moonbuggy

`A disciplinary hearing has been told how a nurse allegedly hit a colleague with a frozen fish at a Kent hospital.

Patricia Jennings, 55, from Tunbridge Wells, is also accused of inappropriate sexual behaviour with fellow workers.

The incidents were said to have taken place at the Kent and Sussex Hospital in Tunbridge Wells in 2003. [..]

One nurse said she was slapped in the face with a frozen trout after a patient brought several of them into the hospital as a gift to staff.

Ms Jennings then said “give us a kiss” while moving the fish’s mouth, the hearing was told.’

`Denver prosecutors have charged a worker in an after-school program at Horace Mann Middle School with second-degree assault with a deadly weapon for allegedly Tasing a student.

Shaun Ellis, 24, had worked at the school since September but was dismissed after the Jan. 11 incident, according to Denver Public Schools officials.

Ellis is accused of using a Taser stun gun three times on a 13- year-old boy who had been accused of tripping a girl in a hallway, said Lynn Kimbrough of the Denver District Attorney’s Office.’

`The father who got national attention for punching a teacher’s assistant in front of class full of students has sued the school district.

Dave Swafford was charged after marching into a classroom at Lakewood Ranch High School east of Bradenton last month and punching the assistant, whom he had accused of inappropriately touching his foster daughter, a student at the school. [..]

An attorney for Swafford filed suit against the teacher’s assistant and the school district Wednesday.

Claims included that school officials failed to take proper steps after learning of the girl’s allegations, tried to cover up evidence and fabricated a story that the girl’s claims were retaliation for being punished by the assistant at school.’

`Harry Whittington, the Republican lawyer shot by Dick Cheney in a hunting accident in Texas last weekend, emerged from hospital yesterday and apologised to the vice-president for all the trouble the shooting had caused.

Mr Whittington, who suffered a minor heart attack when a shotgun pellet lodged near his heart, absolved Mr Cheney of any responsibility.

As he was discharged from hospital in Corpus Christi, he said: “We all assume certain risks in whatever we do, whatever activities we pursue. And regardless of how experienced, careful and dedicated we are, accidents do and will happen.”‘

followup to Cheney unlicensed during hunting mishap.

`A man accused of sexually assaulting an Amarillo woman was arrested when he called police to report being robbed of his wallet, which the victim said dropped from his pants during the attack.

Investigators had the wallet in hand when Boungkong Inthirath, 52, called about an hour after the assault of a 23-year-old woman Wednesday.’

`A man who claims he is obsessed with doorknobs faces three years in prison for a burglary spree in which dozens of them were taken from construction sites, along with tools and other materials.

A criminal complaint said Thor Jeffrey Steven Laufer told police he took a variety of items from the construction sites in the Milwaukee suburb of Mequon to disguise his obsession, “so that it would look like a typical burglary rather than someone just stealing doorknobs.”‘

`Lindsey Jacobellis tried to show off and she got what she deserved: She fell on her tail.

Jacobellis had a 50-yard lead in the first women’s Olympic snowboardcross final Friday in a dandy of a race. She had looked over her shoulder several times in the bottom section of the run to see where her opponents were on the course. Obviously, she could already feel the weight of that gold medal around her neck. She was excited. She was confident of her victory. And she tried to show off a bit, throwing a back-side method over the second-to-last jump. But she held the grab too long, lost her edge and tumbled to the snow.’

`Bang! Fark.com’s Drew Curtis was in the line of fire and he got peppered pretty good. The insults rained like small lead pellets, and they may have come from none other than Tom Cruise.

While the grammatically-impaired emailer responsible for the missive below didn’t signal or indicate or announce himself, “I’m pretty positive this is him,” Drew tells Boing Boing, The I.P. belongs to Paramount Studios, and he’s writing about a story we linked about him and Katie splitting up.”‘

`A Serbian man needed emergency surgery after sticking a pencil inside his penis to keep it stiff during sex.

Zeljko Tupic, from Belgrade, told doctors he had experienced erectile difficulties in the past.

