Oversized, gas-guzzling 4x4s could be banned from the increasingly traffic-clogged streets of Paris within the next 18 months following a resolution passed by the city's council.
"Off-road vehicles are just not suited to towns and you have to wonder why people drive them," Denis Baupin, a senior Green party councillor who tabled the resolution, said on Wednesday.
"They're polluters, they're space-occupiers, they're dangerous for pedestrians and other road users. They're a caricature of a car," he said.
Under the resolution, sports utility vehicles (SUVs) could be banned from Paris city center during peak pollution periods and their owners denied residents' parking permits.
Off-roaders could also be barred from protected areas like the Bois de Boulogne and the banks of the river Seine.
The plan, which would require the approval of the city's police chief and is certain to meet stiff opposition from the motoring lobby, follows similar remarks by London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who last month described 4x4 vehicles as "bad for London -- completely unnecessary" and called their owners "complete idiots."
A recent British survey found that just one in eight 4x4 drivers had driven their car off-road, and six in 10 never take it out of town.
The vehicles are an increasingly common sight in Paris's wealthier quarters.
Sales surged by 11 percent in France last year and the cars make up nearly 5 percent of the market.
A recent survey by France's Agency for the Environment and Energy Management, Ademe, placed Mercedes' deluxe but bulky G500 off-roader top of a "list of shame" of the most environmentally harmful cars in Europe, and underlined the fact that of the 18 vehicles on that list, 14 are SUVs.
A similar British study by the Environmental Transport Association, based on manufacturers' figures, named the Range Rover 4.6 HSE as the dirtiest car on the road.
Baupin said Paris could not legally ban SUVs outright, but could include a clause in its next transport and traffic plan, due to be adopted next year, restricting vehicles that did not meet minimum environmental requirements.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS