Odd news from Today's paper and earlier this year

[papau]

From Today's paper:

Two women in their 70s were arrested after they allegedly befriended two homeless men, took out 19 life insurance policies on them and filed claims worth more than $2.2 million after the
transients mysteriously died in hit-and-run pedestrian accidents in Los Angeles.
By Cara Mia DiMassa and Richard Winton.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/e2zz0H5DEY0G2B0HX6r0Ep
=======================================================================
FROM EARLIER THIS YEAR:

South Houston, Texas:
Sean Eckman, 29, an English teacher at South Houston High School here was put on administrative leave and has since resigned. He asked his principal if he could take a 17-year-old student to prom, claiming he was a family friend and that the parents had agreed
that it would be OK - except they hadn’t.

Wiesbaden, Germany:
Police noted the driving behaviors of an unnamed 28-year-old Polish woman including driving about five miles on the wrong side of the road, and stopped her, finding out she was without a license. She on test broke the four times the legal limit imbibing and still alive barrier!

Cheltenham, UK:
An inebriated University of Gloucestershire student in Cheltenham,UK, somehow managed to scale a 100 foot pine tree, passing out near the top, and falling asleep with a good grip
on a branch. Thank goodness he had a cell phone to use when he awoke so as call to firefighters to rescue him from his perch.

Columbus, Ohio:
Angel Tarazon during the night broke into an appliance repair company van, collected a cache of repair tools to take with him, but then found that the van was equipped with child safety locks that were activated when Tarazon initially entered the vehicle and closed the side door behind him. He then couldn’t get to the driver's section to deactivate the system because of a steel cage that separated the front from the rear section of the vehicle, effectively caging him before he was jailed.

Altoona, California:

The minor league baseball franchise the Altoona Curve have decided to hold a Salute to Frivolous Lawsuit Night as part of their Sunday, July 2nd contest. They plan to give out
a pink tote bag to the first 137 men in attendance ages 18 and over, lukewarm coffee for the first 137 women 18 and over (so they will not burn themselves), and the first 137 kids will be given a beach ball - with a warning not to ingest it. The inspiration for the
event was a Los Angeles Angels fan who filed a lawsuit against the club because he did not receive a red nylon tote bag as part of the major league club's Mother’s Day promotion last May.

Crawfordsville, Indiana
Paul Stein, 32, an inmate of the Montgomery County jail here, crawled through a hatch in his
holding cell (used to service pipes and wiring)and made it all the way to just above the lobby, where he crashed through the ceiling.

Burlington, Wisconsin:
An unnamed 24-year-old had a fight with her boyfriend and went back to their apartment, piled up his clothes in the hallway, and set fire to a pair of his jeans - a fire that eventually spread to their apartment.

Fusa, Norway:
A group of men called police when they allegedly saw a group of tiny, white men coming out of a fjord here. When police arrived, they didn’t find any evidence of little men. They did, however, find evidence that the callers were drug dealers apparently hallucinating after sampling their own wares - 52 lbs of hashish, 314 grams of amphetamines and about 9,000 Rohypnol tablets.

Council Bluffs, Iowa:
Trenton Camacho, 21, called police to report the theft of the contents of a Priority US Mail package that had been left in the common hallway of his apartment complex. Asked to describe the contents, Trenton admitted that it was a "Jenna Haze Love Doll" - an inflatable "replica” of a porn star. Trenton told police that he was not certain what he was going to do with the “doll”....

Davenport, Iowa
Chris T. Coppinger was fired from Mohassan Grotto 22, where he worked as co-manager of the organization's charitable bingo operation, after his supervisors allegedly found $1,000 in cash and checks in his office along with a contraceptive device, and a jar of urine that appeared to have been hidden. He was subsequently accused of smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol in the building; having pornography on his work computer; ordering a 15-year-old coworker to urinate in a jar, and having “relations” with another person on his desk. In a hearing about his request for unemployment benefits, Coppinger admitted to drinking and having relations with a woman on his desk, but in his defense, he testified that many other members of the organization had engaged in that same activity in that same locale. His request for benefits was denied...