Irish Penguin

A penguin was found waddling the streets of Dublin after a gang of pranksters stole her from the city's zoo.
Ten-year-old Kelli was said to be distressed by her kidnap ordeal after three men climbed perimeter fences and snatched her from her mate Mick. Furious zookeepers condemned those responsible, saying that the delicate birds could have died from the trauma. 
Eddie O'Brien, team leader in the zoo's east section, said the penguin was obviously traumatized when rescued but quickly settled back into her routine.
"These birds get stressed very easily when taken out of their environment. They don't react well to and it and it could have caused a heart attack," he said.
Gardai said three men broke into the Phoenix Park zoo at about 8am on Thursday and climbed into the enclosure.
The thieves snatched the Humboldt – native to parts of South America, including Chile – stuffed it in a sports bag, hailed a taxi outside the zoo and fled.
Gardai believe they told the taxi driver they had a rabbit in the holdall.

Prominent Delay

The aging Frank Dryman, a notorious killer from Montana's past, had hidden in plain sight for so long that he forgot he was a wanted man.
In an exclusive jailhouse interview with The Associated Press, Dryman detailed how he invented a whole new life, with a new family, an Arizona wedding chapel business — and even volunteer work for local civic clubs.
"They just forgot about me," said Dryman, in his first interview since being caught and sent back to the prison he last left in the 1960s. "I was a prominent member of the community."
That is, until the grandson of the man he shot six times in the back came looking.
Dryman had been one step ahead of the law since 1951 when he avoided the hangman's noose, a relic of frontier justice still in use at the time.Less than 20 years later he was out on parole. Not content with that good fortune, he skipped out and evaded authorities for four decades. After a while he even forgot about hiding and signed up for V.A. benefits from his days in the Navy in 1948.
Now the 79-year-old Dryman is back behind bars, likely for what remains of his life. He was caught only after his long-ago victim's grandson got curious and started poking around.

Towed for Security

A driver was forced to pay £150 to get his car back after police confiscated it because he left a window open. Marcus Morris was told that police they had taken his VW Polo because the open window - which he had accidentally left down - meant the vehicle was at risk of theft.

Mr Morris, 25, had parked the car near to Leeds city centre as he went for a job interview but returned an hour-and-a-half later to find it had gone. He contacted West Yorkshire Police believing it had been stolen but was told they had removed it to protect it from thieves.

Mr Morris, said: "I couldn't believe it. It seems outrageous. So what if I had left my window open? If anything had been taken then it'd have been my own fault." Police told him a window had been left open and a CD wallet was in the back of the car. The vehicle had been taken to a storage facility.

When Mr Morris collected his car the next morning he was handed a bill for £150. "I'm not working at the moment and that's a lot of money for me. It's money I don't think I should have had to pay," he said.

West Yorkshire Police said it made no apology for taking action. Chief Insp Elizabeth Belton said: "Officers regularly patrol our communities looking for opportunities to prevent crime, which is exactly what has happened on this occasion. The vehicle was left insecure with valuables on show in an area with significant levels of car crime and we were unable to locate the owner. We make absolutely no apology whatsoever for the officer's actions, which have prevented this vehicle becoming a target for thieves. Had a thief got there first it would have been a very different story. We need people to take responsibility for their own property and take any valuables with them when they park up. We hope Mr Morris's story will serve as a reminder."

The charges made for the recovery and storage of vehicles are set nationally by the Government. Mr Morris confirmed he is taking legal advice in an attempt to recover the cost.

Criminal Snoopy

A man tried to break into prison to free an inmate while dressed as the cartoon character Snoopy. Prison wardens were baffled when they were confronted by the character from the Peanuts cartoon trying to break down a staff door while apparently waving a gun. The man and an accomplice, who were attempting to free a relative from HMP Isle of Wight ,Britain, went on to hurl concrete missiles at prison officers’ cars.
A prison source told The Sun: “It’s not every day you see a giant cartoon dog go on the rampage after trying to break into a prison. They weren’t exactly inconspicuous but they were taken seriously because they appeared to have a gun. They caused a real commotion and it was only later they were found to be armed with a water pistol.”
It emerged after the pair were arrested that they had attempted to break into the wrong prison. They had staged the attempted jail-break at the Isle of Wight’s Albany site, while the relative they were looking for was locked up in the nearby Cramp Hill unit.
The source added: “This has got to rank as one of the worst attempted jail breaks ever.”
A spokesman for Hampshire Police said two men, aged 43 and 21, were arrested on suspicion of criminal damage and held under the Mental Health Act after the incident on May 1.
It is not clear which of the two men was dressed as Snoopy.