So as he prepared for a night with his new lover, he decided to insert a thin pencil into his penis.

Tupic had to cut his sex session short when the pencil shifted and became lodged in his bladder, forcing him to call an ambulance, the daily Kurir reported.’

‘”Firewall” is [Harrison] Ford’s latest excavation of the family-in-peril thriller, and it is a mostly rote attempt to reboot “The Desperate Hours” — the taut psychological standoff between Humphrey Bogart and Fredric March from 1955 — for the computer age. Instead of dramatic tension, “Firewall” makes do with a lot of frantic typing at computer keyboards. It’s like watching Microsoft’s Service Pack 2 download for nearly two hours. [..]

You don’t go to a Harrison Ford movie expecting gritty realism, but even by the lowered standards of the modern thriller, what finally causes “Firewall” to collapse is a series of increasingly improbable plot twists. The most laughable of these can’t be discussed without revealing the movie’s climax, but it is accompanied by what is sure to be one of the year’s funniest lines (though not intentionally): “Where are they, Rusty?” Jack asks the family dog, completely serious. “Where have they gone?”

This comes shortly after he uses his daughter’s iPod to hot-wire the bank’s servers, moving $100 million to Cox’s offshore account, while downloading Sharon Stone’s celebrity playlist from iTunes. (OK, he doesn’t really get the playlist, just the $100 million.) [..]’

Also the Firewall trailer.

`Evangelist Ken Ham smiled at the 2,300 elementary students packed into pews, their faces rapt. With dinosaur puppets and silly cartoons, he was training them to reject much of geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology as a sinister tangle of lies.

“Boys and girls,” Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, “you put your hand up and you say, ‘Excuse me, were you there?’ Can you remember that?”

The children roared their assent.

“Sometimes people will answer, ‘No, but you weren’t there either,’ ” Ham told them. “Then you say, ‘No, I wasn’t, but I know someone who was, and I have his book about the history of the world.’ ” He waved his Bible in the air.

“Who’s the only one who’s always been there?” Ham asked.

“God!” the boys and girls shouted.

“Who’s the only one who knows everything?”

“God!”

“So who should you always trust, God or the scientists?”

The children answered with a thundering: “God!”‘

`A transit bus driver grabbed a woman by the hair, knocked her head into a pole, opened the door and tossed her into traffic after she yelled at him for missing her stop, police said.

The 52-year-old woman, who was not identified, suffered a broken shoulder.’

`It’s one of the darkest secrets of the Warren Jeffs polygamist community. An especially severe form of birth defect is on the rise and may mushroom in coming generations. [..]

Fumarase Deficiency is an enzyme irregularity that causes severe mental retardation, epileptic seizures and other cruel effects that leave children nearly helpless and unable to take care of themselves.

Dr. Theodore Tarby has treated many of the children at clinics in Arizona under contracts with the state. All are retarded. “In the severe category of mental retardation,” the neurologist said, “which means an IQ down there around 25 or so.”

Until a few years ago, scientists knew of only 13 cases of Fumarase Deficiency in the entire world. Tarby said he’s now aware of 20 more victims, all within a few blocks of each other on the Utah-Arizona border.’

`A 12-year-old Aurora boy who said he brought powdered sugar to school for a science project this week has been charged with a felony for possessing a look-alike drug, Aurora police have confirmed.

The sixth-grade student at Waldo Middle School was also suspended for two weeks from school after showing the bag of powdered sugar to his friends.

The boy, who is not being identified because he is a juvenile, said he brought the bag to school to ask his science teacher if he could run an experiment using sugar.’

`U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney has shot and wounded a 78-year-old fellow hunter during a Texas quail shoot.

Harry Whittington, a lawyer from Austin, the state capital, was described as “alert and doing fine” in hospital after being sprayed with shotgun pellets late Saturday afternoon at the Armstrong Ranch in south Texas.

Ranch owner Katharine Armstrong said Cheney turned to shoot a bird that had just been flushed and accidentally hit Whittington, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times reported.’

