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Also the group on Facebook went along the lines "Let's all draw Mohammed" which led to alot of racist/hateful drawings. The group should never have been opened and Pakistan also overreacted.

French carmaker Renault is facing a backlash over plans to christen a new model Zoe.

Parisian Zoe Renault, 23, has hired lawyers to insist that Renault scrap its branding.

"I could not bear to hear: 'Zoe's broken down' or 'We need to get Zoe overhauled'," she told Le Parisien newspaper.

Renault is facing other petitions from women called Zoe. A Renault spokesman said Zoe was not a "definitive choice".

The all-electric Renault Zoe ZE (zero emission) is set for launch in 2012. Zoe - which means "life" in Greek - was apparently chosen to underline the car's environmental credentials.

Zoe Renault - who has no apparent family link to the company - said in an interview with Le Parisien that she could not bear to be associated with a car for the rest of her life, and all the inevitable sarcastic gibes.

Her lawyer David Koubbi, who specialises in the protection of first names and is representing other Zoes, said he had sent a letter to Renault's chief executive arguing that the plans were an attack on the rights of his clients.

If the company does not change its plans, Mr Koubbi said he would take the case to court.

A spokeman for Renault told the newspaper said that naming cars after women was nothing new, but said that Zoe was the name of a concept car and was not a definitive choice.

Zoe is an increasingly fashionable name in France, and was ranked the sixth most popular girls name in 2009, according to a list compiled by prenom.com.

Of course she's trying to get money. That's what 95% of lawsuits are these days. Butthurt tightarses trying for a money grab.

It might take Renault just to change the name, but that's still a BIG change. It's cheaper for them to just go for a settlement.

A young Chinese woman was left partially deaf following a passionate kiss from her boyfriend.

The 20-something from Zhuhai in Guangdong province arrived at hospital having completely lost the hearing in her left ear, said local reports.

The incident prompted a series of articles in the local media warning of the dangers of excessive kissing.

"While kissing is normally very safe, doctors advise people to proceed with caution," wrote the China Daily.

The doctor who treated the girl in hospital was quoted in the paper explaining what had happened.

"The kiss reduced the pressure in the mouth, pulled the eardrum out and caused the breakdown of the ear."

The chorus of warnings was echoed by the Shanghai Daily, which wrote: "A strong kiss may cause an imbalance in the air pressure between two inner ears and lead to a broken ear drum."

The young woman is expected to regain her full hearing within about two months.

Must of been some pretty passionate lovemaking for that to happen.

Taking a deep drag on his cigarette while resting on the steering wheel of his truck, he looks like a parody of a middle-aged lorry driver.

But the image covers up a much more disturbing truth: At just the tender age of two, Ardi Rizal's health has been so ruined by his 40-a-day habit that he now struggles to move by himself.

The four-stone Indonesia toddler is certainly far too unfit to run around with other children - and his condition is set to rapidly deteriorate.

A psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada sees video games as "practice" for controlling your dreams. Jayne Gackenbach presented her work for discussion at the Sixth Annual Games for Health Conference in Boston this week.


A LiveScience article published earlier this week detailed a couple of studies conducted by Gackenbach in 2006 and 2008 where she surveyed the dreams of gamers and non-gamers and examined the connection between gaming and nightmares. Some of the things she found:

--People who played games were more likely to report lucid dreams (the kind you can control as an observer while still being a participant).--Of people who reported lucid dreams, gamers "never had dream control over anything beyond their dream selves."--Gamers didn't code nightmares as "threatening." Rather, they seemed to be having fun.--Gamers' nightmares are more violent than non-gamer dreams (like, rated-R as opposed to PG-13).

Gackenbach hopes to bring her research to a sleep study lab, but funding is an issue. LiveScience suggests that her research may tie into treatment studies for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The Games for Health Conference ran last week.

In DC, even the Spelling Bee draws protesters
WASHINGTON – The nation's capital always draws its share of protesters, picketing for causes ranging from health care reform to immigration policy.

But spelling bee protesters? They're out here, too.

Four peaceful protesters, some dressed in full-length black and yellow bee costumes, represented the American Literacy Council and the London-based Spelling Society and stood outside the Grand Hyatt on Thursday, where the Scripps National Spelling Bee is being held. Their message was short: Simplify the way we spell words.

Roberta Mahoney, 81, a former Fairfax County, Va. elementary school principal, said the current language obstructs 40 percent of the population from learning how to read, write and spell.

"Our alphabet has 425-plus ways of putting words together in illogical ways," Mahoney said.

The protesting cohort distributed pins to willing passers-by with their logo, "Enuf is enuf. Enough is too much."

According to literature distributed by the group, it makes more sense for "fruit" to be spelled as "froot," "slow" should be "slo," and "heifer" — a word spelled correctly during the first oral round of the bee Thursday by Texas competitor Ramesh Ghanta — should be "hefer."

Meanwhile, inside the hotel's Independence Ballroom, 273 spellers celebrated the complexity of the language in all its glory, correctly spelling words like zaibatsu, vibrissae and biauriculate.

While the protesters could make headway with cell phone texters who routinely swap "u" for "you" and "gr8" for "great," their message may be a harder sell for the Scripps crowd.

Mahoney had trouble gaining traction with at least one bee attendee. New Mexico resident Matthew Evans, 15, a former speller whose sister is participating in the bee this year, reasoned with her that if English spellings were changed, spelling bees would cease to exist.

"If a dictionary lists 'enough' as 'enuf,' the spelling bee goes by the dictionary, therefore all the spelling words are easier to spell, so the spelling bee is gone," Evans said.

"Well," Mahoney replied, "they could pick their own dictionary."

You can stop polishing your glasses — you're reading that right. A plan proposed to detonate a nuke to seal off that troublesome oil well is gaining support with each of BP's failures. The Russians apparently used the tactic five times between 1966 and 1981. They went four for five.

Still, those first four times saw wells successfully sealed off, including one that had been raging for three years (the spill in the Gulf — the worst oil leak in U.S. history — has been at it for over 40 days, by comparison). The method didn't work for the last well, and those responsible wonder if they just had poor geological data.

The call to go nuclear is spearheaded by voices such as Matt Simmons, a Houston energy expert and investment banker, who claimed the plan was thanks to "all the best scientists." He went on, saying, "Probably the only thing we can do is create a weapon system and send it down 18,000 feet and detonate it, hopefully encasing the oil."

The government's Energy Department was not as enthralled, as one senior official remarked, "It's crazy."

Will it ever happen? According to an anonymous source at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico — y'know, the guys and gals who created the Bomb in the first place — no. "It's not going to happen," continuing on with "Technically, it would be exploring new ground in the midst of a disaster — and you might make it worse."

Would you want to nuke the well if it ensured that it would be sealed? Or is a nuke only going to cause more environmental damage?

Hasn't that already been posted somewhere here?