There’s auto news out of Sweden: Volvo Cars says that it will be fully electric by 2030. No more internal combustion, no more hybrids. It’s batteries or bust.

In making this commitment, Volvo is betting on a trend: that as EVs are becoming cheaper and new conventional cars are being priced higher, consumers’ math on electric-versus-internal combustion will soon come out in electrics’ favor.

But there’s more to Volvo’s position on EVs than just changing the powertrain. The carmaker says its pure electric models will only be available for sale online, and that its first fully electric car is now receiving over-the-air software updates. (Tesla has been doing this for years.) That first plan has implications for the built environment; the second, for emissions and the global climate.

Read it all (subscription).

Online sales and over-the-air updates could spell the end of car dealerships https://t.co/vgjKX8lqDY via @business

— North Street (@northassoc) March 4, 2021

The author’s discussion of the three kinds of model which a holy person can follow – pilgrim, dead man, sufferer on the cross – is based on a sermon by Bernard of Clairvaux, but the saints’ names here are his own addition. James, Giles and Julian were the three saints most closely associated with pilgrimage in the thirteenth century – James in particular, the archetypal pilgrim with his scrip and cockle-shell. St Julian was known instead as an accommodator of pilgrims, as a result of the legend about his life which grew up in the thirteenth century. There’s a useful overview of his story here. According to the Golden Legend, Julian learned as a young man that he was destined to kill his parents. Trying to escape his fate, he fled his home (that never works, Julian!) and settled in a distant country. He got married, but one day when he was away from home his parents arrived at his house and his wife, fatally hospitable, gave them her own bed to sleep in. When Julian returned and saw the sleeping couple, he thought it was his wife in bed with another man, and so he killed them both. In penance for his sin he built hospitals and lodgings for travellers, and ferried pilgrims across the river – on one occasion, as depicted at the top of this post and below, he ferried Christ in disguise as a leper, and was told by him that his sin was forgiven.

St Julian therefore became a patron of pilgrims and travellers, a byword for hospitality – Chaucer says of his Franklin, who loves sharing the pleasures of the table and keeps open house for half the neighbourhood, that ‘an housholdere, and that a greet, was he; Seint Julian was he in his contree’. And so in Ancrene Wisse ‘St Julian’s house’ is heaven, the destination of wayfarers, a permanent lodging-place for those who pass as strangers and pilgrims through this world. Pilgrims travel to their ‘home in heaven’, but that journey is best made, Ancrene Wisse argues, not by travellers but by anchorites, who seek God in one fixed and steadfast place. In that dwelling, as a later English anchorite – another Julian – wrote, they find the union with God which means he becomes infinitely intimate, homely, with the soul: ‘for in us is His homeliest home’.

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12 February is the feast of St Julian the Hospitaller, in medieval tradition the patron of wayfarers and pilgrims and those who give them lodging. Ancrene Wisse, St Julian's house, and the 'homeliest home' https://t.co/T6kX4EXHbZ pic.twitter.com/xf51dYh7Bp

— Eleanor Parker (@ClerkofOxford) February 12, 2021

Germany’s biggest air-ambulance operator has ordered two electric air taxis to evaluate their potential in a pioneering role speeding doctors to patients.

ADAC Luftrettung, part of the country’s leading motoring association, will begin testing the 18-rotor Volocopter GmbH aircraft from 2023 after the simulation of 26,000 emergency responses in two cities indicated that it could fulfill a rapid-transport role currently performed by a costlier helicopter fleet.

The joint announcement Tuesday provides further evidence of the commercial potential of vertical takeoff air taxis, coming less than a week after Singapore said it plans to launch the world’s first such service.

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Germany’s biggest air-ambulance operator orders two electric air taxis to evaluate their potential in a pioneering role speeding doctors to patients https://t.co/QME5XipfWw

— Bloomberg (@business) December 15, 2020

Saudi Arabia said it was curtailing this year’s hajj pilgrimage to only a small number of people already in the kingdom, rather than the millions who usually flock to Islam’s holiest sites, amid concerns about the spread of the new coronavirus.

The hajj, the Muslim world’s most important religious pilgrimage, is considered a pillar of Islam and has been held since the seventh century in Mecca. All Muslims who are able to are required to make the journey at least once in their lifetimes.

