Facebook Hero

A New York teenager narrowly avoided a 25-year jail term for armed robbery thanks to a Facebook status update he posted about pancakes. Rodney Bradford was held by police for 13 days, accused of breaking into a Brooklyn residence, but was able to corroborate his alibi thanks a posting to his Facebook page that showed what he was doing at the time of the crime. Bradford's comment, teasing his girlfriend about not having joined him to eat pancakes and accompanied by a time-stamp, was probably instrumental in the district attorney's decision to drop the charges, his lawyer Robert Reuland said

Carrot Monster

Vicki Larrieux, a 22-year-old student from Portsmouth, claims she is unable to keep to a healthy diet because she is frightened of vegetables. She suffers from a fear known as lachanophobia, which leaves her sweating and stricken with panic attacks at the merest sight of a sprout or a pea.
Larrieux survives on a diet of meat, potatoes, cereals and an occasional apple but refuses even a single slice of carrot on her dinner plate. "Every time I would see vegetables not just on my plate, but anywhere I would get feelings of panic, start sweating and my heart rate would shoot up.
Treatments for the condition include "psychological re-programming."

Mega Lottery

Two British ticket holders have become the country's biggest lottery winners after scooping a whopping £45,570,835.50 each in the latest EuroMillions draw. The only two winning tickets for the massive £91 million jackpot were bought in the UK so each ticket holder will get half the winnings, smashing the previous record of the highest lottery payout in the UK which previously was £35.4 million. The holders of the winning tickets now have 179 days to claim their prize and make this an official record in England.
In May this year a 25-year-old Spanish woman broke the world record of the highest lottery payout by becoming the biggest EuroMillions, ever, winner when she won £110 million.

Save Scooby-doo

Cartoons should be given movie-style age ratings to protect children from the violence shown in programmes such as Scooby Doo and Batman, a child safety expert has warned. A senior lecturer at Lincoln University, USA, said that risky behavior which would normally lead to injury is rarely shown to have negative consequences in cartoons. She claims to have found evidence that there children who watch violent programmes are more likely to engage in risky behavior and injure themselves. Among the programmes she deemed to contain the most risky behavior were Scooby-Doo, Batman, X-Men and Ben 10.
There have been some protests among children against this but they have failed to bring any change as thet are very localised, being limited to households and neighborhoods.

Fat Kill

A jury on Friday convicted a man of murdering his former son-in-law, rejecting the man's defence that he was too fat to have run up and down a flight of stairs to commit the crime and make a quick getaway.
Edward Ates was found guilty of murder and weapons counts for killing Paul Duncsak, who was shot six times at his home in Ramsey, about 25 miles north-west of New York.
Ates had argued he did not have the energy to accurately shoot Duncsak from a perch on the staircase at Duncsak's home in August 2006. He was 62 years old and 285 pounds at the time of the murder. Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor termed Ates' defense "nonsense."

Hitler help

A council in Austria is attempting to block the sale of the house where Adolf Hitler was born over fears it could fall into the hands of neo-Nazis who would turn it into a shrine to his memory and again propagate his ideals. The owner of the house in Braunau-am-Inn wants to put it on the market with a likely asking price of over £2million. But there is not enough money in the town coffers to buy the property and the council plans to appeal to the government. Hitler was born in the house on April 20, 1889. His mother Klara and father Alois, rent ed a suite of rooms above the pub and lived in the apartment until 1892 when they moved to Linz.