A bizarre fox attack at a Salisbury, MD steak house had patrons and employees jumping and scrambling for cover.

The attack happened near closing time, when customers encountered a wild fox in the parking lot. Feeling threatened, they ran back inside the slow-release door at restaurant, and the fox followed them inside.

Once inside the building, the fox scampered into the dining room area, into the bar area and back to the dining area, causing employees and patrons to take cover. Several jumped onto tables or chairs.

The fox lunged and bit the manager the manager before running away.

[Read](http://www.wusa9.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=61020 “Read the Story”) (AP via WUSA9)

It was like a scene out of an old Western, with lawmen in hot pursuit of alleged outlaws on horseback.

Only this time the pursuers were in police cruisers, and the chase was through a modern suburban neighborhood.

One of the outlaws was seen urinating against the side of a Culpeper convenience store. After being asked to find a proper restroom, he and his female partner fled the scene on horseback.

[Read](http://www.wtopnews.com/?nid=25&sid=1197912 “Read the Story”) (AP via WTOP)

Six members of an alleged homegrown terror cell that intended to launch a commando-style attack on New Jersey’s Fort Dix were arrested by the FBI Monday night after a 15-month investigation. Four of the six were born in Yugoslavia, one was born in Jordan and the other in Turkey. All were U.S. residents. Their alleged intention was to conduct an armed assault on the army base and to kill as many soldiers as possible.

Fort Dix was chosen because one member’s family owned a pizza parlor near the base and that member was able to enter the base to deliver pizza.

The investigation began when a man walked into a photo shop and asked to convert a tape to a DVD, and the clerk alerted law enforcement after he saw what was on the tape.

Read (ABC News)

The diners didn’t know it, but their credit cards were going to pay for more than their meals, prosecutors said.

Waiters in about 40 restaurants, in New York and elsewhere, quietly recorded customers’ credit card information and passed it on to people who used the information to make more than $3 million worth of worth of illegal purchases.

The credit card account information was stolen from customers who visited restaurants in Manhattan’s Chinatown and other parts of the New York metropolitan area, as well eateries in Florida, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Some members of the group stole customers’ information; some made the counterfeit cards; others shopped for merchandise; and finally someone bought the goods for cash.

Read (AP via CNN)

64-year-old California grandmother and blogger is the latest addition to the menagerie of freelancers, filmmakers and activists who have been allowed to see war first hand as “embeds.”

Listen (NPR)

*Jane Stillwater’s blog is located at [http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/](http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/ “Jane Stillwater’s blog”). She mentions in her most recent post that she might not get a chance to visit the Red Zone before leaving Iraq.*

Baltimore police arrested a 7-year-old boy, handcuffed him, then hauled him off to the station house where they took his mug shot and fingerprints.

His offense? He allegedly rode a dirt bike on a sidewalk.

He was sitting on the bike *with the motor off* on a sidewalk in east Baltimore when an officer grabbed him by the collar and pulled him off the bike.

“Dirt bikes are illegal within city limits and pose a serious threat to pedestrians and drivers,” said police spokesman Matt Jablow.

[Read](http://www.wtopnews.com/?nid=25&sid=1089746 “Read the Story”) (AP via WTOP)

An [Independence, VA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence%2C_VA “Wikipedia’s Independence, VA entry”), man might find himself with a lump of coal for Christmas after he was caught running through town naked Monday by none other than Santa Claus himself.

A man dressed as Santa was driving near [Damascus, VA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus%2C_VA “Wikipedia’s Damascus, VA entry”) (Trail Town USA) when a man driving erratically behind him began throwing trash, parts of his truck and clothing out the windows.

Santa — who asked that his name be withheld — said by the time the man got into Damascus and jumped out of his truck, he was stark naked.

[Read](http://www.tricities.com/tristate/tri/news.apx.-content-articles-TRI-2006-12-20-0006.html “Read the Story”) (Tricities.com)

A fence-building company in Southern California agrees to pay nearly $5 million in fines for *hiring illegal immigrants*. Two executives from the company may also serve jail time. The Golden State Fence Company’s **work includes some of the border fence between San Diego and Mexico**.

[Read and Listen](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6626823 “Read and Listen the Story”) (NPR)

A Stafford County, VA man didn’t intend to harbor a fugitive yesterday when he opened his front door to see why his dogs were barking. When he opened his door, an **emu** just waltzed in.
After taking a look at its claws, he decided he wasn’t going to be the one to ask the bird to leave. He called animal control and waited.

This wasn’t the man’s first run-in with the wild kingdom. While attending college in Richmond, VA years ago, he pulled into a **Burger King parking lot one night and was approached by two zebras**, escapees from [Maymont Park](http://www.maymont.org/animals/index.asp).

[Read](http://fredericksburg.com//News/FLS/2006/112006/11102006/236007 “Read the Story”) (Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star)

In a city where you can get just about anything delivered to your door — groceries, dry cleaning, Chinese food — pot smokers are increasingly ordering takeout marijuana from drug rings that operate with remarkable corporate-style attention to customer satisfaction.

The emphasis on customer service and satisfaction was evident at one stash house, where agents found more than 30 pounds of marijuana in plain view, already packaged for holiday delivery, court papers said. The packages featured the drug ring’s cartoon character logo and the greeting, “Happy Holidays From Your Friends at Cartoon!”

[Read](http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/11/06/pot.delivery.ap/index.html “Read the Story”) (AP via CNN)

A 22 year-old woman from Mountain City, Ga. faces a drunk driving charge after she steered the horse she was riding onto the highway and tangled with a car, authorities said. She also was cited for entering a traffic lane.

[Read](http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2550620&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312 “Read the Story”) (AP via ABC)

ATM manufacturers have been working on ways to stop the theft of ATM machines, and sometimes the amount of money in the ATM is so small, it hardly seems worth the risk. But that hasn’t discouraged thieves this summer in such states as Arizona, California and Georgia. Thieves have pulled off or attempted such thefts at least 21 times this year in the Phoenix area alone.

To protect their money, many banks use ATMs equipped with global-positioning technology that tells authorities where the machines are.

[Read](http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2006-10-04-atm-thefts_x.htm?csp=34 “Read the Story”) (USA Today)

When Indalecio Robles owned a convenience store in El Salvador, the threat of an armed robbery was so rampant, he had to hire guards with shotguns to protect the store.

He never thought he would need that kind of protection in the United States, but on Tuesday — *just one day after the grand opening* of his Harrisonburg convenience store — he was robbed at gunpoint.

“I knew we had to worry about that stuff before,” he said Wednesday night at his store. “But I never thought it would happen here. It was terrible.”

Despite the robbery, Robles opened for business on Wednesday and does not plan to close anytime soon.

[Read](http://www.dailynews-record.com/news_details.php?AID=6533&CHID=2 “Read the Story”) (Harrisonburg Daily News Record)