Robbed with generosity

Police in Columbus are looking for a man they say robbed a bank near downtown, then handed two $100 bills to passers-by as he ran away. FBI Special Agent Harry Trombitas said the man robbed a Huntington Bank branch early on Monday afternoon after showing a teller a gun in his waistband. Trombitas said the man was running up the street when he encountered a mother and daughter window-shopping. The robber stopped and gave them each a $100 bill, assured them it was real, then kept running. Trombitas said the mother and daughter from the Cleveland area were in town for a visit to Ohio State.

"We won't know what he was thinking until we catch him ," an FBI agent tells the Columbus Dispatch. One theory is that the mother had just given a homeless man some money, and authorities say the fleeing robber may have seen it.

Plumber Of Fire

Colin Furze, a 30 year old plumber who adapted his scooter to shoot 15ft flames from the rear, has been arrested for an alleged firearms offence.

Furze, a James Bond fan, displayed his modified his scooter, with an anti-tailgating flame thrower operated by the flick of switch, in the press earlier this week. But Lincolnshire Police spotted the pictures of Furze allegedly riding his scooter on a public highway – and arrested him on Thursday. A Lincolnshire Police spokesman said: ''The man was arrested on suspicion of possessing an object converted to a firearm on Thursday. He was released on unconditional bail.''

Devastated Colin didn't want to comment. The daredevil, whose stunts include a 16ft wall of death, had said this week "Everybody wants a flame thrower on a motor bike. I don’t need a flame thrower on the back of my bike, I’m not going to set fire to people’s car’s, it’s just something interesting to do."

The scooter, which was built before Christmas, was Mr Furze's third attempt at the project after the first did not ignite and the second burst into flames.

Something fishy with the shampoo

Lisbeth Koelster, a television presenter on the Danish public channel DR1, was last May found guilty by a district court in Glostrup, west of Copenhagen, of violating animal protection laws. She had poured a "very diluted" amount of shampoo into a fish tank on a 2004 episode of the consumer affairs show she fronted to demonstrate the level of toxic material in a brand of anti-dandruff shampoo. After three days, all but one of the fish were dead.
The lower court judge had ruled that Miss Koelster "deliberately committed an act of cruelty to animals" and violated animal protection laws, but decided not to hand down any sentence since an unreasonable amount of time, "four-and-a-half years," had passed between the date the complaint was filed and the trial.
The appeals court judges ruled on Friday, however, that Miss Koelster's test did not violate European laws on experimenting on animals.
They also said it had "not been sufficiently proven that Ms. Koelster had caused the fish anguish and suffering," as claimed by the plaintiff, a veterinary practitioner who saw Koelster's show.
Following the proceedings, Koelster said she was "thrilled at this very unambiguous verdict" which "exonerates me of all the charges."
"This is a great victory for the freedom of journalistic work. I was not an executioner of these fish and I have not violated animal protection laws, as this ruling confirms," she told reporters.

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Millitary Tactics

Online criminals are posing as US serviceman posted overseas and promising love and marriage to cheat women out of thousands of dollars, the US Army’s Criminal Investigation Command has warned. Special CID agents cautioned that they had learned of multiple incidents in which people online, most notably from Ghana, Nigeria and Angola, posed as US soldiers and got “romantically involved... with female victims and prey on their emotions and patriotism.” They often used information about real soldiers, including names and ranks, and found photographs of soldiers online to create a false identity. Once they snared a victim, the criminals request money they claim is needed to purchase items including laptops and return plane tickets.

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Tax office version of 9/11

A TEXAS man, Joseph Andrew Stack, set his house on fire, then stole a small plane and crashed it into a building containing a federal tax office on Thursday, CNN reported citing federal officials. "This was apparently -- according to an official -- a deliberate act," CNN anchor Tony Harris said.

The inset shows the building after the small plane crashed into it. The plane struck the second floor of the seven-story building in Austin, Texas about 10 am and burst into flames in a massive explosion that forced people to flee out of the windows, witnesses and officials said. There was "no known link to terrorism" the Department of Homeland Security said, noting that the cause of the crash was not yet known.

North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) launched two F-16 fighter aircraft from Ellington Field in Houston, Texas to conduct an air patrol in response to the crash.
Two people were taken to hospital and one person was unaccounted for, but fire officials said they believed everyone else had been evacuated.

Fate of the pilot was not immediately clear. Now it is known that he has left the world and left the people still on it an angry anti-tax agency web page.

