Say What? Boy Grabs Knife After Dad Pulls Plug on Video Game

[ClassyLady]

Originally posted by CrimsonTide4
Burger King franchise owner Tony Versace issued the following statement in response to the incidents:

[hijack]

If my name was Tony Versace, I would not be worried about a Burger King in Troy, Michigan. I would be over in Milan living it up with Donatella

[/hijack]

[CrimsonTide4]

Oldest U.S. Bank Robber Gets 12 Years in Prison
Sun Jan 25, 8:59 AM ET Add Oddly Enough - Reuters to My Yahoo!



LUBBOCK, Texas (Reuters) - The oldest bank robber in the United States, 92-year-old J.L. Hunter Rountree, was sentenced to over 12 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to robbing $1,999 from a Texas bank last August.



Rountree, who goes by the nickname "Red," said he robbed his first bank when he was about 80 because he wanted revenge against banks for sending him into a financial crisis.


Rountree was sentenced on Friday to 151 months in a federal prison, which he will serve at the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas.


He appeared in court in a loose-fitting prison outfit and shackles on his ankles. He had a cane to help him walk. Rountree listened to the proceedings through headphones because he is hard of hearing. **Did they really need the shackles? How fast do they think he can run???**


Police said Rountree, who was not armed, handed two envelopes to a teller at a bank in Abilene, Texas. One envelope had the word "robbery" written in red ink. Rountree told the teller to stuff money into the other envelope, or else she would get hurt.


After asking Rountree twice if he was kidding, she put the money into the envelope and Rountree then made off in a 1996 Buick sedan, police said.


A bank employee noted the license plate of the vehicle and Rountree was pulled over by police on a highway about 20 miles from the crime scene, 30 minutes after the robbery.


Rountree left a prison in Florida, where he was the oldest prisoner in the state, about a year and a half ago after serving a three-year sentence imposed on him for a 1999 bank robbery in Pensacola.


He was caught holding up a bank in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1998 when he was 87, and given three years' probation.


Federal officials said they had no records to prove it, but they are fairly certain Rountree was the oldest person ever to rob a bank in the United States.


In a prison interview with the Orlando Sentinel in 2001, Rountree said he had been a businessman in Texas but had fallen on hard times. He also told the paper that prison food was better than what was served at some nursing homes.


"A Corpus Christi (Texas) bank that I'd done business with had forced me into bankruptcy. I have never liked banks since," he told the newspaper. "I decided I would get even. And I have."

[CrimsonTide4]

Judge Shoots Boy for Throwing Snowballs
49 minutes ago Add Oddly Enough - Reuters to My Yahoo!



BERLIN (Reuters) - A German judge took the law into his own hands and peppered a teen-ager with lead shot when snowballs went astray and hit the wall of his house, a court in the northern town of Lueneburg said Wednesday.



"Two 16-year-olds were having a snowball fight, and the judge's house got hit. Then the light went on, the door opened, and a shotgun fired off two rounds," said court spokesman Juergen Wigger. "The judge was alone at home."


He said one of the boys' mothers saw her son had been shot in the arm and called the police who arrested the 55-year-old judge and confiscated the firearm. Investigations were continuing.

[brickhouse492]

Say What?!!!!!

[CrimsonTide4]

Cell Doors Left Unlocked Twice at Prison
Fri Jan 30, 9:53 AM ET Add Oddly Enough - Reuters to My Yahoo!



LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (Reuters) - For the second time since December, cell doors at the Arkansas prison housing the state's death row inmates were accidentally unlocked, prison officials said on Thursday.



No one left their cells when a guard unlocked 26 doors on death row at Varner prison, about 70 miles southeast of Little Rock, for three minutes on Wednesday.


"They (the prisoners) sat there. They didn't move. But the death row inmates are the best behaved inmates in prison," said Dina Tyler, spokeswoman for the Arkansas prison system.


In December, an electrical fault opened all doors in a cellblock housing violent prisoners such as murderers and rapists. Dozens of inmates ventured into a corridor and one of them was killed.


An inmate is expected to be charged with the killing within days, Tyler said.


The guard responsible for the latest death row incident has been fired.

