SANTAQUIN, Utah — A truck driver who won a $380,000 Lamborghini in a convenience store contest crashed the sports car six hours after he got it, and now plans to sell the 640-horsepower convertible because he cannot afford the insurance or taxes.

"I already had offers on it. I'm going to sell it," David Dopp said Wednesday. "I have bills more important than a Lamborghini. I've got a family to support."

Dopp, a 34-year-old truck driver for Frito-Lay, spun out of control just a few hours after taking the keys to the Murcielago Roadster that he won in a "Joe Schmo to Lambo" contest sponsored by Maverik convenience stores.

Dopp told The Associated Press the damage "isn't super bad" — a punctured oil pan and wheel and a few dents and scratches on the front and rear ends. The father of six said he couldn't afford to pay taxes on the car or the insurance, which runs $3,500 every six months.

"That's why rich people own them," he said. "The poor people like me don't."

Dopp was taking family members and friends on joy rides the first evening. He said he took a curve at about 45 mph and "hit some black ice and spun out." The car jumped a curb and went through a fence before coming to a rest about 75 feet off the road. Neither Dopp nor his passenger was injured.

"My heart pretty much fell out," Annette Dopp told KSL-TV of Salt Lake City. "They said they were OK. Then (came), you know, that feeling when your heart drops and you're like, 'Oh, my gosh. What do we do now?'"

Dopp was videotaped jumping up and down and hollering in speechless disbelief when contest officials announced during a Nov. 12 college football game that he won the car. He had to take out insurance before he could claim the car — "that was a good thing," he says — and took the keys to the roadster Saturday.

Dopp said he never imagined he could keep the car for long because it costs too much to own.

He also won $5,000 worth of driving lessons at Miller Motorsports Park in Tooele County.

Should have used the driving lessons.

CHICAGO — The Rod Blagojevich who once challenged a prosecutor to face him like a man, the glad-handing politician who took to celebrity TV shows to profess his innocence, was nowhere to be found Wednesday as he was sentenced to 14 years in prison for corruption.

Frowning and pulling nervously at his tie, the disgraced former governor seemed like another person as he stepped up to address the sentencing judge. Bluster once as conspicuous as his famously lavish head of dark hair was wiped out, a victim of his June convictions on charges that included attempting to sell President Barack Obama’s U.S.

The iPad hasn’t been much of a revenue stream for Microsoft, which has been focusing on developing its own competing tablet ecosystem. But as a software company, it can’t ignore the scores of millions of Apple devices out there for long. Sure, it has a few things in the App Store, but one of its biggest earners, Office, is entirely absent. The Daily reports that this is likely to change shortly, as Microsoft is planning to debut an iPad version of their productivity suite next year.

It would be a stripped-down version more in line with their mobile apps than the desktop ones. Users can, after all, easily view and make simple edits on a tablet machine, but heavy duty spreadsheet or slide work will still necessitate a desktop OS.

The price would likely be similar to that of Apple’s productivity apps: around $10, or at any rate in that vicinity. Price parity would be the ideal, but Microsoft may feel (perhaps rightly so) that its offering is worth more to enterprise users who have adopted the iPad informally as an email and calendar platform.

On the other hand, Microsoft doesn’t need the money so much as the platform presence, so a higher price seems unlikely. Preventing the leakage of users to Apple platforms is crucial in maintaining Microsoft’s dominance in the office apps arena.

The timing just turned out to be a bit awkward; Microsoft will certainly be putting out its own native and complete solution alongside Windows 8, but the iPad’s prominence is too great to be ignored at this point, and supporting it ASAP became more important than a unified tablet infrastructure. Hence a release to satisfy impatient customers and then later the “real” Office Tablet Edition.

The Dover Air Force Base mortuary for years disposed of some dead troops’ body parts by burning them and dumping the ashes in a Virginia landfill, a practice that officials have since abandoned in favor of burying the remains at sea.

The Dover mortuary, which is the main point of entry for America’s war dead, sent remains to the landfill from 2003 until 2008, according to Air Force officials. The manner of disposal was typically withheld from the relatives of fallen service members. The disclosure comes in the aftermath of several federal investigations into mishandling of remains at the mortuary.

Air Force officials acknowledged the practice Wednesday in response to inquiries from The Washington Post. They said the procedure was limited to portions of body parts that were unable to be identified at first or were later recovered from the battlefield, and which family members had indicated could be disposed of by the military.

Lt. Gen. Darrell G. Jones, the Air Force’s deputy chief for personnel, said the body parts were first cremated, then incinerated, and then taken to a landfill by a military contractor. He could not explain why both cremation and incineration were necessary, but likened the process to disposing of medical waste.

Jones also could not estimate how many body parts were handled in this way. “That was the common practice at the time and since then our practices have improved,” he said.

An Air Force document shows that the landfill was in King George County, Va. Officials with Waste Management Inc., which operates the landfill, said it was kept in the dark about the origin of the ashes. “We were not specifically made aware of that process by the Air Force,” said Lisa Kardell, a spokeswoman for the company.

