Tucson business leaders are pitching the creation of a regional sports authority to generate money to refurbish ball fields and better compete with Maricopa County, where spring training is booming. The Tucson Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce broached the idea with the Tucson City Council this week and stressed that maintaining three Major League Baseball teams, which gave an estimated $30 million boost to the Tucson-area economy last year, would require regional cooperation. "Nobody can do this lifting on its own. We need as many tools in our financing toolbox as we can find," said Tom Tracy, president of the Lodging Co., a lodging consulting firm. .

Hottest Sedans of 2008

Carmakers are rolling out eight new luxury sedans this year, and each one brings something fresh to the industry, be it style, performance or technology. Two other all-new entries from non-luxury automakers promise to heat up the premium segment.

Troubled brands like Jaguar and Lincoln are hanging their hopes on luxury sedans that launch this spring. And underdogs like Hyundai are boldly venturing into this upscale segment as Cadillac and Mercedes-Benz gear up to defend their stake.

Mazda Cosmo Sport 110S: An Under-Apprectiated Classic

I've always been attracted to engineering oddities. You know, things that get the job done in a different way than most. And I'm especially partial to out-of- the-ordinary engines. So it just seems natural that sooner or later I'd own a car with a rotary engine. And I do: a Mazda Cosmo Sport. "A what?" you say.

The two-seat Cosmo is a '60s-era small sports car powered by a 110-hp, two-rotor Wankel engine. The rotary was the brainchild of Felix Wankel, a self-taught German tinkerer who never went to college. He made the first rotary prototype in the late '50s for NSU, a German motorcycle and car manufacturer eventually bought out by Volkswagen. For a while in the '60s, it looked to some like the rotary would be the engine: light, small and only a handful of parts. Several carmakers paid Wankel for the rights to use the rotary.

With friends like these ...

There is much debate on who exactly were the original co-founders of Facebook, but whoever they were, Zuckerberg is the only one left on the board, although Hughes and Moskowitz still work for the company.

Thiel is widely regarded in Silicon Valley and in the US venture capital scene as a libertarian genius. He is the co-founder and CEO of the virtual banking system PayPal, which he sold to Ebay for $1.5bn, taking $55m for himself. He also runs a £3bn hedge fund called Clarium Capital Management and a venture capital fund called Founders Fund. Bloomberg Markets magazine recently called him "one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the country". He has made money by betting on rising oil prices and by correctly predicting that the dollar would weaken. He and his absurdly wealthy Silicon Valley mates have recently been labelled "The PayPal Mafia" by Fortune magazine, whose reporter also observed that Thiel has a uniformed butler and a $500,000 McLaren supercar.

Electric sports car to be ready for 2009

Santa Rosa, California - The US electric car manufacturer ZAP has announced that it is planning to produce by 2009 an electric sports car for under 30,000 dollars. The two-seater Zap Alias is said to have a top speed of over 250 km/h with two in-wheel engines producing an output of 320 hp. The range is listed at over 160 kilometres.