[brickhouse492]

Originally posted by CrimsonTide4
"They (the prisoners) sat there. They didn't move. But the death row inmates are the best behaved inmates in prison," said Dina Tyler, spokeswoman for the Arkansas prison system.

They have caused enough mayhem to last a life time. How terrible that an inmate died, even if he was on death row! I hardly condone the death penalty even though I'm thinking ... the world would be a better place without certain characters.

Edited: Oh, the inmate that died wasn't on death row. Well that's awful just the same.

[CrimsonTide4]

Wal-Mart on PR Offensive to Repair Image
Sun Feb 1, 8:24 PM ET Add Business - Reuters to My Yahoo!


By Emily Kaiser

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE:WMT - news) is tired of critics who say it is a behemoth bent on destroying small-town America, driving down wages and shipping jobs to foreign sweat shops.

Wal-Mart, Fortune magazine's "most admired company," is also among the most sued. Dozens of cases claiming sex discrimination and wage violations have stained its image. Editorials deplore how low-paid Wal-Mart workers must sign up for welfare to make ends meet.


Even men's magazine Playboy got in on the act, calling Wal-Mart's Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters the "epicenter of retailing's evil empire."


But after years of abiding unflattering views, the empire is striking back with a tough new public relations strategy.


"No one likes to hear someone say something negative about their family," said Wal-Mart spokeswoman Sarah Clark. "There are some things out there that are totally inaccurate, and we're looking to set the record straight."


Officials at the world's largest company have started firing off letters to the editor responding to critical news articles and editorials. Once-reticent Wal-Mart executives are speaking out more in the hopes of cleaning up the world's largest retailer's stained image.


The company has also altered its advertising campaign to showcase women managers and others who have benefited from working there.


"We all want to defend our company," Clark said.


Besides top management, she said, store employees have taken it upon themselves to write letters, with no directive from headquarters.


"As we have become the most visible company in the U.S., we have increasingly become a target of criticism and even attacks," she said. "We are really in the position of protecting and enhancing an already good reputation, not trying to repair a bad one."


'DIATRIBE AGAINST OUR COMPANY'


In the last few weeks, Wal-Mart's benefits manager wrote to The New York Times to explain the retailer's much-maligned health insurance plan, and a district manager sent a letter to The Salt Lake Tribune to "share some things that aren't so bad about us" after a series of stories.


Chief Executive Lee Scott wrote to Ohio's Akron Beacon Journal after a columnist said Wal-Mart deserved some blame for the closing of a local factory owned by Newell Rubbermaid Inc. (NYSE:NWL - news), one of the retailer's major suppliers.


Scott called the column a "diatribe against our company" that did not reflect the facts.


In January, he became the first Wal-Mart CEO to speak at the National Retail Federation trade group's conference. In a speech that he acknowledged sounded defensive at times, he chided the media for heavy coverage of the company's legal troubles, massive imports from China and employee health-care policies.


Other executives have also started banging the drum.


"We are not popular with a lot people," Vice Chairman Tom Coughlin said at the grand opening of a new Wal-Mart store in San Antonio in January.





"If our wages and benefits were so bad, we wouldn't have had that type of attraction with the customer," he was quoted as saying in the San Antonio Express-News. "The chain wouldn't be the size it has become if we were doing as many things wrong as people like to attribute to us."

BAD PR

Despite the more aggressive approach, public relations experts say Wal-Mart's image-improvement efforts are not enough to shore up its reputation.

"For years they've been a classic example of the wrong way to do PR," said Jonathan Bernstein, president of Bernstein Crisis Management and author of "Keeping the Wolves at Bay: A Media Training Manual."

"They're going to continue to get beat up as long as they basically have a reputation for being unfair or unreasonable to their employees," he said. "All the damage control in the world can't help them unless their policies change.

This year Wal-Mart faces two key tests that should help determine whether reports of worker mistreatment are isolated incidents or widespread.

A California judge is set to decide later this year whether a sex discrimination lawsuit should proceed as a class action covering 1.5 million current and former women employees.

Meanwhile, an investigation into illegal workers at some Wal-Mart stores will be back in the spotlight when a Pennsylvania grand jury completes its deliberations in a few weeks.

