Lucky Owner Gets Her 350,000-Mile Beetle Restored by VW for Free

Kathleen Brooks, owner of this red Beetle (nicknamed "Annie" ), purchased the car new in December of 1966, and has used it to commute to work for the past 51 years. Brooks works with breast cancer patients and survivors to provide comfort and cosmetic care during treatment and recovery. She's also a three-time breast cancer survivor herself. If anyone deserves a free factory restoration for their car, it's her.

Volkswagen took 11 months at the company's Mexico factory to fully restore Brooks' Beetle, replacing 40 percent of its parts, and saving 357 individual pieces. The restoration team even went as far as to recreate all of the original stickers Brooks put on the car over her years of ownership. In order to restore the paint to its original condition, the team took the color from inside the glove box and matched it to the sandblasted, restored chassis.

Project manager and mechatronics engineer Augusto Zamudio said the goal wasn't to create a museum quality Beetle, but to bring the car back to a state where Brooks could drive and enjoy it for many more years to come. As a result, the car got new, upgraded disc brakes, a modern vintage-look radio, a new wiring harness, a refreshed suspension, and a rebuilt engine and transmission. As you can see in the picture above, the end result is a stunning piece of machinery.

We hope Brooks and her car will enjoy many more miles of reliable fun together. Judging by the fantastic factory restoration job, we're confident that's exactly what'll happen.

16 photos at link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/enthusiasts/lucky-owner-gets-her-350000-mile-beetle-restored-by-vw-for-free/ar-BBQLPkM?ocid=Login#image=BBQLPkM_1|1

The Latest: Pelosi: Trump thinks Mexico will pay for wall

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on President Donald Trump’s promised U.S.-Mexico border wall (all times local):

4:35 p.m.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi says President Donald Trump thinks Mexico will pay for the border wall through the new trade deal.

Pelosi told colleagues privately that Trump insisted during an Oval Office meeting that Mexico will pay for the wall “one way or another.”

She told him Mexico isn’t going to pay for it. The president responded that Mexico would pay with money the U.S. will make from the revised North American Free Trade Deal, known as USMCA.

Pelosi told the president “that’s terrible” and told him she’s going “go out and tell people that you think that Mexico is paying for it with money that should be going into our economy.”

Pelosi’s remarks to Democrats were described by an aide in the room who was not authorized to speak publicly.

— By AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro


More from today: https://apnews.com/1674502d0a124a39a99bef1dca7e93e8



House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of Calif., right, accompanied by Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer of N.Y., left, speaks to the media following a meeting with President Donald Trump. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

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That was awkward -- at world's biggest climate conference, U.S. promotes fossil fuels

KATOWICE, Poland — President Trump’s top White House adviser on energy and climate stood before the crowd of some 200 people on Monday and tried to burnish the image of coal, the fossil fuel that powered the industrial revolution — and is now a major culprit behind the climate crisis world leaders are meeting here to address.

“We strongly believe that no country should have to sacrifice economic prosperity or energy security in pursuit of environmental sustainability,” said Wells Griffith, Trump’s adviser.

Mocking laughter echoed through the conference room. A woman yelled, “These false solutions are a joke!” And dozens of people erupted into chants of protest.

The protest was a piece of theater, and so too was the United States’ public embrace of coal and other dirty fuels at an event otherwise dedicated to saving the world from the catastrophic effects of climate change. The standoff punctuated the awkward position the American delegation finds itself in as career bureaucrats seek to advance the Trump administration’s agenda in an international arena aimed at cutting back on fossil fuels.


Read more (Includes video): https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/that-was-awkward--at-worlds-biggest-climate-conference-us-promotes-fossil-fuels/2018/12/10/aa8600c4-f8ae-11e8-8642-c9718a256cbd_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e8a3579339b3



Youth and indigenous groups protest during a U.S.-hosted event Monday at the U.N. climate talks in Katowice, Poland. (Frank Jordans/AP)

Climate change was behind 15 weather disasters in 2017

A drought scorched the Great Plains, causing wildfires and $2.5 billion in agriculture losses. Catastrophic floods submerged more than a third of Bangladesh. Record-shattering heat waves killed scores of people in Europe and China.

These were among 15 extreme weather events in 2017 that were made more likely by human-caused climate change, according to in-depth studies published this week in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. At least one episode — a devastating marine heat wave off the coast of Australia that cooked ecosystems and damaged fisheries — would have been “virtually impossible” without human influence, scientists said.

The findings, presented Monday at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, underscore the degree to which climate change is already harming human society, researchers said.

“People used to talk about climate change as a very complex and difficult problem of the future — something that would happen in places far away and on long time scales,” said Jeff Rosenfeld, the Bulletin’s editor in chief. “But hurricanes and wildfires and bleaching and drought . . . they’re happening to us right now, and we face new and challenging risks of how they’re going to affect us in the future.”


Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/10/climate-change-was-behind-weather-disasters/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.995fdaf5738b



Flood-affected villagers wait for relief assistance Aug. 15, 2017, on a washed-out road in Morigaon district in the northeastern Indian state of Assam. (Anupam Nath/AP)

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