The Dover mortuary changed its policy in June 2008, Jones said. Since then, the Navy has placed the cremated remains of body parts in urns that are buried at sea.

Asked if it was appropriate or dignified to incinerate troops’ body parts and dispose of them in a landfill, Jones declined to answer directly. “We have recognized a much better way of doing things,” he said. “Let me be emphatic: I think the current procedures are better.”

On Tuesday, the Air Force acknowledged that the mortuary had lost a dead soldier’s ankle and an unidentified body part recovered from an air crash; had sawed off a Marine’s arm so he would fit in his casket; and had improperly stored and tracked other remains.

The Air Force disciplined three mortuary supervisors after an 18-month investigation, but has not fired any of them, despite calls from lawmakers and veterans’ groups for tougher action.

“What happened at Dover AFB exceeds on many levels the nationwide anger that resulted from reports of mistreated wounded at the former Walter Reed Army Medical Center in 2007 and reports of lost or misplaced graves at Arlington National Cemetery,” said Richard L. DeNoyer, the national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “You only get one chance to return our fallen warriors to their families with all the dignity and respect they deserve from a grateful nation — and that mortuary affairs unit failed.”

Every single person that knew about this needs to be fired, and the people who signed off on it need to be prosecuted. This is beyond the pale.

ANTAKYA, Turkey — Once one of Syria’s closest allies, Turkey is hosting an armed opposition group waging an insurgency against the government of President Bashar al-Assad, providing shelter to the commander and dozens of members of the group, the Free Syrian Army, and allowing them to orchestrate attacks across the border from inside a camp guarded by the Turkish military.

The support for the insurgents comes amid a broader Turkish campaign to undermine Mr. Assad’s government. Turkey is expected to impose sanctions soon on Syria, and it has deepened its support for an umbrella political opposition group known as the Syrian National Council, which announced its formation in Istanbul. But its harboring of leaders in the Free Syrian Army, a militia composed of defectors from the Syrian armed forces, may be its most striking challenge so far to Damascus.

On Wednesday, the group, living in a heavily guarded refugee camp in Turkey, claimed responsibility for killing nine Syrian soldiers, including one uniformed officer, in an attack in restive central Syria.

Turkish officials describe their relationship with the group’s commander, Col. Riad al-As’aad, and the 60 to 70 members living in the “officers’ camp” as purely humanitarian. Turkey’s primary concern, the officials said, is for the physical safety of defectors. When asked specifically about allowing the group to organize military operations while under the protection of Turkey, a Foreign Ministry official said that their only concern was humanitarian protection and that they could not stop them from expressing their views.

“At the time all of these people escaped from Syria, we did not know who was who, it was not written on their heads ‘I am a soldier’ or ‘I am an opposition member,’ ” said a Foreign Ministry spokesman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in keeping with diplomatic protocol. “We are providing these people with temporary residence on humanitarian grounds, and that will continue.”

Good move Turkey.

October 12, 2011 | ISSUE 47•43

NEW YORK—As the Occupy Wall Street protest expands and grows into a nationwide movement, Americans are eagerly awaiting a list of demands from the group so they can then systematically disregard them and continue going about their business, polls showed this week. "The protesters need to unify around a shared agenda with precise policy goals so I can begin paying no attention to them whatsoever," said Tulsa, OK poll respondent Kaye Petrachonis, echoing the thoughts of millions across the country. "If they don’t have a clear power structure organized around specific demands first, then I'll never be able to completely tune them out due to a political conflict of interest or an inability to comprehend complex, detailed economic concepts. These people really need to get their act together." Once Occupy Wall Street has a concrete set of objectives in place, the majority of Americans said they would go back to waiting for the sluggish economy to recover while blindly accepting things the way they are.

And we're going to be waiting a long time...

After plenty of speculation and reports, Twitter announced officially today on its blog that the company had acquired popular third-party client TweetDeck.

“This acquisition is an important step forward for us,” the company wrote. “TweetDeck provides brands, publishers, marketers and others with a powerful platform to track all the real-time conversations they care about. In order to support this important constituency, we will continue to invest in the TweetDeck that users know and love.”

via crunchbase.com

After Twitter’s purchase of iPhone app Tweetie and its partnership with TwitPic, it wasn’t exactly shocking to hear the company wanted to buy one of the most popular third-party Twitter clients, which has versions available for desktop, iPhone, iPad, and Android. The company has indicated in the past it wanted to better control the user experience, and such, acquisitions like this are the easiest way to accomplish that goal.

Iain Dodsworth, CEO of Tweetdeck, said on the official Tweetdeck blog that he was “extremely happy and proud.” And with a reported $40 million mix of cash and stock going to Dodsworth, his investors, and his team, who wouldn’t be happy?

A few weeks ago, TechCrunch reported the first tidbits of the deal. TechCrunch initially cited a $40 million to $50 million range for the purchase, and if the CNN report holds up, TC’s first report will prove accurate.