The five-day event, which begins in late July this year, is a source of great political and religious prestige for Saudi Arabia, while also generating an estimated $8 billion in revenue for the kingdom each year.

Mayor John Tory announced the updated regulations for the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) on Thursday.

“This will help to stop the spread of COVID-19 in our city,” Tory said.

“As the restart and reopening begins, we know that more people will be back on the TTC… at the same time, physical distancing will become a greater and greater challenge.”

The TTC board will need to approve the recommendation at its meeting next week, though TTC CEO Rick Leary has already said he supports the plan.

“I want to make sure people know our system is safe for both customers and employees,” Leary said.

Toronto also announced on Thursday a plan to give out one million non-medical masks to transit users, with a focus on low-income and marginalized communities.

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The repatriation of 565 Japanese citizens from Wuhan, China, in late January offered scientists an unexpected opportunity to learn a bit more about the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) raging in that city. To avoid domestic spread of the virus, Japanese officials screened every passenger for disease symptoms and tested them for the virus after they landed. Eight tested positive, but four of those had no symptoms at all, says epidemiologist Hiroshi Nishiura of Hokkaido University, Sapporo—which is a bright red flag for epidemiologists who are trying to figure out what the fast-moving epidemic has in store for humanity. If many infections go unnoticed, as the Japanese finding suggests, that vastly complicates efforts to contain the outbreak.

Two months after 2019-nCoV emerged—and with well over 20,000 cases and 427 deaths as of 4 February—mathematical modelers have been racing to predict where the virus will move next, how big a toll it might ultimately take, and whether isolating patients and limiting travel will slow it. But to make confident predictions, they need to know much more about how easily the virus spreads, how sick it makes people, and whether infected people with no symptoms can still infect others.

Some of that information is coming out of China. But amid the all-out battle to control the virus, and with diagnostic capabilities in short supply, Chinese researchers cannot answer all the questions. Countries with just a handful of cases, such as Japan, can also reveal important data, says Preben Aavitsland of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. “It’s up to all countries now that receive cases to collect as much information as possible.”

With the limited information so far, scientists are sketching out possible paths that the virus might take, weighing the likelihoods of each, and trying to determine the fallout. “We’re at this stage where defined scenarios and the evidence for and against them are really important because it allows people to plan better,” says Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. These scenarios break into two broad categories: The world gets the virus under control—or it doesn’t.

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What does the new coronavirus have in store for humanity? Nobody knows, but let @kakape and @sciencecohen walk you through a couple of scenarios. https://t.co/L1Lcjk3jmU

— Martin Enserink (@martinenserink) February 5, 2020

In 2004, shortly after the national World War II Memorial was completed, Earl Morse, a retired Air Force captain working at the Department of Veterans Affairs clinic in Springfield, Ohio, realized that many of the veterans he knew would never get to see it.

So he persuaded pilots at his local flying club to ferry a handful of veterans to Washington on small planes, and accompany them to the National Mall.

Jeff Miller, who owns a dry cleaning company in Hendersonville, N.C., soon added chartered commercial jets to the impromptu enterprise.

From there blossomed an entire organization, known as the Honor Flight Network, which since 2005 has carried nearly a quarter-million veterans of World War II and the Korean and Vietnam Wars to Washington.

Read it all.

“Our mission is to transport our veterans to visit the memorials that are dedicated to honoring their sacrifice.”

From across the US, private planes and commercial airliners take veterans to the capital to see monuments dedicated to them. https://t.co/bcpJ0WnX5Y

— The New York Times (@nytimes) November 11, 2019

Sept 8 The ReNew conference in England takes place, Sept 16-17. Over 400 church leaders gather and the focus is on ‘Multiplying Ministries in the Face of Eternity’. Abp Ben Kwashi is a speaker. Pray for him and all the contributors as they prepare. pic.twitter.com/oQbFvvedmr

— GAFCON (@gafconference) September 7, 2019

I’m off to a big conference and would appreciate your prayers for the Sunday sermon and Monday address–KSH. Blogging will be catch as catch can until I return.

A new battlefront has opened in the trade war between the United States and China: the $1.6 trillion American travel industry.

