Two killed in blinding sandstorm on L.A.-area highway

Written on 5:26 AM by yahoo

LANCASTER, California (AP) -- Markan Rios stood beside a crumpled van on a desert highway, bewildered and trembling as he clung to a white tennis shoe.

It belonged to his girlfriend, who had just been whisked away by paramedics, but Rios -- a Brazilian tourist who speaks neither English nor Spanish -- had no idea where to find her. Another family member stood sobbing nearby and recalled seeing a deep gash across his wife's forehead before she, too, was taken away by ambulance.

"All my family was in this van, all 11," said Fernando Amaral Pontes, who had blood on his jacket sleeve and side.

Rios and Pontes were in one of more than a dozen vehicles that slammed into one another Tuesday during a blinding sandstorm in the high desert north of Los Angeles. The accident killed at least two and injured 16, including nine of the 11 people in Rios and Pontes' van.

Two of the injured were in critical condition after the crash that left vehicles scattered across Highway 14, Los Angeles County Fire Inspector Ron Haralson said

About 15 vehicles were involved in three separate collisions, said California Highway Patrol Officer Henry Ross. He said the cause of the crashes were under investigation, but that poor visibility and high winds "didn't help matters at all."

The accident happened just west of Edwards Air Force Base and at the northern edge of Los Angeles County. It was about 40 miles northeast from the site of a fiery truck pileup Friday night in a tunnel on the Interstate 5 freeway that killed three people and injured 10.

Tuesday's crash left big rigs and passenger cars scattered and bent on the pavement and dirt center divider.

Rios, 24, and Pontes, 46, were traveling from Los Angeles to Las Vegas as part of a two-week vacation from their hometown of Fortaleza, Brazil. They were in the van with an American tour guide when the sand swirled up and blinded the driver, who barreled into a blue delivery van, Rios said.

"I couldn't see anything; it was too much and too quick," Rios said. "I was coming in and I saw the sand and we slowed down but the truck in front of us had stalled and we couldn't stop."

The pair eventually made it to Antelope Valley Hospital more than three hours after the accident, where a Portuguese translator helped them locate their family. Pontes also had a sore shoulder and a gash on his knee.

Police were investigating whether two other fatal collisions, which happened 20 miles north and two hours before the pileup, were also caused by strong winds.

The weather service issued a dust storm warning for the Antelope Valley Tuesday afternoon, cautioning that blowing dust in the region could reduce visibility to near zero.

"It's not unheard of for the area to experience a dust storm, but it's not an everyday type of thing," said meteorologist Jaime Meier in the weather service's Oxnard office.

by cnn

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From Playboy Playmate to savior of orphans

Written on 7:44 PM by yahoo

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) -- Glassy-eyed and so thin his bones protrude through his skin, a newborn infant named only Rony stares up at a dirty ceiling hour after hour, frozen in his crib because of a softball-sized tumor on the back of his neck.

Then an hourglass-shaped, platinum-haired woman flashing a megawatt smile and wearing diamond earrings and designer blue jeans leans over his crib in the steamy hospital ward, locks her long arms around the child and gently pulls him toward her.

"They don't hold the children much here," says Susie Scott Krabacher, a former Playboy centerfold who over the last 15 years has become an unlikely patron savior for scores of abandoned Haitian babies.

Krabacher, 43, founded the Mercy and Sharing Foundation, an Aspen, Colorado-based charity that has provided shelter, schooling and health care to thousands of children from the poorest slums of this troubled Caribbean nation. The charity, funded mostly through private donors, runs six schools, three orphanages, an abandoned-baby ward and a cervical cancer screening center.

"If it wasn't for her, all of those kids would be dead today," said Bob Lataillade, who runs Mercy and Sharing's main orphanage in Port-au-Prince.

Krabacher chronicles her unusual journey -- from partying in Hugh Hefner's mansion to setting up Haiti's first hospital ward for abandoned babies -- in a memoir to be released in October called "Angels of a Lower Flight" (Simon & Schuster).

The book, which is expected to be made into a Hollywood film, details Krabacher's childhood growing up poor in Alabama and her wilder days at Playboy, where she had a 10-year career, including a May 1983 centerfold spread.

With her long blonde locks and statuesque figure, Krabacher cuts an odd figure in the streets of Haiti's gritty capital. She has been known to waltz into the most dangerous slums wearing platform boots and flowing skirts to ask tattooed gang leaders to allow her charity work to proceed without being robbed.

On her first visit to the country in 1994, Krabacher visited Port-au-Prince's bleak General Hospital and was shocked to find scores of unwanted babies left abandoned and without food in their cribs, including one who had died without anyone noticing.

"There were rats the size of Chihuahuas. They would run all over the place and bite the children. It was horrible," Krabacher, who lives in Aspen but visits Haiti several times a year, told The Associated Press during a recent trip here.

Krabacher eventually persuaded hospital officials to allow her and her husband, Joe, to pay to fix up the ward, which today cares for about 20 children.

Like little Rony, many were left outside the hospital entrance, often frail and barely clinging to life.

"He's going to suffer his entire life. But at least we can give him some humanity so he doesn't have to die in utter misery," Krabacher says, gently swaying Rony in her arms.

A couple of weeks later, Rony died. He was three months old.

Krabacher has had to overcome setbacks in her mission to help Haiti's neediest.

When the abandoned baby ward first opened, people stole the ceiling fans, the refrigerator and baby mattresses.

After rebels forced President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power in 2004, Krabacher flew into the chaotic capital and found that looters had broken into a food warehouse and stolen the orphanage's supply of rice, beans and milk.

For her work, Krabacher was made an honorary Haitian citizen and in 2004 was invited to Buckingham Palace to receive the Rose Award, presented by the foundation established to further Princess Diana's commitment to the poor.

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