The Hormel Hunger Survey released on Monday also showed 53 percent of Americans polled believe government subsidies for ethanol production will help reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil, but nearly as many -- 47 percent -- oppose the subsidies because they increase food prices.

HAMBURG, Germany (Reuters) - Imposing a standard speed limit of 130 kph (80 mph) on German motorways would have scant impact on the environment and only hurt domestic carmakers, the country's VDA auto industry group said on Monday.

"Such fixed speed limits would be an ecological zero-sum game and would damage the German auto sector," VDA President Matthias Wissmann said in a statement to Reuters.

Germany is unusual in that stretches of its motorways still have no speed limit, and the country's influential car industry has lobbied hard against any national rules.

Boston, Mass. - More than three out of five Cape Cod/Island residents (61 percent) -- including a bipartisan 54 percent of Republicans, 69 percent of Democrats and 50 percent of Independents -- favor the Cape Wind project, according to a major new scientific survey of 501 Cape and Island residents conducted by Opinion Research Corporation (ORC) for the Newton, MA.-based Civil Society Institute, a nonprofit and nonpartisan think tank.

The Civil Society Institute survey tests six arguments made against Cape Wind by critics of the project and finds that not one of the arguments succeeds in persuading half or more of Cape/Island residents to oppose the project. In fact, fully half of the arguments -- tourism/the regional economy, boating and commercial fishing -- backfire and generate more support than opposition for Cape Wind.

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Dutch solar car Nuna4 won the 20th World Solar Challenge, a 3,000 km (1,864 mile) race through the Australian outback, race officials said on Friday.

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A Dutch environment group launched a campaign on Friday called "Proud to be a non-Flying Dutchman" to get the travel-happy Dutch to reduce their air miles for the sake of the climate.

"We want to discourage Christmas shopping in London, disco nights in Ibiza, Milan weekends and stag nights in Barcelona," Dutch Friends of the Earth said on Friday.

Oil's bullish momentum has pulled in increasing amounts of speculative investment and waves of technical buying have been triggered as U.S. oil pierced successive lines of resistance.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp will slash the price and size of its hybrid system by around half for the next-generation Prius model, and use a nickel-metal hydride battery instead of lithium-ion, a top executive said.

"When we went from the first-generation Prius to the second-generation, we did the same thing," Executive Vice President Kazuo Okamoto, in charge of Toyota's research and development, told reporters in Tokyo.

Toyota, the world's biggest automaker, has not publicly disclosed a timeframe for the introduction of the third-generation Prius model. Some media reports have speculated the planned late-2008 launch would be delayed because of concerns over the safety of lithium-ion batteries.