A Los Angeles hotel long popular with Chinese travelers saw a 23 percent decline in visits last year and another 10 percent so far this year. In New York City, spending by Chinese tourists, who spend nearly twice as much as other foreign visitors, fell 12 percent in the first quarter. And in San Francisco, busloads of Chinese tourists were once a mainstay of one fine jewelry business; over the last few years, the buses stopped coming.

Figures from the Commerce Department’s National Travel and Tourism Office show a sharp decline in the number of tourists from China last year.

Industry professionals worry that the drop-off is picking up speed this year, affecting not just airlines, hotels and restaurants, but also retailers and attractions like amusement parks and casinos.

Read it all.

The number of Chinese tourists coming to the United States is falling. That’s especially painful to the businesses that cater to them because they spend an average of 50 percent more than other international visitors during their stays. https://t.co/nLfgTOJWJI

— NYT Business (@nytimesbusiness) June 12, 2019

How can you avoid becoming a victim of an Uber imposter? Follow these important tips:

Before you get into the car, use the Uber app to check the license plate. Make sure it matches the actual car.

Check to make sure the person behind the wheel looks like your driver’s photo in the app.

Don’t give away your name. Instead, ask the driver who they are picking up….

Read it all.

With few exceptions, like Afghanistan and the Isle of Man, there are highway speed limits essentially everywhere else in the world.

But this is Germany, the self-declared “auto nation,” where Karl Benz built the first automobile and where cars are not only the proudest export item but also a symbol of national identity.

It’s also the country where, in darker times, Hitler laid the groundwork for a network of multilane highways that in the postwar years came to epitomize economic success — and freedom.

Call it Germany’s Wild West: The autobahn is the one place in a highly regulated society where no rule is the rule — and that place is sacred….

Read it all.

🚗🚕💨Impose a Speed Limit on the Autobahn? Not So Fast, Many Germans Say https://t.co/zZFBcP1Oqk

— LearnOutLive German Books (@_learn_german) February 8, 2019

Crashes are up by as much as 6 percent in Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and Washington, compared with neighboring states that haven’t legalized marijuana for recreational use, new research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) and Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) shows. The findings come as campaigns to decriminalize marijuana gain traction with voters and legislators in the U.S., and Canada begins allowing recreational use of marijuana this month.

The two new studies will be presented today at the Combating Alcohol- and Drug-Impaired Driving summit, hosted by IIHS and HLDI at the Vehicle Research Center. The summit brings together highway safety and law enforcement experts to discuss the prevalence and associated risk of alcohol- and drug-impaired driving, as well as strategies to combat impaired driving.

Colorado and Washington were the first states to legalize recreational marijuana for adults 21 and older with voter approval in November 2012. Retail sales began in January 2014 in Colorado and in July 2014 in Washington. Oregon voters approved legalized recreational marijuana in November 2014, and sales started in October 2015. Nevada voters approved recreational marijuana in November 2016, and retail sales began in July 2017.

HLDI analysts estimate that the frequency of collision claims per insured vehicle year rose a combined 6 percent following the start of retail sales of recreational marijuana in Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and Washington, compared with the control states of Idaho, Montana, Utah and Wyoming. The combined-state analysis is based on collision loss data from January 2012 through October 2017.

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On August 7, the New York Times ran a story by Rukmini Callimachi about Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, a young American couple, both graduates of Georgetown University, who decided to quit their humdrum office jobs and go on an epic bike ride and camping trip that would take them all over the world. “I’ve grown tired of spending the best hours of my day in front of a glowing rectangle, of coloring the best years of my life in swaths of grey and beige,” Austin wrote. “I’ve missed too many sunsets while my back was turned.”

So in July of last year, they flew from Washington, D.C., to Cape Town, and from there bicycled through South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, and Malawi to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania….

You watch the news and you read the papers and you’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place,” wrote Austin during their trek. “People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted….I don’t buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own…”

They biked through Kyrgyzstan and entered Tajikistan. It was in that country that their journey came to an abrupt end this past July 29, when five ISIS members deliberately plowed their car into the two adventurers, killing them along with two temporary cycling companions, one from Switzerland and the other from the Netherlands. “Two days later,” wrote Callimachi, “the Islamic State released a video showing five men it identified as the attackers, sitting before the ISIS flag. They face the camera and make a vow: to kill ‘disbelievers….’”