"If they lose one of those cases in California or Pennsylvania, it will hurt," said Paul Argenti, professor of corporate communications at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business.

Argenti, who advised Kmart in the early 1990s when it was struggling to compete with Wal-Mart, said Wal-Mart's "most admired company" ranking in Fortune's annual poll of executives, directors and analysts should help the company through the worst of the image problems, but it needs to change its insular corporate culture if it hopes to make new friends.

"They've been very, very internally focused for most of their life," he said. "That's built into their culture. They've never really had to reach out. Now they do."

[Steeltrap]

As a journalist with close to 15 years of experience, I'm CTHU about Wal-Mart and its image burnishing efforts. What many folx fail to realize is that these companies bring a lot of their problems on themselves. All the media does is illuminate them, IMHO.

If Wal-Mart is concerned about the funkiness of the image, it needs to change how it does things.

[CrimsonTide4]

Robbers Make Priest Victim Swear on Bible
Mon Feb 2, 9:25 AM ET Add Oddly Enough - Reuters to My Yahoo!



RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (Reuters) - The Bible is mightier than the gun, at least for a group of Brazilian (news - web sites) robbers.



Unsure if their weapons had caused enough fear, robbers who broke into a monastery made a priest swear on the Bible that he had handed over all the money, police said on Friday.


The 15 hooded men who stole some $6,200 from a secluded Catholic monastery near the town of Guaratingueta in Sao Paulo state were apologetic.


"They were asking the priests to forgive them during the robbery, saying they were only doing it because they needed the money," said police investigator Flavio Andre Averaldo.


"And before leaving they made one priest swear on the Holy Bible that there was nothing left."


The money had been meant to pay the Bethlehem Monastery's expenses.


The robbery took place on Wednesday but the robbers cut the telephone wires so it took the monks a while to contact police.




~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

These robbers are going straight to hell!!!!

[CrimsonTide4]

Man Lives with Dead Brother for 18 Months
Thu Feb 5, 7:39 AM ET Add Oddly Enough - Reuters to My Yahoo!



LONDON (Reuters) - A British retiree did not notice his brother had been dead for 18 months despite sharing a mobile home with him.

When Herbert Silver, 72, finally called police and told them his brother George, 75, had died, they went to the bachelors' home expecting to find a body. Instead they found a skeleton, British newspapers reported Thursday.


"I admit that I didn't go into his room for a few hours, a few days...well quite a while actually," Herbert Silver told the Daily Telegraph. WTH


Silver said he had thought it a "bit odd" when his brother failed to emerge from his bedroom in the tiny home they shared in Blissford, southern England, but told the Daily Mirror:


"George liked to keep himself to himself, and to be honest so do I." A postmortem indicated George Silver had been dead for up to 18 months.

[Dionysus]

Well they were kind of old. If he had Alzheimer's I can see how this can happen. Otherwise...WTFFFFFFFFFF

[OrigamiTulip]

Texas toilet starts gushing oil
Woman returns to crude-covered home


Crude oil covers the commode in Leila LeTourneau's Spring Hill, Texas, home, Feb. 2.


The Associated Press
LONGVIEW, Texas - A Texas woman has struck oil — or maybe it struck her.

Leila LeTourneau returned from work late Monday to find crude oil covering her home’s floors and spilling from the toilets, bathtub and sinks.

Experts have told her the oil kind of “burped up.”

Longview city crews and representatives from Basa Research, which owns some wells in the area, are trying to help find the source of the oil.

Local station KLTV reported one theory is that the house may have been built on an abandoned well that wasn’t properly plugged.

“I always tease people about ’doesn’t everybody in Texas have an oil derrick in the back yard?’ Then when I came home I discovered I struck oil inside the house,” LeTourneau said.

She and her son are now staying at a hotel.

[AKA2D '91]

Originally posted by Dionysus
Well they were kind of old. If he had Alzheimer's I can see how this can happen. Otherwise...WTFFFFFFFFFF

I know he smelled some kind of ODOR! Dayum!

Re: Toilet
I'm glad they were not TCB.

