plus 3, Truck Series back at Darlington, set for Aug. 14 event - CBS Sports

Truck Series back at Darlington, set for Aug. 14 event - CBS Sports
Geneva Auto Show: MINI Countryman Ready For On-Road, Off-Road Duty - MSN Money
Aftershock drives more from Haitian capital - ksl.com
1935 Plymouth Coupe - Crowd Pleaser - Street Rodder Magazine

Truck Series back at Darlington, set for Aug. 14 event - CBS Sports

Posted: 20 Jan 2010 05:21 PM PST

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- Chris Browning is hoping the return of NASCAR's Truck Series to Darlington Raceway this summer will lead to a longer run than the last time.

Darlington officials announced Wednesday that the track would hold the "Too Tough To Tame" 200 on the night of Aug. 14. Set up, inspection, qualifying and the race will all take place that Saturday, Browning told the Associated Press.

"It's going to be a neat deal," said Browning, the president of the raceway.

Browning and his staff had sought to bring the Truck Series back to Darlington for several years, given the area's long history of NASCAR racing and its love of pickups.

Darlington had initially tried to attach a truck race to its Southern 500 show over Mother's Day weekend. However, schedules had never worked out, Browning said.

Darlington got an opening when the Truck Series decided not to run at Milwaukee this year, and Browning pounced on the chance to light up the track for a second event.

"Number one, the competition is great. The guys are so hungry and they race so hard," he said. "The other is that people in our area can really relate to trucks."

Browning said that was the case in the early 2000s when the trucks rolled for four seasons at the egg-shaped oval. The late Bobby Hamilton won the truck race here in 2001 and 2003. Ted Musgrave won in 2002, and Sprint Cup star Kasey Kahne was a rookie in 2004 when he took the checkered flag in Darlington's first-ever night race.

"I think it will be awesome for the Truck Series to go back to Darlington," said Ron Hornaday, last year's series champion.

Hornaday said racers like Hamilton and Musgrave regularly put on a strong show for fans.

"Traditionally, Darlington has been one of those places that have close finishes which the Truck Series is known for," Hornaday said. "I'm excited to go there."

It'll be a different, downsized Darlington drivers come back to.

The track, nicknamed "The Lady In Black," had hosted two Sprint Cup races a year from 1960 through 2004, including the Southern 500 on Labor Day weekend. In NASCAR's schedule realignment, that slot was assigned to California and Darlington got the Saturday night before Mother's Day for its lone Sprint Cup date.

Darlington has made a good run out of what some had thought was a dead weekend, gaining sellouts of 63,000 from 2005 to 2008 and coming fewer than 5,000 shy of a fifth straight full house last May.

The track also went through a repaving before the 2008 Southern 500. The asphalt is still new enough to bother racers who haven't driven there recently.

"It is great to go back to Darlington Raceway, one of the most historic tracks in NASCAR," said series director Wayne Auton. "The trucks have had great races there in the past and fans will definitely get their money's worth."

Browning doesn't see why the trucks can't be a yearly happening for Darlington.

The date comes before the start of school -- children 12 and under can attend for free -- and before the region turns its attention to college football.

"If it all works out, we'd like to stay with that. It gives us another weekend to be running here," Browning said. "It could be the perfect schedule for us."

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Geneva Auto Show: MINI Countryman Ready For On-Road, Off-Road Duty - MSN Money

Posted: 20 Jan 2010 04:23 PM PST

Need a reason to think spring? Try this: Deliveries of the four-seat Maserati GranTurismo convertible begin this spring and the car carries a base sticker price of $139,700.

The figure includes the base price of the car, $135,800; dealer prep, $300; shipping charges, $1,500, and gas-guzzler tax, $2,100.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Aftershock drives more from Haitian capital - ksl.com

Posted: 20 Jan 2010 05:21 PM PST

By PAUL HAVEN and MIKE MELIA
Associated Press Writers

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) - Workers are carving out mass graves on a hillside north of Haiti's capital, using earth-movers to bury 10,000 earthquake victims in a single day while relief workers warn that people are still dying of their injuries.

Medical clinics have 12-day patient backlogs, untreated injuries are festering and makeshift camps housing thousands of survivors could foster disease, experts said.

"The next health risk could include outbreaks of diarrhea, respiratory tract infections and other diseases among hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in overcrowded camps with poor or nonexistent sanitation," said Dr. Greg Elder, deputy operations manager for Doctors Without Borders in Haiti.

The death toll is estimated at 200,000, according to Haitian government figures relayed by the European Commission, with 80,000 buried in mass graves. The commission now estimates 2 million homeless, up from 1.5 million, and says 250,000 are in need of urgent aid.

Getting help in is still a challenge. Gen. Douglas Fraser, head of the U.S. Southern Command running Haiti's airports said Thursday that 1,400 flights are on a waiting list for slots at the Port-au-Prince airport that can handle 120 to 140 flights a day.

In the sparsely populated wasteland of Titanyen, north of Port-au-Prince, burial workers said the macabre task of handling the never-ending flow of bodies was traumatizing.

