2005's offbeat escapades
2005-12-21 11:35
Paris - Alongside tragedies, wars and natural disasters the year just ending brought its share of unusual, outrageous, tragi-comic and just downright silly news items.
As usual, a lot of them concerned judicial scrapes, prison mix-ups, strange regulations and the like.
Behind bars
In Denmark, a 43-year-old man was sentenced to two months in prison for passing himself off as a bona fide prisoner and thereby spending a night voluntarily behind bars.
Per Thorbjoern Lonka said he carried out the prank in order to prove that rich people could easily pay someone else to serve their prison terms. The prison guards who locked him up failed to ask for his identity papers.
Double trouble
A canny youth serving a sentence for assault in a Scottish jail escaped by virtue of the fact that his identical twin was also incarcerated there, but was due for release.
When the brother's name was called, his twin presented himself, and was duly let out. The authorities then had little choice but to free the brother as well.
Half price?
A court in the Swiss city of Zurich ruled that owners of very short cars could pay only half a parking fine, provided that two of them could really fit into one space.
A couple who owned two tiny city runabouts had done just that, but needless to say the parking attendant had stuck a fine on both their vehicles.
Going undercover
Tired of hearing reports of visitors paying grossly inflated prices for taxi rides in his city, the mayor of Prague disguised himself as an Italian visitor - and promptly unmasked a driver whose metre ran at over six times the normal rate.
"Disguised the way I was, I was certainly expecting to be charged a higher price, but not to such an outrageous extent," he said.
All the rage
Local lawmakers in the US state of Virginia threw out a bill that would have banned young people from wearing baggy falling-down trousers, which are currently all the rage. "Underwear is called underwear for a reason" said the congressman who sought the measure.
Catch a whiff
A woman in the US city of Norwalk, Connecticut filed a lawsuit against the local authorities for exposing her to colleagues' perfumes and colognes in her job as a municipal clerk.
She cited a serious allergy.
Fingered
A couple in California pleaded guilty to trying to extort money from a major hamburger restaurant chain after claiming to have found a human fingertip in a bowl of chili.
The court found that the fingertip was placed there on purpose, and had been purchased for $100 from a construction worker who lost it in an industrial accident.
Donkeys have rights too
The local council in the northern English resort town of Blackpool enacted an employment rights charter for the donkeys that carry tourists along the beach. The animals won regulated working hours and a day off each week.
Shutdown
When World Trade Organisation negotiators rolled into Hong Kong for a major summit, digital piracy figured prominently on their busy agenda.
Strange to relate, many of the bustling outlets that usually sell music CDs, DVDs and software in the city decided to shut down for the duration of the talks.