Santa burglar stuck in chimney for 3 hours, arrested

ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Santa aside, that trip down the chimney doesn't work so well after all.

So a man in St. Louis found out early Wednesday. Police say he was a burglar, and he was arrested after a harrowing three hours inside the chimney of a business.

Authorities were called at 3 a.m. to a pawn shop, where the man was wedged in the chimney, unable to move. After about three hours, rescuers were able to knock away bricks and free him.

He was taken to a hospital for evaluation. The man's name has not been released.

Man invents INVENTED a female ROBOT for compaions

A BOFFIN too busy to find real love has INVENTED his idea of the perfect woman – a female ROBOT.
Inventor Le Trung, 33, created Aiko, said to be “in her 20s” with a stunning 32, 23, 33 figure, shiny hair and delicate features.

She even remembers his favourite drink and does simple cleaning and household tasks.

"Fem-bot" Aiko, who has cost £14,000 to build so far, is a whizz at maths and even does Le’s accounts.

Le, a scientific genius from Brampton in Ontario, Canada, said he never had time to find a real partner so he designed one using the latest technology.

He said he did not build Aiko as a sexual partner, but said she could be tweaked to become one. more

Letter carrier stole more than 100,000 letters

MONTREAL - A Montreal letter carrier pleaded guilty Monday in what is being called the biggest case of mail theft in Canadian history.

Eric Belley, 34, stole more than 100,000 letters and packages over a six-year period.

The letters themselves were left untouched, and that’s the problem - the prosecutor believes Belley was simply too lazy to do his job.

Instead of delivering mail to his customers the Montrealer brought entire bags of letters home, hiding them in his Montreal-area apartment or at his cottage north of the city.

“It was a shock. We had never seen such a thing, 75,000 or 100,000 pieces of mail,” said Catherine Lortie, of Canada Post.

On Monday the former postman pleaded guilty to mail theft. It appeared he had little choice after being caught in the act red-handed.

In the corporation’s investigation of Belley, he was filmed removing bags of mail from the trunk of his car and bringing it inside his home. He now faces up to 10 years in jail.more

Fantasia Barrino is about to be evicted

American Idol's third season winner, Fantasia Barrino, is about to be evicted from one of her two Charlotte, North Carolina, homes -- according to the blog, realestalker.

Find out where Barrino and your other favorite American Idol stars are now.

According to property records, the 6-bedroom mansion has been foreclosed on. Unless the 8-time Grammy-nominated singer can make necessary payments, the 6,232 square-foot home will be auctioned off on Jan. 12.

Barrino, a single mother to daughter Zion, purchased the home, located on Bevington Place, in March 2007. The price was $1.3 million.

Check out American Idol's hottest makeovers.

Her other house, also located in Charlotte, was purchased in July 2004 for $740,000 and records show it's not in financial trouble.

Her recent tune, a duet with Jennifer Hudson called "I'm His Only Woman," was just nominated for a Grammy.

Mother disgusted after Nintendo DS Scrabble game taught her son a string of swearwords.

Enlarge Ethan Carrington-Anderson and his mother Tonya with his Nintendo DS Scrabble game that has a tendency to come up with rude words when it is the computer's turn to play
A mother who bought a Scrabble game for her eight-year-old son's computer console to improve his vocabulary has told of her disgust after it produced a string of swearwords.
Tonya Carrington, 36, gave her son Ethan the Nintendo version of the much-loved word game, enabling him to pit his wits against 'virtual' characters.
But she was horrified to discover that the computer-generated players were laying down words containing crude slang and abuse.
Now she is urging other parents considering buying the popular package as a Christmas present to think again.
Mrs Carrington tried out the program for herself on Ethan's hand-held DS console and was taken aback when her 'opponent' laid down the word 't*ts'.
The game also gives a definition of words it uses, on this occasion giving the meaning 'a garden bird' but also 'an informal word for female breasts'.
Any doubt was removed when the next word the computer offered was 'f*ckers', which it defined as 'a slang word for chavs'.
As if that wasn't bad enough, it received a triple score and won the game for the character, whose name was Camilla.
'Ethan is doing really well with English at school, so I decided to get this to help boost his vocabulary - but obviously not like that,' she said.
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Boy George faces a jail term for falsely imprisoning

Boy George faces a jail term for falsely imprisoning a male escort.

He was told in court today that a prison sentence was 'the most likely option' after a jury convicted him of handcuffing Norwegian Audun Carlsen to a wall at his flat.

The singer, 46, whose real name is George O'Dowd, also beat Carlsen, 29, with a metal chain as he tried to escape from the flat in Shoreditch, East London after a kinky photographic session, Snaresbrook Crown Court heard.

Mr Carlsen fled in his underpants and alerted police.

A jury found Boy George, left, guilty of falsely imprisoning male escort Audun Carlsen, right
O'Dowd claimed he had handcuffed Carlsen to a wall while he investigated whether he had tampered with his home computer on April 28 of last year.

He accused Mr Carlsen of stealing photos of himself from the laptop, taken when the pair met three months earlier.

The defence claimed that the dispute was over whether Mr Carlsen had stolen photographs and, in so doing, 'messed up' O'Dowd's computer.
The suggestion that it was because Mr Carlsen refused to have sex with O'Dowd on the previous occasion was 'entire fantasy or a lie', the defence said.
O'Dowd denied to police that he punched or assaulted Mr Carlsen or swung a chain at him as the escort fled the flat, and suggested the bruises Mr Carlsen sustained could have been due to the fact that he was HIV positive.

Jurors saw photos of welts on Carlsen's head and injuries to his arm.

Boy George performing in Peru last year. He has been warned he faces a jail sentence
But Mr Carlsen told the court that O'Dowd concocted the story about computer tampering so he could punish him for not having sex during the first meeting.

He said: 'I think he couldn't handle the refusal - me not having sex with him.'
O'Dowd told police he was annoyed about that claim. 'I'd never have slept with someone who is HIV positive,' he told police.
The prosecution said the pair first made contact on the Gaydar website, a social networking site primarily for gay and bisexual men.more

farmers upset by the Environmental Protection agency

MONTGOMERY, Ala. – For farmers, this stinks: Belching and gaseous cows and hogs could start costing them money if a federal proposal to charge fees for air-polluting animals becomes law.
Farmers so far are turning their noses up at the notion, which is one of several put forward by the Environmental Protection Agency after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that greenhouse gases emitted by belching and flatulence amounts to air pollution.
"This is one of the most ridiculous things the federal government has tried to do," said Alabama Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks, an outspoken opponent of the proposal.
It would require farms or ranches with more than 25 dairy cows, 50 beef cattle or 200 hogs to pay an annual fee of about $175 for each dairy cow, $87.50 per head of beef cattle and $20 for each hog.
The executive vice president of the Wyoming Farm Bureau Federation, Ken Hamilton, estimated the fee would cost owners of a modest-sized cattle ranch $30,000 to $40,000 a year. He said he has talked to a number of livestock owners about the proposals, and "all have said if the fees were carried out, it would bankrupt them."
Sparks said Wednesday he's worried the fee could be extended to chickens and other farm animals and cause more meat to be imported.
"We'll let other countries put food on our tables like they are putting gas in our cars. Other countries don't have the health standards we have," Sparks said. more