`An Australian tourist has been charged with assault after telling a Texas woman to stop talking on her mobile phone at the movies.

Pauline Clayton was enjoying a matinee screening of Brokeback Mountain in a Texas cinema when her day suddenly turned ugly. [..]

“I put one finger up to my mouth to shoosh her,” Ms Clayton said.

“She ignored me – I then leaned across and touched her with three or four fingers on the top of her arm.”

When the “very large” woman failed to end her call, Ms Clayton again touched her on the shoulder and that was when the woman exploded.

Ms Clayton said the woman stood up over her, started shouting expletives at her and then stormed out of the cinema, in the town of Webster, just outside Houston.

A short time later two Texas police officers walked into the cinema and escorted Ms Clayton out.’

`Paris Hilton reportedly threatened to pull out of the Brit Awards unless she had a Jacuzzi in her dressing room. Hilton, will report from the red carpet, was allegedly ready to boycott the show if she didn’t get the special bath. An insider said to Britain’s Daily Star the 24-year-old, who is thought to be pocketing £100,000 ($235,500) for the show, was shocked she wouldn’t have a few “home comforts”. “The producers had to tell her the facts of life, that her dressing room is precisely that – a place to get dressed, nothing else,” the source said.’

`A Martin County deputy is accused of using his squad car camera to tape women.

The sheriff’s office fired deputy Jack Munsey after an investigation found that Munsey broke the rules by using the camera for unofficial purposes, spending on-duty time on off-duty activities and for improper conduct.

The investigation reveals that Munsey used his dashboard-mounted video camera to zoom in on and record bikini-clad girls, including one showering at a public beach.’

`A crime victim has criticised a police e-fit of a suspect saying although the thief had an unusual appearance he “didn’t look that odd”. [..]

“The man was a pretty odd-looking character and we didn’t get a good look at his face, but he didn’t look that odd,” Mrs Rule said.

“The man in the picture has half an ear – he didn’t have half an ear. And his moustache wasn’t like that.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone who looks like that in Stalham or anywhere else in my life.”

She added: “Apparently the problem with the moustache was that the police only had long moustaches on their computer so they had to sort of chop it off at the ends.”‘

`A New Zealand thief was nabbed after being lured back to the scene of her crime to claim a “lucky shopper” prize. [..]

Police in the North Island city of Palmerston North couldn’t identify Adams.

So shop owner Wayne Garrand put up her picture in the store window with the words “This Week’s Lucky Shopper” – such competitions are common in New Zealand.

“I just thought, ‘Bugger it, let’s give this a try’,” Mr Gerrand told the Dominion Post newspaper.

Adams and a friend came into the store wanting to claim her prize and gave her name and address to Mr Gerrand, who passed it on to police.’

`Authorities were seeking Thursday a burglar who allegedly took the time to make coffee, cook and eat meals, take showers, pick out a change of clothes, watch television and check his e-mail while inside three rural Washington County homes this month. [..]

Lori Menzel of the town of Kewaskum said the burglar left his Yahoo account open after checking his personal e-mail on the computer at her home.

“He never logged out,” she said, adding: “He made himself at home here. He spent some time in our bedroom trying on my husband’s clothes. I could tell he went through some of my clothes.”‘

`Willie Williamson’s mother had agreed to let her son come home a little later than usual. It was Super Bowl Sunday, after all, and his buddy had a 10:30 curfew.

But at 10:36 p.m., she got a call from a neighbor — the call every parent dreads — and rushed out the door.

“I talked to Willie about drugs,” Gloria Williamson says now. “I talked to Willie about drinking. I talked to Willie about if you go out with a girl, you have to respect her … but this is something I thought I would never have to talk to him about.”‘

`Drinking your own urine? Orland Park police have no problem with that.

But drink it in a front-page newspaper article while wearing your crossing guard uniform complete with official police insignia, and there will be problems.

