Curses, Foiled Again

Belgian authorities said two robbers misguessed how much dynamite it took to blow open a cash machine in Dinant. The blast caused the building behind the ATM to collapse and killed both robbers. Bank officials said they wouldn’t have gotten any money anyway, since the ATMs are designed to implode when forced open and destroy all the cash inside.

Other Belgian authorities said a thief who robbed a shoe store in Maldegem didn’t get far. Police official Rik Decraemer told Reuters that police quickly identified him as a one-legged Russian asylum seeker from the description storekeepers gave and because he stole only one shoe. Officers promptly arrested the suspect with the shoe.

Pay and Pay and Pay Phone

When Los Angeles hairdresser Barbara James, 49, accepted a collect call from a customer using a pay phone to say she was running late for her appointment, James was billed $45.09 for the three-minute call. Service provider Network Communications International Corp. charged her $37.40 for the brief, in-the-neighborhood collect call, $4.74 in regulatory fees and taxes, and an extra $2.95 just for what it called “billing cost recovery fee.” NCIC’s president Bill Pope told The Los Angeles Times the tiny number of collect calls nowadays makes such prices inevitable, especially since pay phones are largely unregulated.

Avoirdupois Update

Japanese lawmakers established a national limit on waistlines for people 40 and older, according to The Atlantic magazine: 33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women.

Peruvian police arrested four people accused of killing as many as 60 people and selling their fat to buyers who used it to make cosmetics. “We have people detained who have declared and stated how they murdered people with the aim to extract their fat in rudimentary labs and sell it,” Police Commander Angel Toldeo announced. The Reuters dispatch said the gang stored the fat it collected in used soda and water bottles

Not Quite Right

After a surveillance camera in St. Catharines, Ontario, caught James Cedar, 19, masturbating in his neighbors’ back yard while looking through the windows, the perp confessed. Later, Cedar’s lawyer sent the victim a letter threatening legal action for invading her client’s privacy because, Margaret Hoy wrote, “you have installed surveillance cameras which photograph and videotape into my client’s yard and windows.” Victim Patricia Marshall told The Toronto Sun her reaction was “total disbelief.” She explained she installed the infrared camera because she suspected someone was spying on her and her two teenage daughters.

In addition to the threat by Cedar’s lawyer, prosecutor Wally Essert withdrew the original criminal harassment charge against Cedar, informing Marshall that branding Cedar a sexual offender would lessen his chances of developing “normal relationships.”

Second-Amendment Follies

A New Jersey judge ruled that a quadriplegic has the right to bear arms. The judge added, however, that James Cap, 46, will have to use a wheelchair mount to use the firearm and have qualified people assist him. Cap told The Star-Ledger he intends operating the gun on the mount by using a breathing tube.

Territorial Imperative

Japanese police arrested Noda City resident Yuuki Oshima, 22, after he urinated through the mail slot of a woman’s apartment onto a towel hung inside the door to keep people from peeping inside. The woman had reported to police that for the past five months, her doorbell would often ring in the middle of the night, and she would sometimes find urine inside the entrance. Japan Today reported that police said Oshima confessed, explaining he first saw the woman on the street five months earlier but didn’t speak to her or try to approach her. “I absolutely went crazy for her the first time I saw her,” he told police, “and just did it.”

Democracy Follies

Edward Natapei, the prime minister of the Pacific nation of Vanuatu, lost his job and his seat in parliament when he left the country on official business but forgot to send a note explaining his absence to the speaker of the house. “It was a standing order,” an official at the speaker’s office told Britain’s The Times. “If you miss three consecutive meetings, your seat will be declared vacant.” As a result of his oversight, Natapei, a career politician and president of the socialist Anglophone Vanua’aku Pati party, became the island nation’s shortest serving prime minister, leaving office after 14 months.

Holy Prevention

Italian inventor Luciano Marabese, determined to keep religious tradition alive despite the swine flu epidemic, unveiled an electronic holy water dispenser. “After all the news that some churches, like Milan’s cathedral, were suspending the use of holy water fonts as a measure against swine flu, demands for my invention shot to the stars,” Marabese told Reuters. “I have received orders from all over the world.” The terra cotta dispenser, introduced in the town of Fornaci di Briosco, works like an automatic soap dispenser in public restrooms; churchgoers wave their hands under a sensor, and the machine spurts out sanctified water.

Lingerie Model of the Week

Sheriff’s deputies in Lee County, Fla., arrested Lawrence Jay Horowitz, 43, for attacking his girlfriend at her home after she made a comment when he walked into the kitchen wearing one of her nightgowns. She said she thought at first he was trying to be funny, according to a Naples Daily News report, “but then realized he had a strange look on his face.”

News and Blues is compiled from the nation’s press. To contribute, submit original clippings, citing date and source, to Roland Sweet in care of The New Times.