[FeeFee]

THE HOTTIE DEFENSE
Judge Found Cop’s Looks Were So Good, They Aided Entrapment

BY STEPHANIE FRANCIS WARD

He’s so good-looking, it’s not a crime.

A Florida appellate court upheld dismissal of charges that stemmed from a drug sting on the grounds of police entrapment. The trial judge had found the undercover officer instigating the buy "was a very attractive man," while the defendant, a self-described "lonely homosexual man," testified he bought the drugs at the officer’s request in hopes of getting a date.

The state’s Fourth District Court of Appeal ruled 2-1 for the defendant. Its Jan. 21 opinion also notes the defendant’s testimony that the officer asked for drugs four times in one evening.

"Based on the explicit and implicit findings by the trial court, the police conduct at issue can best be described as using the allure of the possibility of sex to induce one who is under no suspicion of criminal plans or activity to commit a nonsex-related crime that has been instigated and suggested by the police," the court wrote. State of Florida v. Julio Blanco, 4D03-113.

A Fort Lauderdale detective on loan to the Drug Enforcement Administration approached Julio Blanco at a gay bar in 2002, identified himself as "Mike" and asked if Blanco liked to "party," Blanco testified at trial. Blanco, who was sitting by himself and found the man both friendly and attractive, asked for clarification, thinking that the man might have sex with him.

In response, the officer told Blanco that he "liked to have a good time," and asked Blanco to buy him some cocaine, according to the opinion. Initially, Blanco told him no, but relented after three more requests.

"When Mike asked Blanco a third time for cocaine, Blanco became annoyed and started to leave," the opinion states Blanco testified. "Blanco told him that if he was looking for drugs, he did not have any."

But because the officer was very handsome and Blanco was interested in him, he stayed, according to the complaint, and later agreed to see if anyone in the bathroom was selling cocaine. No one was, but Blanco was able to buy the officer some crystal methamphetamine.

"Mike" testified that he believed Blanco began the conversation about drugs and offered to get some for "Mike."

Later that evening, the two exchanged numbers, and the officer telephoned Blanco on more than one occasion. Two weeks later, Blanco was arrested.

Carolyn M. Snurkowski, a Florida assistant attorney general, says her office would not comment on the matter.

Even if the undercover officer was not attractive, the charges against Blanco would probably still have been dismissed, says Kevin J. Kulik, Blanco’s attorney.

"He certainly knew by the third time that my client didn’t do drugs," says Kulik, describing the officer as 6’2", under 30 years old and in good shape.

Susan J. Lebow, the Broward County judge who heard Blanco’s case, seems to agree.

"This whole situation seemed very clear to me," she said in court. "I mean, the detective walked in dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, and for the record, he was a very attractive man."

Kulik refrained from describing his client’s physical appearance. "That’s almost impossible for me to answer," the Fort Lauderdale lawyer says.

Using attractive male officers in stings that involve locations frequented by gay men is common, says James L. Schwartz, who previously represented the National Lesbian and Gay Law Association in the ABA’s House of Delegates.

"Good-looking cops are sent out, and they’re told to ‘Try and get yourself picked up,’ " says Schwartz, who practices in Chicago. "It would be the equivalent of sending a very good-looking woman out to solicit someone for sex. If the person is very good-looking, it becomes something that makes [committing the crime] that much easier."

[CrimsonTide4]

Okay, You Be the Look-Out...
Fri Feb 6,10:52 AM ET Add Oddly Enough - Reuters to My Yahoo!


BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (Reuters) - Police in the central Argentine city of Cordoba foiled a predawn street hold-up on Thursday -- and were staggered to find one of the assailants was blind.


"When a police car arrived at the scene, the pair took off running. What caught the attention of the officer was that they were running holding hands," Police Commissioner Luis Ceballos told Reuters. "On apprehending them, the officer found one of them was blind." ***LMAO LMAO LMAO***


Police recovered a fire-arm from the scene, and are still trying to work out what was going through the blind robber's mind. It was not immediately clear which of the pair was wielding the gun.


"We don't know what they were thinking," Ceballos said. "This is the first time I've seen anything like this in my life."


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This just made me LMAO so hard. OMG, dumb criminals who are blind too.