News & Blues

Curses, Foiled Again

David Foley intended framing his landlord in Whitefish Bay, Wis., by sending a Milwaukee television station a CD containing child pornography. The station turned the disk over to police, who discovered it contained not only the planted porn, but also a stockpile of child porn belonging to Foley. Investigators said it also identified at least two children they said the one-time mentor for the Big Brothers, Big Sisters program had molested. (Milwaukee’s WITI-TV)

German police reported that a 57-year-old man tried to rob a bank in Osnabrueck by seizing a female hostage, brandishing a gun and demanding a 10,000-euro ($13,483) ransom. “The plan failed, however,” according to a regional court statement at the man’s trial, “due to the fact that the building has not held a bank for more than a decade but rather a physiotherapy practice.” The robber improvised by demanding that a passer-by withdraw money from a cash machine in the building. She withdrew 400 euros, which he took before fleeing in a stolen car. He abandoned the car but left behind the gun, which turned out to be a toy but was covered with his fingerprints. The man, labeled by the Bild newspaper as “Germany’s dumbest bank robber,” received a seven-year prison sentence. (Agence France-Presse)

News of Warmageddon

This winter’s weather has been so mild in North America that Winnipeg, which has enjoyed its third-mildest January in more than a century, was forced to truck in 200 loads of faux snow for its annual snow-sculpting competition. Festival du Voyageur official Emili Bellefleur said she knows of only one other year that the 43-year-old festival had to buy artificial snow. (Reuters)

Like a Candle in the Wind

A woman who lit a candle at her home outside Manchester, England, to honor songstress Whitney Houston wound up setting the house on fire. Fire official Rick Taylor said the woman apparently failed to snuff the candle when she went to bed. The flame ignited a curtain, starting a blaze that gutted the living room. (Manchester Evening News)

Sky’s-the-Limit Marketing

Tourist officials in Norway accused tourist officials in Finland of trying to “steal” the celestial phenomenon known as the northern lights. The display is the prime, if not only, attraction for winter tourists. Norway had the market to itself until the Finnish Tourist Board posted time-lapse video footage of the aurora borealis on YouTube, where it was viewed 400,000 times in just two months. “We cannot stand by and watch the Finns try to grab a bigger share of the northern-lights market,” Per-Arne Tuftin of Innovation Norway, the state-owned company that promotes tourism, told the Tromso-based newspaper Nordlys (whose name translates as “Northern Lights”). “We will not give up: The northern lights will be ours.” (Germany’s Der Speigel)

Rules Are Rules

When city officials in Detroit decided to repave Grandy Street, a 2006 legal settlement with the Michigan Paralyzed Veterans of America required they provide wheelchair-accessible curbs at intersections. The ramps were built along a 13-block stretch, at a cost of $156,000, even though Grandy Street is sparsely populated, occupied and abandoned houses are run down, and the ramps lead mostly to grassy fields and broken sidewalks blocked by fallen trees and debris. “It is what it is,” said Frank Jacobini, vice president of Major Cement, which the city paid to do the work. “It’s one of those bureaucratic things that doesn’t make any sense.” (Detroit News)

Poetic License

For its latest traffic-safety campaign, the New York City Department of Transportation made 144 signs with safety messages in the form of haikus. The signs, designed to resemble traditional street signs, are placed in high-crash locations near cultural institutions and schools. “The haikus are embedded in a QR code on the sign, readable with smartphone apps,” the DOT said, “making the safety messages interactive and fun to discover.” (New York City Department of Transportation)

Drinking-Class Hero

When Matthew Mitchell, 27, came upon the scene of an alcohol-related head-on collision outside Palestine, Texas, that killed one person and injured three others, he tried to drive through the flashing lights of scattered police cruisers and ambulances but collided with a medevac helicopter that had just landed in the middle of the road to transport one of the victims. No one was hurt, but a Department of Public Safety trooper who questioned Mitchell after the incident quoted him as asking, “Why was the helicopter flying so low?” He was promptly charged with driving while intoxicated. (Houston Press)

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.