Oklahoma

Small plane crashes during race; rescuer dies

A single-engine plane crashed Sunday during an air race, seriously injuring the pilot and leaving a rescuer dead, authorities said.

The plane lost power and crashed shortly after noon. The pilot was airlifted to an Oklahoma City hospital and was listed in critical condition.

A member of the airport’s ground crew was killed when he fell from the back of a pickup truck racing to the scene of the crash, said John Clabes, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Fire officials said the small plane apparently hit the edge of the runway.

The two-day event at the Clarence Page Airport featured three to four races a day between heats of five planes.

Scott Rayburn, owner of Aerospace Refinishing Inc., a business on the airport grounds, said the planes involved in the races were small, propeller-driven aircraft between 12 and 15 feet long.

“They’re like oversized model airplanes,” Rayburn said. “This is definitely not something you want to fly in from here to Texas. They look like coffins with wings.”

Washington, D.C.

Gen. Myers defends treatment of prisoners

The Pentagon’s top general on Sunday defended the treatment of prisoners at the U.S. Navy prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and he said the U.S. believed al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was wounded, though it’s not known how badly.

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the United States had done a good job of humanely treating detainees. Muslims in several countries have protested in recent weeks about allegations that a Quran was flushed down a toilet at Guantanamo as part of an interrogation of a prisoner.

The human rights group Amnesty International released a report last week calling the prison camp “the gulag of our time.”

Myers said that report was “absolutely irresponsible.” He said the U.S. was doing its best to detain fighters who, if released, “would turn right around and try to slit our throats, slit our children’s throats.”

Florida

Steering wheel tests for alcohol consumption

If the car doesn’t start, you are too drunk to drive.

That is the premise behind a $600 sensor that can be installed in a steering wheel or in gloves and will test a driver’s skin to determine alcohol consumption.

Inventor Dennis Bellehumeur, 54, says his device prevents a vehicle from starting or running if the driver is over the legal alcohol limit.

The device’s skin sensor makes it different from the “breath alcohol ignition interlock” that has been on the market for three decades. That device requires that a driver blow into an instrument that measures alcohol in the breath.

Bellehumeur, a real estate agent and deli owner in Wilton Manors, spent 12 years developing his sensor after his then-teenage son crashed into a utility pole while driving drunk and suffered minor brain damage.

He received a patent this month, and the sensor should complete testing this year, he said.

Drunken driving killed an estimated 16,654 people last year, nearly 40 percent of the nation’s total traffic deaths, according to agency projections released in April.

California

Ticket against jaywalking chicken dismissed

A chicken that got a ticket for crossing the road has clawed his way out of it.

The $54 citation for impeding traffic was dismissed Friday after Linc and Helena Moore’s attorney argued that the fowl was domesticated and could not be charged as livestock.

State law restricts livestock on highways, but not domestic animals.

The chicken was ticketed March 26 for impeding traffic after it wandered onto a road.

The Moores said they got the ticket because they were among several people who complained that deputies have done little to curb noisy off-road vehicle riders.

“For the last two and a half years, no one has been able to stop the kids riding their bikes in the middle of the road or the neighbors’ dogs running around our neighborhood,” Linc Moore said. “But when our chicken escaped and crossed the road once, it became a huge issue.”

Sheriff’s officials said the ticket had nothing to do with the Moores’ complaints.