There are, however, some production models that are either here -- or very close.

GM is displaying a version of the Vue Green Line sport-ute that, the company says, will be the industry's first plug-in hybrid, which should go into production within two years, beating even the heralded Chevrolet Volt to market.

A plug-in hybrid operates like a normal gasoline-electric hybrid but can be plugged in to regular electrical current overnight to charge the batteries to the point where, GM claims, the Vue will be able to travel 34 miles on electric power alone.

Preceding this plug-in Vue by a year will be a Vue Green Line "2-Mode," an advanced version of the current Vue Green Line that gets 50 percent greater fuel economy than a regular gas-powered Vue.

Escalating tensions in and the Strait of Hormuz, where Iranian patrol boats recently confronted a Navy convoy, portend further global conflict as well.

"I don't think the world is more safe or more dangerous," says Johan Selle, director of operations for iJet Intelligent Risk Systems, a Maryland-based risk consultancy agency. "I think that certain threats are more frequent now than they have been." According to Selle, these include suicide

SAN MATEO, Calif., Jan. 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Avistar Communications Corporation , has announced that Colgate-Palmolive Company, a multinational consumer products company, will deploy its desktop videoconferencing technology integrated with Lotus Sametime. Beginning with an initial installation this month, Colgate-Palmolive's aim is to benefit from the most innovative and effective combination of collaboration tools available for the corporate environment. Colgate-Palmolive recognizes the value that Avistar desktop videoconferencing adds to unified communications, by improving communication, fostering collaboration, and reducing travel expenditures, with their associated carbon emissions.

The addition of Avistar follows the recent upgrade at Colgate-Palmolive to Lotus Sametime 7.5.1. The initial deployment to management level users will support full video and audio collaboration between locations in New York, New Jersey and Asia. Colgate-Palmolive has opted for Avistar's hosted service, enabling infrastructure management and technical support to be off-loaded, yet offering full product performance and reporting. Following a successful rollout, the company expects to extend desktop videoconferencing more broadly later in 2008 and into 2009, with the potential to include thousands of users.

"Our objectives in adding desktop videoconferencing to our Sametime installation are to enhance collaboration across geographic boundaries in order to deliver new products more quickly, gain the value of face-to-face communications both internally and with suppliers, and to reduce travel expense and its impact on our environment," said Jack Haber, Vice President of Corporate eBusiness at Colgate-Palmolive.

"Avistar effectively integrates with Lotus Sametime to bring desktop videoconferencing to any number of uses across the enterprise," said Darren Innes, Avistar's general manager for worldwide direct and channel sales. "Our market-beating bandwidth control technology, which supports video communications and mitigates the need for additional network capacity, will enable Colgate-Palmolive to rapidly scale to meet business demand. Avistar provides a premier desktop videoconferencing solution that offers quick deployment through a hosted solution, delivering desktop videoconferencing software as an easy to manage service."

travel types

If you are in Overland Park, say, visiting one of the many corporate headquarters (it's got Applebee's, Sprint-Nextel and Petrol Oil and Gas, to name a few), you can find yourself with a choice: barbecue, steak or a trip into past travel practices.

Or, in my case, all three.

Barbecue and steak can, even at top dollar, prove lifeless tropes in too many other areas of the country, but not here -- where it sometimes feels like you can walk out back behind the restaurant to pick your individual cow. Stay right where you are in Overland Park, if you wish, and hit Fiorella's Jack Stack Barbecue, one location of a small, high quality local barbecue chain.

If you are looking to take advantage of the high-end steak scene, travel north toward the Kansas City stockyards (I'm a devout carnivore, so my mouth waters just as I type "stockyards") and all the great steakhouses it has to offer, hopping over the border to the Missouri side of Kansas City -- less than an hour's drive -- for one of the best options, Plaza III Streakhouse.

fter two years of this, I met a man who was a troubled soul, a coke addict and an alcoholic, who took me on lots of holidays in return for which I supplied sex on demand and an enormous amount of therapy. Suntan aside, I paid a very heavy price for this relationship. When I discovered the extent of his dishonesty – the receipts, the condoms – I unravelled for the last time, not helped by the amount of cocaine I was taking. I look back and cringe at my total lack of self-respect, and anyone might have thought I was determined to destroy myself. But let's remember: like guns, alcohol and drugs don't kill people – people kill people.

I'm well aware that a person can be a problem drinker without ever touching illegal substances, but for me, and millions of others, alcohol was the ultimate "gateway drug". Although, bizarrely, I lost my virginity sober, I didn't have sober sex for another 23 years , and every other new substance or behaviour I tried was done while cushioned in alcohol. People do more sexual, narcotic, or violent things under the influence of booze than anything else. It's the sheer weight of numbers that I can't get over.

I just don't know why governments don't do anything about all the crime that's committed, day in and day out, which, without alcohol in the mix, simply wouldn't happen. Alcohol is, exponentially, an bigger gateway drug than cannabis has ever been or ever will be, and it's about time that the Government woke up and stopped wasting everyone's time with the "war on drugs", which is about as nonsensical as the "war on terror". And now it's January, official "wagon" month in the modern British citizen's calendar. Everybody's doing what they spend the rest of the year talking about – giving up alcohol and other intoxicants. People are desperately proud of their January abstinence, not least because this excessive self-denial will entitle them to party all the harder come 1 February.