Sunday, 9-3-06: In Orlando, Florida, a man robbed a bank and stuffed the money into the front of his pants. As he was walking out of the bank, his crotch burst into flames, catching the attention of passers-by. The police walked him very slowly to an ambulance. In local news, the police arrested a 20-year-old Portland man for firing a random bullet from a bluff near Interstate 205 on Friday morning. The 9 mm bullet from a pistol struck a woman riding in a van and broke her collarbone. She later said she was really glad her kids weren't in the car. Monday, 8-4-06: A woman named Charlotte Church asked Paris Hilton to be on her new talk show. Paris said she'd do it for $650,000. Charlotte rescinded the invitation. She said, "We asked Paris to be on the program because I could ridicule her and not feel at all bad about it-- she's such a complete airhead." A Cambodian Buddhist monk named Dem Yong, age 30, stipped naked and ran through the streets of suburban Phnom Penh after a night of drinking rice wine laced with toads. He's been asked to leave the monkhood. On Sunday, Europe's first spacecraft to the moon crashed into a volcanic plain at 4475 MPH. It was supposed to do that. The mission was in part to test the ion engine and new navigation systems. During months in orbit around the moon, SMART-1 scanned the surface with X-rays, infrared and took high resolution pictures. Steve Irwin, the hugely popular Australian TV wildlife personality, was killed today by a stingray. He was diving on the Great Barrier Reef to film a documentary. Stingrays are the largest of the venomous fish, and he died of a strike to the chest. Steve's show Crocodile Hunter has been popular since 1992. Tuesday, 8-5-06: The IRS refunded $318 million by mistake this year. A computer program that was supposed to catch fraud wasn't working. The IRS spent more than $20 million on the computer project, and in 2005 it caught $412 million in fraudulent returns. A study has found that autism is linked to the age of the father. Wow. Men over 40 are 6 times as likely to father an autistic child as men under 30. Maternal age makes no difference. Schizophrenia is the same way. The primary cause is old men having children. The reason is that a man's sperm gets worse in quality as he gets older, whereas a woman's eggs don't. Wednesday, 8-6-06: The Mobile Phone Throwing World Championship was held in Savonlinna, Finland. The men's winning throw was 292 feet, and the women's was 167 feet. Federal agents in Tucson, Arizona, arrested six men and seized thousands of pairs of fake Nike sneakers. They think they broke up one of the largest smuggling rings in recent history. The current plot involved 15 sea cargo containers containing 135,000 pairs of counterfeit Nike Air Jordans, worth $16 million. In all, the ring is believed to have shipped 82 containers into the US, bribing customs agents to get them in. An official Chinese government report reveals that a third of the country is now regularly bathed in acid rain, due to unbridled industrial development. More than half has intermittant acid rain. In some regions, every rain is acid. An aggressive porpoise has been menacing the French coast for several weeks, overturning boats, knocking fishermen into the sea, frightening swimmers. Experts believe his violent streak developed this summer after he was expelled from a group of other porpoises. He's caused more than $2000 in damages. Fishermen wanted to kill him, but a scheme is being devised to chase him away from boats with "acoustic repellants." What? An underwater air-horn? In local news, a 36-year-old woman was arrested for raising her 17-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son in a house over-run with 31 cats. The cats were taken to a shelter, and the kids are staying with their godmother. Jennifer Gaines told police she'd taken in 3 pregnant cats 8 months earlier. Wow.... Thursday, 8-7-06: IBM is using processors designed for Sony's Playstation3 video-game console to build the world's fastest computer to work on nuclear weapons. The computer will be named Roadrunner, and will be capable of performing a 1000 trillion calculations a second, or a "petraflop." It will have 32,000 processors, and will occupy an area equal to three basketball courts. It will use the open-source Linux for an operating system. In Yamoussoukro, Ivory Coast, the entire cabinet of 32 members resigned over a wave of toxic fumes that are blamed for the deaths of three children. The residue from a gasoline shipment was dumped near a residential area in Abidjan. The new Army Field Manual provides Geneva Convention protections for all detainees. Long solitary confinements, using dogs to threaten prisoners, putting hoods over people's heads, beating them, sexually humiliating them, depriving them of food or water, mock executions, shocking, burning, causing pain, and waterboarding are no longer allowed. Still allowed are using good cop/bad cop techniques, pretending to be someone other than an American interrogator, and separating detainees from each other are still allowed. Of course anything can still be done to people in CIA custody.... In local news, a woman in Cheshire shot her husband in the back after he killed their pet chicken. The couple had been drinking while doing yardwork. Police said they aren't sure if Stephen Gray meant to shoot the chicken, but they're sure Mary Gray meant to shoot him. Friday, 9-8-06: Paris Hilton was arrested in Hollywood yesterday on suspicion of drunk driving. She was handcuffed and booked. Her blood alcohol was .08%, the minimum to warrant an arrest. "It was nothing," Paris said on a radio talk show hours after her release. "I was starving because I had not ate all day" and was "speeding a little bit" and "I wanted to have an In-N-Out Burger." The House voted yesterday to stop the slaughter of horses for meat. They thought they'd ended it last year when they yanked the salaraies and expenses of federal inspectors, but the Bush administration just started charging the slaughterhouses for the inspections and continued the slaughter. 88,000 horses and mules were killed last year at three slaughterhouses, 2 in Texas and one in Illinois. Most of the meat goes to Europe and Asia for people to eat. Some goes to zoos. In local news, an emergency room nurse came home Wednesday night and found an intruder in her house. She was still in her scrubs, and he was armed with a hammer. They got into a violent struggle, and she strangled him to death. "I've been assulted twice and bit, hit, kicked and punched by patients," she said. In more local news, a Multnomah county detective who asked several women he stopped in 2004 to lift their shirts, remove their bras or unzip their pants to search for a "flower tattoo" remains on patrol. Despite prosecutor's pleas to keep him off the street. Deputy Christopher Green gave his phone number to the woman he made remove her bra. He later lied to his supervisor when asked about the incidents. One victim said she was nauseous to learn other women experienced what she went through. "I think it's disgusting," she said. Another brought a tort claim and was paid $60,000 by the city. And he's still on the street. Yesterday a wrongful death suit was filed against two officers who shot a young man named Fouad Kaady a year ago today. Fouad was badly burned in a carwreck and was in an "excited deirium." He was naked in the street, barking like a dog. The police ordered him to lay down. Instead he jumped on top of their car, and they shot him seven times. The case is being handled by Gary Spence, a famous lawyer from Wyoming. Both these officers are also still on the street. "In London a granny named Sue Kept a blade in the heel of her shoe. When she carved up a dame In a lav, she became The old woman who shivved in a loo." Saturday, 9-9-06: A 63-year-old priest in Amsterdam has confessed to phoning in a fake bomb threat to stop a Madonna concert. He was arrested shortly after he made the threat because he used his home phone. Madonna's tour goes next to Japan. The Mutnomah Country Sheriff says Deputy Christopher Green, the tatto hunter, is being reassigned from street patrol to training unit because prosecutors won't take his cases. He will teach hazardous materials, firearms, defensive tactics and other subjects.