dumb – if forced to act out one of these paranoid scenarios required by nutball politicians.

Solid topic – especially for a nation of voters who have no problem coming up with an analysis and opinion that requires absolutely no information. They listen to Talk Radio, their favorite pundit – cripes! whoever they met at the American Legion bar on Friday night.

CNN started a series, this week, taking the time to get up close and personal with several projects, every day.

Let the Flash load and click through to every aspect of the program

Till now, the Feds have relied on transparency to provide info to the voting public. That only works as well as the effort citizens put into looking at the information available. Poisonally, I think the average American hasn’t gotten as far as Google.

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A major increase in maximum ocean wave heights off the Pacific Northwest in recent decades has forced scientists to re-evaluate how high a “100-year event” might be, and the new findings raise special concerns for flooding, coastal erosion and structural damage.

The new assessment concludes that the highest waves may be as much as 46 feet, up from estimates of only 33 feet that were made as recently as 1996, and a 40 percent increase. December and January are the months such waves are most likely to occur, although summer waves are also significantly higher.

In a study just published online in the journal Coastal Engineering, scientists from Oregon State University and the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries report that the cause of these dramatically higher waves is not completely certain, but “likely due to Earth’s changing climate…”

“Possible causes might be changes in storm tracks, higher winds, more intense winter storms, or other factors,” Ruggiero said. “These probably are related to global warming, but could also be involved with periodic climate fluctuations such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and our wave records are sufficiently short that we can’t be certain yet. But what is clear is the waves are getting larger…”

Increasing wave heights, they said, have had double or triple the impact in terms of erosion, flooding and damage as sea level rise over the last few decades. If wave heights continue to increase, they may continue to dominate over the acceleration in sea level that’s anticipated over the next couple of decades. The prior concern about what sea level rise could do, in other words, is already a reality. If sea levels do increase significantly in future decades and centuries, that will only add to the damage already being done by higher waves…

Hampering the research effort is the fact that two of the major buoys used for these studies, which are some distance off the Pacific Northwest coast and measure waves in deep water, were only installed in the 1970s. Even at that they provide two of the longest high-quality wave height records in the world. OSU researchers are studying historical records through climate data, old newspaper records and other information to try to recreate what wave heights and storm events were like going further back in time.

Scientists have an insatiable curiosity. They will continue to poke and prod, examine and strive to bring understanding into human terms. They will publish and criticize and build upon that understanding.

Politicians and the public may choose to read and learn – or blindly follow the pundits and priests of ennui, traditional guides to disaster since Pompeii and beyond.