What, then, is the moral of this couple’s story? In the last analysis, it’s a story about two young people who, like many other privileged members of their generation of Americans, went to a supposedly top-notch university only to come away poorly educated but heavily propagandized – imbued with a fashionable postmodern contempt for Western civilization and a readiness to idealize and sentimentalize “the other” (especially when the latter is decidedly uncivilized). This, ultimately, was their tragedy: taking for granted American freedom, prosperity, and security, they dismissed these extraordinary blessings as boring, banal, and (in Austin’s word) “beige,” and set off, with the starry-eyed and suicidal naivete of children who never entirely grew up, on a child’s fairy-tale adventure into the most perilous parts of the planet. Far from being inspirational, theirs is a profoundly cautionary – and distinctly timely – tale that every American, parents especially, should take to heart.

Read it all (cited in the morning sermon) and make sure to read the whole Ny Times original story.

Death by Entitlement https://t.co/4v8q8v3hLY #Trending via @pjmedia_com

— Robert Lloyd Jr (@lloyd1z) August 17, 2018

Two high-profile DUI accidents serve as vivid reminders of just how destructive intoxicated driving can be. Two people are dead, two survivors are recovering from serious injuries, and all of their families are left in a world of hurt.

An intoxicated driver fatally struck a vacationing 11-year-old Danish girl walking with her family Monday night near Cannon Park, police said. This followed a head-on collision involving a drunk driver June 22 that nearly killed congressional candidate Katie Arrington and a friend. The wrong-way driver in that accident died of her injuries.

The young girl’s parents will no doubt be scarred forever. The 30-year-old driver, charged with reckless homicide and felony driving under the influence resulting in a death, faces a possible long prison sentence and a lifetime of regret. The fatal accident also leaves the city with a black eye, coming about the same time Travel + Leisure named Charleston its top U.S. destination for a sixth year in a row.

“This was preventable and never should have happened,” police Chief Luther Reynolds said at a news conference Tuesday alongside Mayor John Tecklenburg and other city officials. “I am very angry. … This hurts all of us.”

Read it all.

On Wednesday, Cardinals tight end Jermaine Gresham helped a random stranger out at the airport.

Delilah Cassidy, an American Airlines passenger, had trouble when her bag came in over the weight limit.

She explained on Twitter that she had just gotten back from Europe and couldn’t pay the $50 the airline was trying to charge her because her cards were being declined, and the airline wouldn’t take cash.

Then a stranger stepped in to help Cassidy.

Read it all.

One of my favorite stories of the week–Jermaine Gresham helps out stranger at airport https://t.co/aWLNdAKMSB #sports #compassion

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) June 2, 2018

It seems that nearly everyone in Boerne[,Texas,] has a Tammie Jo story, and taken together, they paint a picture of a woman almost too impossibly caring, too impossibly devoted to her community. But, they say, that’s why she was a role model long before she landed that damaged jetliner.

Longtime friend and fellow church member Staci Thompson said a deep Christian faith has guided the way Shults lives.

Shults has taught nearly every grade level of Sunday school at their church. She’s volunteered at a school for at-risk kids and turned a cottage on her family’s property into a temporary home for victims of Hurricane Rita and widows.

“She would tell you everything she has she’s been given from God, so she wants to share it,” Thompson said.

Read it all.

After landing troubled Southwest plane, pilot Tammie Jo Shults hugged passengers, texted 'God is good' https://t.co/i0U4FOBwcy #religion #faith #work #usa

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) April 19, 2018

A central question before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit: Can Metro allow secular advertisers to promote Christmas shopping and charitable giving, but not the church?

Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh was unrelenting in questioning Metro’s lawyer, former solicitor general Donald B. Verrilli Jr., and stated unequivocally his view that the policy is “pure discrimination” in violation of the First Amendment.

Kavanaugh, who is on President Trump’s list of candidates for possible Supreme Court vacancies, made several references to recent high court opinions, including a 2017 ruling that sided with a Missouri church denied access to government grants meant for a secular purpose.

The two other judges on the panel — Judith W. Rogers and Robert L. Wilkins — pointed out that the archdiocese had acknowledged its ads were designed in part to promote religion, not just charitable giving.

Read it all.

