The idea is to post strange, funny, silly, crazy, stupid, scary, ... things you find in the news.
I'll start with this one:
Drunken man parks horse in bank foyer
BERLIN - An early-morning bank customer had a bit of a shock when he found a horse at the automatic teller machine.
The horse's owner, identified only as Wolfgang H., had a bit too much to drink the night before and decided to sleep it off inside the bank's heated foyer, police said Tuesday.
The 40-year-old machinist told Bild newspaper he had had "a few beers" with a friend in Wiesenburg, southwest of Berlin, and decided to hit the hay in the bank on his way home.
Confronted with the lack of a hitching-post, he brought the 6-year-old horse, named Sammy, in with him.
When a customer came across the horse and sleeping rider in the bank at 4:15 a.m. Monday, he called police, who then came and woke the owner up and sent him on his way.
No charges were filed, but there might be some cleanup needed: Apparently Sammy made his own after-hours deposit on the carpet.
The Dutch Police stops woman who swallowed 129,000 euros in tickets
«The military police of the airport of Amsterdam-Schiphol has stopped a woman who traveled to Madrid and that had ingested 129,000 euros in bills of 500, according to police sources informed today. The woman, of 57 years, swallowed in a species of ball 259 tickets of the Maxima denomination, whose origin still is investigated, according to Dutch agency ANP. The Police stopped it thinking that it was a "mule" - people who dedicate themselves to the drug trafficking, which often they transport the drug within his stomach and that expels it when they arrive at his destiny.»
They didn't say what bank it was. That would be advertising.
Man accused of dental work in garage
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - A man was held Wednesday on charges that he performed dental work on customers without a license in his "filthy" garage, authorities said. Roger Bean, 60, was arrested Tuesday and held on $6,000 bond.
Bean performed denture fittings and made false teeth in his garage, charging just $200 for a full set of dentures, a procedure that typically costs more than $2,000, authorities said. But he was not licensed to practice in Florida.
Palm Beach County Sheriff's detective Don Zumpano said there were "health risks with operating this type of facility outside of your house," adding that Bean's workspace was "filthy."
Neighbors and clients, however, praised Bean for saving them thousands of dollars.
Ron St. Mary, 73, head of the neighborhood crime watch, said Bean is no criminal.
"He's helping the old people who don't have a few dollars," he said. "I think the world of him."
It was not immediately clear if Bean had an attorney.
Thousands of people have been 'fleeced' into buying neatly coiffured lambs they thought were poodles.
Entire flocks of lambs were shipped over from the UK and Australia to Japan by an internet company and marketed as the latest 'must have' accessory.
But the scam was only spotted after a leading Japanese actress said her 'poodle' didn't bark and refused to eat dog food.
Maiko Kawakami, who starred in the Japanese thriller Violent Cop, showed photographs of her pet on a television talk show only to be told it wasn't a dog - but was in fact a lamb.
The discovery prompted hundreds of women to contact the police with similar problems and the authorities believe as many as 2,000 people have been conned.
'We launched an investigation after we were made aware that a company was selling sheep as poodles,' a police spokesman told The Sun.
'Sadly, we think there is more than one company operating in this way.
'The sheep are believed to have been imported from overseas - Britain and Australia.'
Poodles are famously used by the rich and glamourous on the continent but are extremely rare in Japan, with many people having little idea what they look like.
The company, which translates as Poodles as Pets, sold the 'poodles' for £630, about half the cost of a normal poodle but is now understood to have been shut down.
WASHINGTON - An odd-looking Canadian quarter with a bright red flower was the culprit behind a false espionage warning from the Defense Department about mysterious coins with radio frequency transmitters, The Associated Press has learned.
The harmless "poppy quarter" was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them. The worried contractors described the coins as "filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology," according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.
The silver-colored 25-cent piece features the red image of a poppy — Canada's flower of remembrance — inlaid over a maple leaf. The unorthodox quarter is identical to the coins pictured and described as suspicious in the contractors' accounts.
The supposed nano-technology on the coin actually was a protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the poppy's red color from rubbing off. The mint produced nearly 30 million such quarters in 2004 commemorating Canada's 117,000 war dead.
"It did not appear to be electronic (analog) in nature or have a power source," wrote one U.S. contractor, who discovered the coin in the cup holder of a rental car. "Under high power microscope, it appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire-like mesh suspended on top."
The confidential accounts led to a sensational warning from the Defense Security Service, an agency of the Defense Department, that mysterious coins with radio frequency transmitters were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada.
"We'll have a good laugh over it," said John Regitko, who writes a newsletter for a leading coin-collecting organization, the Canadian Numismatic Association. "We never suspected there was such a thing (as spy coins) anyway."
Regitko predicted the quarter will become especially popular among collectors because of its infamy as the culprit behind the spy warning, despite the quarter's wide availability. "Everybody has some in their drawer at home," he said.
One contractor believed someone had placed two of the quarters in an outer coat pocket after the contractor had emptied the pocket hours earlier. "Coat pockets were empty that morning and I was keeping all of my coins in a plastic bag in my inner coat pocket," the contractor wrote.
The Defense Department subsequently acknowledged it could never substantiate the espionage warning, but until now it has never disclosed the details behind the embarrassing episode.
In Canada, senior intelligence officials had expressed annoyance with the American spy-coin warnings as they tried to learn more about the oddball claims.
"That story about Canadians planting coins in the pockets of defense contractors will not go away," Luc Portelance, now deputy director for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, wrote in a January e-mail to a subordinate. "Could someone tell me more? Where do we stand and what's the story on this?"