Ed Danis, the 84-year-old Orland Park “urine therapy” devotee featured in a Jan. 29 Southtown story, has been suspended from his job as a crossing guard, effective Wednesday.

Orland Park Police Chief Tim McCarthy, whose department oversees the part-time guards, said Danis had been warned in writing twice before that he was not allowed to espouse his beliefs while on duty or in his uniform.’

`A first grader was suspended for three days after school officials said he sexually harassed a girl in his class by allegedly putting two fingers inside the girl’s waistband while she sat on the floor in front of him.

The boy’s mother, Berthena Dorinvil, said she “screamed” about last week’s suspension from Downey Elementary School, and added her son doesn’t know what sexual harassment is.

“He doesn’t know those things,” she told The Enterprise of Brockton. “He’s only 6 years old.”

School officials declined comment to The Enterprise, citing the child’s age.’

`Through my own investigations I have just discovered that George Deutsch, the Bush political appointee at the heart of administration efforts to censor NASA scientists (most notably to prevent James Hansen from speaking out about global warming), did not actually graduate from Texas A&M University. This should come as a surprise, since the media has implied otherwise, with even The New York Times describing the 24-year-old NASA public affairs officer, as “a 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M.” Although Deutsch did attend Texas A&M University, where he majored in journalism and was scheduled to graduate in 2003, he left in 2004 without a degree, a revelation that I was tipped off to by one of his former coworkers at A&M’s student newspaper The Battalion.’

`Football star Lomana Tresor LuaLua was last night mourning the death of his 18-month-old son — after the news was kept from him by officials for two weeks.

The tot died in Britain on January 20 from a mystery illness.

But Congolese chiefs did not tell their captain to avoid distracting him as he played in the African Cup of Nations.

They only broke the news after the Democratic Republic of Congo lost their quarter final to hosts Egypt.’

`A man from Sheridan is facing explosives charges after he accidentally blew up his own car with a gas-filled balloon he was taking to a Super Bowl party.

The Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office found a suspicious-looking car Sunday afternoon behind the old Duggan’s gas station in the 4500 block of South Santa Fe Drive frontage road. Passersby had called in to report some type of explosion or car accident.

When a deputy arrived to check it out, he found a white car that showed obvious signs of an explosion. All the windows were blown out, the vehicle doors were bent towards the outside and the roof was pushed about a foot higher than normal.’

with picture.

`A Star Trek fan has gone bankrupt after spending £12,000 turning his home into the Starship Voyager.

Tony Alleyne’s flat in Hinckley, Leics, has moulded walls, touch-panel blue lighting and a life-size model of the show’s transporter room. [..]

He took out two huge loans and ran up debts of over £100,000 on 14 credit cards marketing his idea and paying for the merchandise and has filed for bankruptcy.

Tony, who split from his wife Georgina after he replaced their fridge with a “warp coil” said: “I was convinced Trekkies all over the world would want a house like mine and pay me to do it.’

`Water, water everywhere and we are duped into buying it bottled.

Consumers spend a collective $100 billion every year on bottled water in the belief–often mistaken, as it happens–that this is better for us than what flows from our taps, according to environmental think tank the Earth Policy Institute (EPI).

For a fraction of that sum, everyone on the planet could have safe drinking water and proper sanitation, the Washington, D.C.-based organization said this week. [..]

“Even in areas where tap water is safe to drink, demand for bottled water is increasing–producing unnecessary garbage and consuming vast quantities of energy,” said [a researcher]. “Although in the industrial world bottled water is often no healthier than tap water, it can cost up to 10,000 times more.”‘

`A Catawba Island Township man has been convicted of attacking his girlfriend with a sack of potatoes.

Jeffrey B. Goehring, 27, has pleaded guilty in Ottawa County Common Pleas Court to aggravated assault and aggravated menacing. Charges of kidnapping and abduction were dismissed as part of a plea agreement.

Authorities accused Goehring of detaining the 22-year-old woman at his home during an argument Nov. 1. He choked her with a belt, and hit her with the sack of potatoes.’