Starting in May, Chinese citizens who rank low on the country’s burgeoning “social credit” system will be in danger of being banned from buying plane or train tickets for up to a year, according to statements recently released by the country’s National Development and Reform Commission.

With the social credit system, the Chinese government rates citizens based on things like criminal behavior and financial misdeeds, but also on what they buy, say, and do. Those with low “scores” have to deal with penalties and restrictions. China has been working towards rolling out a full version of the system by 2020, but some early versions of it are already in place.

Previously, the Chinese government had focused on restricting the travel of people with massive amounts of debt, like LeEco and Faraday Future founder Jia Yueting, who made the Supreme People’s Court blacklist late last year.

The new travel restrictions are the latest addition to this growing patchwork of social engineering, which has already imposed punishments on more than seven million citizens. And there’s a broad range when it comes to who can be flagged. Citizens who have spread “false information about terrorism,” caused “trouble” on flights, used expired tickets, or were caught smoking on trains could all be banned, according to Reuters.

Read it all.

“Sorry, I died.”

The flight attendants looked as stunned as everyone else — my eyes went directly to them after the jolt — and quickly wheeled the drink cart back to the front of the plane and gathered near the cockpit. They started looking through an emergency manual. I’m no expert, but I’m thinking that’s not a great sign.

I was on the left side of the plane, an aisle seat a couple of rows in front of where the engines under the wings are located. We were about 20 minutes into the flight and I was doing work on my laptop, preparing for Sunday’s assignment of covering the Tennessee Titans at the Cleveland Browns. After that first wave of panic, with my heart trying to beat its way out of my chest, I went to my Yahoo mail account and started writing something to Katie and the kids. I figured, get them something, get a few words out, comfort them in some way. Say goodbye.

Then I realized the wireless was gone. I gulped, closed the laptop, put it in my bag and looked around the plane.

Read it all–this was used to introduce the morning sermon.

(Onion) Buick Introduces New Self-Buying Car https://t.co/gbjAoyqtIc #humour #consumerspending #AutonomousVehicles “In what marks a watershed moment for this company, we here at Buick are proud to present the first and only car that purchases itself” LOL

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) November 29, 2017

Minnesota’s Jack Carlson is making sure kids with physical challenges can still experience the freedom of riding a bike. Boyd Huppert of KARE in Minneapolis reports….

Priests at one of England’s most visited parish churches have expressed concern over the unholy racket made by tourists who feel obliged to photograph everything they see.

The University Church of St Mary the Virgin, in the heart of Oxford, welcomes hundreds of thousands of tourists each year, but the volume of visitors risks overwhelming the peace of the church, parts of which date from the 13th century.

The Rev Charlotte Bannister-Parker, the associate priest, said in a newsletter that tourists needed to challenge the mentality that “if you don’t take a photo, it did not happen”.

The priest, daughter of Sir Roger Bannister, the first person to run a mile in less than four minutes, said: “I am not usually a grumpy person but I have been overwhelmed by the number of tourists coming through the church and the fact that so many of them seem unaware that this is a sacred space.

Read it all (requires subscription).

Reihane Taravati, an outspoken social media activist, was riding in a taxi the other day when she received a stern reprimand from the driver.

Unbeknownst to Taravati, 26, her headscarf — which Iranian women are required to wear as a show of modesty — had slipped down the back of her head, leaving most of her hair exposed.

“Fix your scarf, or the undercover [moral] police will see it,” the cabbie told her. He worried about receiving a ticket in the mail, which would cost him about $30.

As Taravati relayed this story while sipping tea with friends in a Tehran cafe, a debate was raging in the Iranian capital that combines two things that people here obsess over: cars and the way women dress.

Read it all.

Charleston is the nation’s No. 1 city again, and No. 2 in the world, according to the readers of Travel + Leisure magazine.

The recognition comes at a time when residents are increasingly worried about the city’s capacity to handle more visitors.

The results of this year’s survey were released Tuesday morning. Readers were asked to rate cities they had visited on sights/landmarks, culture/arts, restaurants/food, people/friendliness, shopping and value.

This is the fifth consecutive year the magazine’s readers have named Charleston the nation’s top city. Charleston was the top city in the world last year. This year San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, took the top global spot.

Read it all.