"Sand War"

Singapore has been accused of launching a clandestine "Sand War" against its neighbours by paying smugglers to steal entire beaches under the cover of night. "It is a secret war for natural resources," said Nur Hidayati, Greenpeace Indonesia spokesman.
The island city-state's size has increased by over 20 per cent since the 1960s and demand for sand for lucrative land reclamation and development projects is higher than ever. However, recent bans on exporting sand introduced in Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam have cut off supplies and opened up a thriving smuggling trade. Thieves have begun making night-time raids on the beaches of Indonesia and Malaysia, carving out millions of tonnes of coastline and depriving Singapore's neighbors of their beaches.

Marathon fakes

Almost a third of the runners who finished in the top 100 of the Xiamen marathon have been disqualified for cheating. The competitors were stripped of their rankings after it emerged some had hired impostors to compete in their place and others had jumped into vehicles part way along the route, Chinese media reported.
Others gave their time-recording microchips to faster runners. Jiefang Daily, the Shanghai Communist party newspaper, said organisers caught the cheats when they scanned video footage. The paper said most of those involved had apologised, but those without a co-operative attitude would be barred from future events.

Tip thief

A couple who refused to leave a tip after receiving bad service in a Pennsylvania restaurant were arrested by police after being accused of theft. Leslie Pope and John Wagner were handcuffed and hauled away after they failed to leave the restaurant's mandatory 18 per cent gratuity -- totalling $16. The couple had joined six friends at Lehigh Pub for dinner. They said they had to wait almost an hour for their meal to arrive and that the service was so shoddy they had to get their own cutlery and napkins. They had to repeatedly ask for drink refills while their waitress smoked outside the pub.

Forest fugitive

France's most wanted fugitive ­ who escaped from prison in a cardboard box and lived in the woods for ten weeks ­ has been caught, the interior minister announced on Friday night.
Jean-Pierre Treiber, 47, a former forest worker and game-keeper, is accused of the kidnapping and double murder of a young couple in 2004. He had been on the run since September 8, when he shut himself into a cardboard box he had made and jumped from a lorry after it drove out of prison in Auxerre, Burgundy. His ability to survive in the forest had captured the French imagination ­ turning him into an anti-hero for some ­ but had become a source of great embarrassment to the police.

Chicken smuggler

An employee at a Johannesburg jewelers has been arrested after trying to smuggle gold out of the store in a cooked chicken. The unnamed worker was nabbed at a security checkpoint set up by Browns jewellers at its head office in northern Johannesburg. Police said the man had stuffed the unspecified amount of gold into the cooked bird and was attempting to leave the premises when he was caught. Following the alleged theft, Browns issued a company edict telling female workers to wear bras without underwire at its Dunkeld workshop. Belinda Phillips, the general manager, declined to say whether the new policy was a bid to avoid interference with metal detectors.

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

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.

Pen DNA

One of darkest criminal mysteries in France, the murder of a little boy a quarter century ago, is back in the news after investigators found DNA on a poison-pen letter. The body of Gregory Villemin (4) was found tied up in the Vologne river in Vosges mountains, in October 1984. The next day, a letter arrived at his home claiming responsibility for the murder. The case was wrapped up in 2001 without identifying the murderer. Prosecutors relaunched the probe last December in the light of new DNA testing techniques and the results of a five-month expert analysis were filed with the state prosecutor on Thursday.

Man loses money in UK without being there

IF you ignore e-mails from strangers telling you that you have won a lottery and need to send some money to claim it, you are alert. However, don't let your guard down because a mail from a friend in distress, stuck in a foreign land, requiring money to return home, could well be fake too.
When business associates and friends in the contact list of V K Mohanarangan ,a man living in South India, received mails about his plight, most of them started calling his number, while a kind hearted friend even sent money worth $1000 . The mail said Mohanarangan was in trouble, having lost all valuables and passport, and immediately required $1200, which could be wire transferred to the hotel in UK from where he needed to check out.
On getting calls from people inquiring if everything was okay with him and if he needed help, Mohanarangan, who deals in engineering machine accessories and has an official e-mail id, realized something was amiss.
He looked into the matter and realized that the messages had indeed gone from his id, which apparently had been hacked. Using his techie friends, he found out that the e-mail had been sent from Nigeria. He approached the suburban commissioner of police, S R Jangid, and filed a complaint.
Though similar mail traps have been heard of, this is perhaps the first time in the city that someone has complained to the police about his mail being hacked.