After months of effort, the Park Service trapped a woman’s lost pet burro near Spotsylvania Courthouse. The mischievous burro wandered the Spotsylvania Court House battlefield since May, but now, she is headed home to her owner.
Read (Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star)
Traffic is flowing again on the Wilson Bridge after a driver attempted to cross as the drawspan was opening.
Read (WTOP)
How impatient can you get? Did the driver think he was Luke Duke?
Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents. Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia’s top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.
Read (The Scotsman) via [Boing Boing](http://www.boingboing.net/2005/12/20/stalins_army_of_mana.html)
In a small wooded area of Wheaton, Maryland, investigators say someone (a criminal justice student) was growing something that definitely should not have been (121 pot plants).
Read (AP via WTOP)
A group of 40 people dressed in Santa Claus outfits, many of them drunk, went on a rampage through Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, robbing stores, assaulting security guards and urinating from highway overpasses.
Read (AP via WFMY)
A hospital in England has apologized to the family of an intensive care unit patient who had maggots crawling on her face.
“We can confirm that a very small number of maggots, each the size of a pin-head, were found. The incident was incredibly rare and we took immediate steps to prevent it from happening again.”
Read (UPI via KCOY)
Police arrested two 10-year-old boys and a 12-year-old girl in Gary, IN and charged them with counterfeiting after one of the boys tried to pay for his school lunch with a fake $20 bill. The lunch lady thought the $20 looked funny and called the school police officer. The police identified seven fake 20s, three 10s, one five and four ones.
Read (AP via WLS)
10 years old! I don’t think I ever thought about doing anything like that when I was 10.
When drivers blow through the toll lanes on the Dulles Toll Road without paying, a red security light immediately flashes and starts whirling in circles. A loud bell rings.
…And that’s it. Forever.
Electronic tolls were first put on the Dulles Toll Road in 1996, but no electronic enforcement went with it. The state uses sporadic police patrols to enforce the tolls, which range from 50 to 75 cents.
Read (AP via WTOP)
Motorists in Prince George’s County, Maryland have been warned they risk getting tickets if they leave their keys in their idling, unattended vehicles. If ticketed, it’s a $60 fine and 1 point on the violater’s license.
Read (AP via WTOP)
Supposedly, this reduces car thefts. Is car theft really such a big problem in Prince George’s County, that you can’t let your car warm up on a cold morning while you run back inside for a few minutes??
Three separate herds of wild hogs are roaming Culpeper county, including a 500-pound black wild boar that has roamed across three farms within a mile of the town of Culpeper all fall.
Read (Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star)
When a pizza delivery driver delivered a pizza near the western Norwegian town of Aalesund, there was something familiar about the customer’s credit card. It was the driver’s card, which had been stolen the day before. The driver recognized the card, because it had his picture on it.
Amazing, someone actually looked at the card. I can’t remember the last time a clerk actually bothered to compare my signature with the signature on the back of my card.
Flickr Photo originally uploaded by GirlReporter.
Some Baltimore streets are getting darker at night because thieves are stealing 30-foot light poles, presumably to sell as scrap metal. About 130 aluminum light poles have disappeared in the last several weeks.
Read (WTOP)
How do you steal a 30-foot light pole? I remember reading in The Corner that people would break into houses, steal the plumbing, and sell the plumbing for scrap metal.
A 17-year-old boy was assaulted and robbed at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday by 2 males in Minot, North Dakota as he left a store where he had just purchased a new Xbox 360 system. The robbers were only interested in the Xbox 360.
Read (AP via IN-FORUM)
Three men in Chattanooga, Tennessee waited in line for 16 hours and purchased 4 Xbox 360 systems. When they arrived home, they were robbed at gunpoint by 2 other men. The robbers refused to take their wallets, but they did take the four Xbox 360 systems.
Read (ksl.com)
Two men in ski masks followed a man from a Tallahassee Walmart to his apartment where they held up the man at gunpoint and stole the Xbox 360 system that he had just purchased at Walmart.
Read (AP via Florida Today)