Just last month UberMedia was supposedly in the process of buying Tweetdeck and had a 30-day exclusive to buy. But negotiations took too long, and that gave Twitter time to propose a better offer. The company is also encouraging external developers to focus on something other than straightforward Twitter clients.

The only downside to Twitter purchasing Tweetdeck will be the loss of an innovative, popular client pushing Twitter to add new features and come up with better ideas. On the upside, having Twitter and Tweetdeck on the same team could mean better and faster integration between service and client.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, addressing Congress on Tuesday, laid out a vision for Middle East peace that he said would include an unspecified “far-reaching compromise” by Israel if the Palestinians accept his country as a Jewish state.

photo via graphics8.nytimes.com

In a speech punctuated by standing ovations from supportive U.S. lawmakers, Netanyahu repeated his insistence that Israel would not accept a return to “indefensible” borders that existed before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and he ruled out allowing Palestinian refugees to return to Israel or giving up any part of Jerusalem. He also vowed that Israel would not negotiate with a Palestinian government that includes the Islamist militant group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip and recently reconciled with the mainstream Fatah administration in the West Bank.

But, declaring that Israel must “find a way to forge a lasting peace with the Palestinians,” Netanyahu said: “I am willing to make painful compromises to achieve this historic peace.” He said he recognizes “that in a genuine peace, we’ll be required to give up parts of the ancestral Jewish homeland.”

Netanyahu blamed the Palestinians for the failure to end the long-running conflict so far, saying they have been “unwilling to accept a Palestinian state if it meant accepting a Jewish state alongside it.” He challenged Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas “to stand before his people and say, ‘I will accept a Jewish state,’ ” just as he said he had done in saying he would accept a Palestinian state.

In the West Bank, a spokesman for Abbas said there was “nothing new” in the speech, which he cast as a rebuff to President Obama.

“On the contrary, he [Netanyahu] added more obstacles,” Nabil Abu Rudeineh said in a telephone interview. “It was a clear message to President Obama, refusing all his ideas, and a message to everybody that he is not ready for peace.” Abu Rudeineh added: “He’s trying to negotiate alone in front of the Congress and conclude an agreement without sitting at the table and without accepting the parameters of Obama. These preconditions are not going to lead to any peace moves.”

Another Abbas aide said Netanyahu’s terms amount to a “declaration of war” on the Palestinians, the Associated Press reported.

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, told the Arabic satellite channel al-Jazeera that Netanyahu chose “dictation over negotiation.” The speech showed that “we have no partner in Israel for peacemaking,” Erekat said. Other Palestinian officials said Netanyahu’s conditions made genuine peace talks impossible.

In Israel, commentators also said that the speech broke little new ground. Netanyahu reiterated points he made in an address to the Israeli parliament last week, in which he implied flexibility on territory while outlining positions that Palestinian leaders have rejected outright.

With Palestinian acceptance of a Jewish state, “the Israeli people will be prepared to make a far-reaching compromise,” Netanyahu said. “I will be prepared to make a far-reaching compromise.”

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistani ground troops opened fire on two NATO helicopters that crossed into Pakistan’s airspace from Afghanistan early Tuesday morning, the Pakistani Army said in a statement. In the firefight that followed, two Pakistani soldiers were wounded, it said.

The clash provided another irritant to the already sour relationship between the United States and Pakistan in the wake of the May 2 Navy Seal raid that killed Osama bin Laden at a compound deep inside Pakistan, heightening American mistrust of Pakistan and inflaming Pakistani sensitivities over sovereignty.

The exchange of fire on Tuesday took place at Admi Kot Post in the North Waziristan tribal region of Pakistan, an area that American officials have long regarded as a haven used by militants to attack coalition forces inside Afghanistan. NATO officials said they were looking into the incident, and could not immediately confirm whether the helicopters had indeed entered Pakistan’s airspace.

Pakistani military officials said the NATO helicopters came about 400 yards into Pakistani territory. The Pakistani Army “lodged a strong protest and demanded a flag meeting,” it said in a statement, referring to a meeting between officials from Pakistan and NATO on the border. Last September, Pakistan shut down the land route through Pakistan that NATO uses to supply its forces in Afghanistan for more than a week after two Pakistani paramilitary soldiers were killed in a similar border clash.

However galling the current clash may be to Pakistani military officials, it was not clear that they would take similar action this time, as both sides may also be seeking to pull relations back from the brink. On Monday, Senator John Kerry met with top civilian and military leaders in Pakistan in an effort to smooth ties.

Lawmakers in both countries have responded with outrage since the Bin Laden raid. In the United States Congress, calls are rising to cut or suspend aid the billions of dollars a year in aid that flow to Pakistan since Bin Laden was killed by American commandos in Abbottabad, a small city about 70 miles from the capital that is home to a top military academy.

For their part, Pakistani officials were furious that they were given no advance notice of the raid, such is the distrust between the two countries. In a closed session of Parliament last week, Pakistani lawmakers urged the government to revisit relations with the United States, warning that Pakistan might sever supply lines to Afghanistan if there were further unilateral incursions.