Curses, Foiled Again
After breaking into the same house he’d broken into eight months earlier, John Finch, 44, found himself trapped, according to police in New Castle County, Del., because the homeowner had changed the locks in the meantime so that a key was required to open the door, even from the inside. Finch entered through a rear window and helped himself to liquor but couldn’t let himself out the door without the key and was too drunk to climb back out the window. So he called 911 for help and was arrested. (Associated Press) Leonard Baskerville, 29, tried to carjack a van stopped at an intersection in Adelanto, Calif., but was arrested by the driver, a uniformed San Bernadino County sheriff’s deputy. (Victorville’s Daily Press) Less than an hour after a bank robbery in Orlando, Fla., police located suspect Johnathan L. Graves, 37, when an officer in police headquarters looked out his window and spotted the man hiding from a patrol car. The officer alerted other officers, who nabbed Graves as he tried to flee. (Orlando Sentinel)
Point of Law
“The laws of Texas don’t reward someone just because he got rid of her body real good,” prosecutor Cary Piel told a Denton jury in his summation at the trial of Charles Stobaugh, 55, accused of murdering his wife the day before their divorce was to be final in 2004, even though her body was never found. The jury returned a verdict of guilty. (The Dallas Morning News)
Man Purse of the Week
Corrections deputies conducting a routine search of a cellblock at the Sarasota County, Fla., jail noticed part of a condom sticking out of the rectum of inmate Neil Lansing, 33. Sheriff’s officials who retrieved the hidden condom said it contained 17 round blue pills, one cigarette, six matches, one flint, one empty syringe with an eraser over the needle, one lip balm container, one additional unused condom, a receipt from CVS pharmacy and a paper coupon. (Sarasota’s Herald-Tribune)
Rollover-Minutes Follies
Rip Alan Swartz, 43, turned himself in to police in Upper Allen Township, Pa., who said that for the past five years Swartz made as many as 400 random phone calls a day all over the country trying to get women to talk to him about pantyhose. (Harrisburg’s The Patriot-News)Maurice Cruz, 43, used his cell phone to make more than 18,000 prank 911 calls during a six-month period, according to the California Highway Patrol, who tracked Cruz to a home in East Los Angeles. (Los Angeles Times)
Self-Bailout Plan
New York City police investigators said postal worker Thomas Tang, 38, stole more than 7,000 coupons from his route and sold them at steep discounts on eBay, earning $35,000 just from J.C. Penney coupons. Other coupons were from Kohl’s and Lowe’s. “I did not want this to happen,” he told police, according to court documents, “but it was the only way I could avoid having my house foreclosed on.” (New York Post)
Urban Planning
China has begun a six-year plan to merge nine cities just north of Hong Kong into one mega-city that will be the world’s largest. Called the “Turn the Pearl River Delta into One” plan, the proposal aims to create a city of 16,000 square miles — 26 times larger geographically than Greater London — with a population of 42 million. The goal is to integrate China’s manufacturing base there and challenge Shanghai and Beijing as China’s driving economic force. (Britain’s The Telegraph) As many as a million people live beneath Beijing because they cannot afford aboveground rents. They pay $50 to $80 a month for small, windowless rooms in a network of unused air-defense bunkers left over from the days when China feared a Soviet missile strike. Beijing is estimated to have 30 square miles of tunnels and basements. One of Beijing’s “bomb shelter hoteliers,” identified as “Mr. Zhao,” said he rents out 150 rooms — they range in size from 6-by-9 feet to 15-by-6 feet — mostly to wholesale sales workers and street peddlers. (Britain’s The Telegraph)
Smell Away Unwanted Pounds
A device that lets food be inhaled rather than eaten will go on sale this fall in France, promised its inventor, Harvard University professor and aerosol scientist David Edwards, 49. The machine, named Le Whaf, will cost $130. It uses rapidly vibrating crystals to create ultrasound waves that transform liquefied food into tiny droplets. Then Le Whaf pumps the flavored mist into a goldfish-like bowl, from which each breath (or “whaff”) takes in the taste with hardly any calories. Edwards predicted that “whaffing” will catch on as a way of eating in the future. “Imagine a restaurant where, instead of sitting at a table, you walk around,” he explained. “Instead of eating food, you’re breathing it in as you walk from room to room, each with a different flavor.” (Britain’s Daily Mail)
Too Big-Box Too Fail
Wal-Mart, Kmart and Best Buy are setting up financial services for store customers without bank accounts, hoping for a share of the $320 billion a year alternative financing services industry, now populated by payday-loan and check-cashing stores that charge 2 percent to 4 percent of the check’s amount. Wal-Mart charges a flat-rate $3 to cash a check. Besides check-cashing, the big-box retailers sell money transfers and prepaid cash cards. Best Buy also started providing kiosks where customers can pay utility, cable and phone bills.
(The Washington Post)
A government survey found that 30 million households either don’t have a bank account or use one sparingly. Two-thirds of America’s “unbanked” population earn less than $30,000 a year; others might earn more but don’t trust banks or come from cash-based cultures. (The Washington Post)
Way to Go
Moments after high school junior Wes Leonard, 16, scored the winning basket in an overtime game in Fennville, Mich., to clinch his team’s undefeated season, he collapsed on the court in the middle of the victory celebration and died of a heart attack. (Michigan’s The Holland Sentinel) Blair River, the 575-pound spokesperson for the Heart Attack Grill, a restaurant in Chandler, Ariz., that specializes in huge burgers, milkshakes and fries cooked in lard, dropped dead at age 29. “Cynical people might think this is funny,” restaurant founder Jon Basso said, “but people who knew him are crying their eyes out.” Having a big man promoting it was part of the restaurant’s tongue-in-cheek “glorification of obesity,” but Basso said the 6-foot-8 River was more than a caricature, pointing out, “Even if he was skinny, we would have given him the job. We would have just put a fat suit on him.” (The Arizona Republic)
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.