Others in Canada's spy service also were searching for answers. "We would be very interested in any more detail you may have on the validity of the comment related to the use of Canadian coins in this manner," another intelligence official wrote in an e-mail. "If it is accurate, are they talking industrial or state espionage? If the latter, who?" The identity of the e-mail's recipient was censored.
Intelligence and technology experts were flabbergasted over the warning when it was first publicized earlier this year. The warning suggested that such transmitters could be used surreptitiously to track the movements of people carrying the coins.
"I thought the whole thing was preposterous, to think you could tag an individual with a coin and think they wouldn't give it away or spend it," said H. Keith Melton, a leading intelligence historian.
But Melton said the Army contractors properly reported their suspicions. "You want contractors or any government personnel to report anything suspicious," he said. "You can't have the potential target evaluating whether this was an organized attack or a fluke."
The Defense Security Service disavowed its warning about spy coins after an international furor. The U.S. said it never substantiated the contractors' claims and performed an internal review to determine how the false information was included in a 29-page published report about espionage concerns.
The Defense Security Service never examined the suspicious coins, spokeswoman Cindy McGovern said. "We know where we made the mistake," she said. "The information wasn't properly vetted. While these coins aroused suspicion, there ultimately was nothing there."
A numismatist consulted by the AP, Dennis Pike of Canadian Coin & Currency near Toronto, quickly matched a grainy image and physical descriptions of the suspect coins in the contractors' confidential accounts to the 25-cent poppy piece.
"It's not uncommon at all," Pike said. He added that the coin's protective coating glows peculiarly under ultraviolet light. "That may have been a little bit suspicious," he said.
Some of the U.S. documents the AP obtained were classified "Secret/Noforn," meaning they were never supposed to be viewed by foreigners, even America's closest allies. The government censored parts of the files, citing national security reasons, before turning over copies under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
Nothing in the documents — except the reference to nanotechnology — explained how the contractors' accounts evolved into a full-blown warning about spy coins with radio frequency transmitters. Many passages were censored, including the names of contractors and details about where they worked and their projects.
But there were indications the accounts should have been taken lightly. Next to one blacked-out sentence was this warning: "This has not been confirmed as of yet."
The Canadian intelligence documents, which also were censored, were turned over to the AP for $5 under that country's Access to Information Act. Canada cited rules for protecting against subversive or hostile activities to explain why it censored the papers.
Associated Press writer Beth Duff-Brown contributed to this story from Toronto.
A man went out to look for mushrooms in the country.
He found a bin bag and was curious because there were no houses anywhere around. So he looked inside and found 15 kg of hashish.
Google wijst virussen aan
Een op de tien webpagina's is besmet met kwaadaardige software, zo blijkt uit een onderzoek van het internetbedrijf Google. In de toekomst gaat Google's zoekmachine de gebruikers verwittigen als hun pc gevaar loopt, schrijft Het Nieuwsblad op zondag.
Computercriminelen hebben nieuwe manieren gevonden om virussen te verspreiden die gegevens over betaaltransacties proberen te bemachtigen. Vroeger werden die verspreid via attachments van emails of via wormen. Elke computer heeft tegenwoordig een antivirusprogramma en een firewall. Daarom gebruiken computercriminelen meer en meer onschuldige websites om hun kwaadaardige software te verspreiden. Medewerkers van Google onderzochten 4,5 miljoen webpagina's die hun zoekmachine genereerde. Ze concludeerden dat 450.000 ervan echt een gevaar zijn voor wie ze aanklikt. Nog eens 700.000 zijn dubieus omdat ze op zijn minst ongezonde elementen bevatten. Om de gebruikers beter te beschermen tegen dergelijke malware wil Google in de toekomst een labeltje plaatsen naast potentieel gevaarlijke websites bij de resultaten die de zoekmachine weergeeft. (VOC)
LONDON (AFP) - French workers are the world's biggest whiners, according to a study published Monday which said the Irish complain least about their lot.
Britons come second to their Gallic cousins in the moaning stakes, followed by Sweden, the United States and Australia. Japanese workers have the lowest morale, but don't complain so much.
The lowest levels of whining were found in the Netherlands, Thailand and Ireland, according to the study by the FDS research group.
"It is interesting to note that after France, Britain and Sweden, the world's biggest workplace whingers are Americans, despite their having by far the highest levels of income," said FDS chief Charlotte Cornish.
"Compare them to Thai workers: while real levels of income are more than eight times higher in the States, more workers in the US feel their pay is a problem than in Thailand," she added.
The study, entitled "What Workers Want, A Worldwide Study of Attitudes to Work and Work-Life Balance", draws on data from 14,000 employees in 23 countries.
They were notably asked about their satisfaction with issues including pay levels and their work-life balance, as well as average working hours.
In terms of worker morale, Dutch workers are the happiest, followed by their Thai and Irish counterparts. The lowest morale of all is found in Japan, followed by Germany, said the study.
The study's authors noted that rightwing French President-elect Nicolas Sarkozy shouldn't expect things to become happier anytime soon, as he prepares to shake up notoriously strike-prone France.
"The UK and US, with their marked competitive individualism and unequal wealth distribution, both appear towards the top of the world's list of whingiest workers," said Cornish.
"The French come out on top -- it seems unlikely that Nicolas Sarkozy's election and the likely shift to more Anglo-Saxon economic practices will make the workers in France any more happy with their lot," she added.
't Gaat van kwaad naar erger.