Dogs treated to five-star hotels

Chuck Shepherd

Chuck Shepherd

You Might Want to Do Your Shoplifting Elsewhere: Increasingly, police departments and government offices (customs agencies, NASA, even the FBI) rely on state-of-the-art investigation support from the Target Corp. (as in Target department stores), according to a January Washington Post report.

Target’s world-class forensics lab in Minneapolis is the first choice by many departments for examination of surveillance tapes and other evidence, and it was Target in the mid-1990s that finally moved agencies to coordinate previously incompatible databases of criminals (treating the felon population as a nationwide “inventory control” problem). A Target executive said he works for “a high-tech company masquerading as a retailer.”

Government in Action

During President Bush’s recent trip to India, 17 Secret Service Labradors and German shepherds accompanying him (each with its own police “rank,” such as “lieutenant”) were housed in five-star hotels in Delhi, according to local press stories (but Delhi police dogs, assisting in the same missions, went home to kennels). Faring less well was one of the three teams of search-and-rescue dogs assigned to find Hurricane Katrina victims, which had to be sent home in March because of a hotel-booking snafu, for which FEMA and Louisiana officials blamed each other.

? How to Be a Police Department: In California, a police department can be created if a local government gives a transportation contract to a private company, automatically empowering that company to hire its own cops, who, though not allowed to make arrests, can carry guns, access police databases, and receive government anti-terrorist grants. The law achieved notoriety in February when Internet millionaire Stefan Eriksson’s Ferrari crashed in Malibu, and he later made confusing statements, including the revelation that he is the “deputy commissioner” of the “San Gabriel Valley Transit Authority” police, a post he acquired by starting a modest bus service for the elderly.

? Questionable Policies: (1) The Wood Methodist Church was informed in March by the town council in Dudley, England, that it owed an “advertising fee” of the equivalent of about $130 to put up a cross. (Town regulations specify that a “cross” is an ad for Christianity.)

(2) In March, Apache County, N.M., contracted to pay up to $100,000 to a former Arizona attorney general to investigate Apache’s sheriff, Brian Hounshell, who, after an exhaustive previous investigation (whose cost was not revealed), was accused of misspending $8,000 of taxpayer money.

Signs of the Times

Cheaters on the Rise: (1) In March, students at Mount Saint Vincent University in Bedford, Nova Scotia, persuaded the administration to prohibit professors from using any plagiarism-detecting aid, to avoid (said the student union president) a “culture of mistrust.”

(2) Students at Banja Luka University in Bosnia-Herzogovina protested in February the economics faculty’s decision to install surveillance cameras during exams. “Cheating in exams,” said one student, “is a part of our Balkan mentality, and it will take years to change students’ (attitudes).”

Least Competent People

(1) A 27-year-old woman was arrested in League City, Texas, in February after police discovered her 6-year-old daughter wandering around her empty school yard on a Saturday morning. The woman said she dropped the kid off, as usual, but that she was distracted and didn’t realize it was Saturday.

(2) Prominent neuroscientist Louis A. Gottschalk, still professionally active at age 89, lost about $3 million of his family trust over a 10-year period to Nigerian e-mail scammers, according to his son, who wants an Orange County, Calif., judge to remove his father as the estate’s administrator. In fact, Dr. Gottschalk has continued to pay money on another scam because the new recipients are “different Nigerians,” according to the son’s description of a conversation with his father.

Update

In 2003, News of the Weird told the inspirational story of “Star Trek” fanatic Tony Alleyne, who was trying to sell his small apartment in Leistershire, England, for the equivalent of about $1.7 million, after having converted it to a finely detailed model of the starship Enterprise (with transporter control, warp core drive, voice-activated lighting and security, infinity mirror, etc.). In February 2006, Alleyne, weary of the lack of buyer interest, filed for bankruptcy and moved to his Plan B: to gut his “Enterprise” and redesign the place as the bridge of the Voyager (from the later Star Trek series), which he will offer at a lower price.

Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or [email protected] or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.