29. mars 2006

If I fire a gun in the air, will McDonald's serve me faster? The competion for dumbest criminal ever is a very crowded field, but Eugene Dobbins and Jeffrey Ware of Lawrence, Ind, have thrown in a pretty good application. The men were hungry and impatient, and when the customer in front of them at the McDonald's drive-through used too much time, they thought gunfire could speed up the service. Well, it got the cops' attention! Police said the men thought their order was taking too long when they tried to speed things up with a gun. An employee called 911. "Somebody's in the drive through firing guns and telling us to get back into the car," the employee told the 911 dispatcher. Police said Dobbins and Ware, in a black Chevrolet Cavalier, fired the gun into the air. "There's a vehicle in front of him and the subject got impatient about him and wasn't moving quick enough and he stuck the gun out of the window and fired a shot," said Lawrence police Chief Deputy Jack Bailey. Police said the men stayed in the drive-through, still waiting for their food, after firing the gun. When they got their food, police were waiting for them. "Criminals do some stupid things -- they really do. That's what usually gets them caught," Bailey said. Police said they saw a .32 caliber revolver in the back seat and a further search turned up dozens of bags of marijuana and crack cocaine. Prison food will have to do for quite a long time, I think. Via Fark. PS: Some earlier candidates for dumbest thief and most stupid criminal. And then there is the just plain stupid, holding an Afghan-style wedding in Norway. 11:45:29 PM    comment []  trackback []

Norwegian stock market quadruples in three years The Norwegian stock market took a serious hit when the dot-com bubble burst. From the old top in September 2000 it lost 56 percent until February 2003. The Oslo Stock Exchange (OBX) index was then at 98.57 points. This afternoon Norwegian public stocks reached 395.66 points, making a 300 percent rise - a quadrupling - of its value in a little more than three years. Now everybody wants a piece of the big pie, obviously, and that tends to be when the really smart money move elsewhere. Not to take anything away from the health of Norway's economy or our businesses, but there is something for arguing that when everybody rushes to the stock exchange to invest their savings, the hunt for the "even bigger fool" is coming to an end. From a Norwegian article in Aftenposten. 7:51:56 PM    comment []  trackback []

No evidence supports Moussaoui's claims Zakarias Moussaoui certainly captured audiences with his admission, or rather, boast, that he and "shoe bomber" Richard Reid was to hijack a fifth plane on 9/11-01 and crash it into the White House. Steven Emerson rightly points out there is no evidence to support his claims. I don't totally discount it, because in the end, he may go to his grave or to his gallows without ever confessing the final details in the same way that Richard Reid may never have fully disclosed all that he knew about the shoe bomb plot for which he was convicted in the December 2001 conspiracy. The fact of the matter is that most of the evidence suggests, Lester, that the U.S. government has not found anyone else who would have participated in this fifth set of hijackers as he has alleged. Nothing indicates Reid had any plans for a US plot at that time. There is nothing directly linking Moussaoui to Atta and the other hijackers. It is not very likely there would be only two hijackers to take on a fifth passenger plane, when the others were set up with four. Moussaoui is attempting suicide by court. Does he deserve to die? Undoubtedly. Should the court sentence him to death to fulfill a request from a crazy fanatic? I don't think so. It is a very flimsy case, and a strange one. 7:10:51 PM    comment []  trackback []

Taylor arrested Charles Taylor has been arrested in Nigeria and is about to be dispatched to Liberia right now. There, presumably, he'll be picked up and sent to the war crimes tribunal for Sierra Leone, where Taylor has a heck of a lot of misery to answer for. Mr Taylor was detained earlier by security forces in the town of Gamboru-Ngala, close to the Cameroon border in the north-eastern Nigerian state of Borno. It is something of a surprise that the Nigerians managed to capture him so fast. Either the Nigerian government hadn't expected the protests to be so serious, and changed their minds about letting him go, or it was really a botched escape attempt that wasn't as clever as it looked. 4:28:03 PM    comment []  trackback []

© Copyright 2006 Jan Haugland. Last update: 01.04.2006; 13:23:31.