"I have seen so many children, so many children. I cannot sleep at night and, if I do, it is a constant nightmare," said Foultone Fequiert, 38, his face covered with a T-shirt against the overwhelming stench.

The dead stick out at all angles from the mass graves _ tall mounds of chalky dirt, the limbs of men, women and children frozen together in death. "I received 10,000 bodies yesterday alone," said Fequiert.

Workers say they have no time to give the dead proper religious burials or follow pleas from the international community that bodies be buried in shallow graves from which loved ones might eventually retrieve them.

"We just dump them in, and fill it up," said Luckner Clerzier, 39, who was helping guide trucks to another grave site farther up the road.

An Associated Press reporter counted 15 burial mounds at Clerzier's site, each covering a wide trench cut into the ground some 25 feet (8 meters) deep, and rising 15 feet (4.5 meters) into the air. At the larger mass grave, where Fequiert toiled, three earth-moving machines cut long trenches into the earth, readying them for more cadavers.

Others struggle to stem the flow of the dead.

More than eight days after the magnitude-7.0 earthquake, rescuers searched late into the night for survivors with dogs and sonar equipment. A Los Angeles County rescue team sent three dogs separately into the rubble on a street corner in Petionville, a suburb overlooking Port-au-Prince. Each dog picked up the scent of life at one spot.

They tested the spot and screamed into the rubble in Creole they've learned: "If you hear me, bang three times."

They heard no response, but vowed to continue.

"It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack, and each day the needles are disappearing," team member Steven Chin said.

One rescue was reported. The International Medical Corps said it was caring for a child found in ruins Wednesday. The boy's uncle told doctors and a nurse with the Los Angeles-based organization that relatives pulled the 5-year-old from the wreckage of his home after searching for a week, said Margaret Aguirre, an IMC spokeswoman in Haiti.

A Dutch mercy flight carrying 106 children slated for adoption arrived in the Netherlands from Port-au-Prince on Thursday. Nearly all of the children, aged 6 months to 7 years, were in the process of being adopted and already had been matched to new Dutch parents before the quake.

At the Mission Baptiste hospital south of Port-au-Prince, patients waited on benches or rolling beds while doctors and nurses raced among them, X-rays in hand.

The hospital had just received badly need supplies from soldiers of the U.S Army's 82nd Airborne Division, but hospital director John Angus said there wasn't enough. He pleaded for more doctors, casts and metal plates to fix broken limbs.

U.N. peacekeepers and U.S. troops have been helping keep order around aid deliveries and clinics in the stricken city, which seemed relatively calm on Thursday, even if looters continued to pillage pockets of downtown.

Police stood by as people made off with food and mobile phones from shattered shops, saying they were trying to save stores that are still undamaged.

"It is not easy but we try to protect what we can," said officer Belimaire Laneau.

Young men with machetes fought over packages of baby diapers within sight of the body of a young woman who had been shot in the head. Witnesses said police had shot her, but officers in the vicinity denied it.

Meanwhile, a flotilla of rescue vessels led by the U.S. hospital ship Comfort has steamed into Port-au-Prince harbor to help fill gaps in the struggling global effort to deliver water, food and medical help.

Elder, of Doctors Without Borders, said that patients were dying of sepsis from untreated wounds and that some of the group's posts had 10- to 12-day backups of patients.

The U.S. Navy said it is working to add 350 more crew members to the hospital ship, quadrupling the number of beds aboard to 1,000 and increasing the number of operating rooms from six to 11.

Commanders of the floating hospital also are sending medical teams ashore to help with casualty evaluation and triage.

At United Nations headquarters in New York, U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes said it was believed 3 million people are affected. Vast, makeshift camps and settlements have sprung up for survivors.

Joseph St. Juste and his 5-year-old daughter, Jessica, were among 50,000 people spending their nights at a golf course under shelters of bed sheets or cardboard boxes. He is afraid to stay in his home because of the aftershocks.

St. Juste, a 36-year-old bus driver, wakes up every day and goes out to find food and water for his daughter.

"I wake up for her," he said. "Life is hard anymore. I've got to get out of Haiti. There is no life in Haiti."

___

Associated Press writers contributing to this report included Alfred de Montesquiou, Tamara Lush, Kevin Maurer, Michelle Faul, Bill Gorman and Jessica Desvarieux in Haiti; Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations; Pauline Jelinek in Washington; Mike Corder in Eindhoven, Netherlands; Emma Vandore and Elaine Ganley in Paris; and Aoife White in Brussels.

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1935 Plymouth Coupe - Crowd Pleaser - Street Rodder Magazine

Posted: 20 Jan 2010 03:26 PM PST

When Tyler first spotted the car on craigslist, it was red and stock appearing, and the condition was acceptable if not impressive, but it caught his attention because it was different. The only turnoff was the price-just under $14,000. Six months went by. One night around midnight, Tyler was back on the computer, searching craigslist for cars. He typed in 1935, and up came the Plymouth, which had been posted three minutes earlier. This time the price was $4,900. The two-thirds price drop seemed weird, so Tyler sent an email. The seller, it turned out, had been working on the car for 10 years, collecting parts and making modifications, but the project had stalled.

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