News Quirks | Making Sure No One Wins 

Curses, Foiled Again
nPolice responding to a break-in at a convenience store in Athens, Tenn., identified their suspect when he returned to the scene two hours later. Officer Chandler Rollo told the Daily Post-Athenian he was at the store waiting for a manager to arrive with the key after someone shattered a glass door and entered the store. A blood-covered Roger Scott Buckner Jr., 21, approached Rollo to ask for help. Buckner required dozens of stitches in his hand and ankle for wounds from the shattered glass.

Making Sure No One Wins
nHoping to win $1,000 in travel vouchers, photographer Duane Kerzic was taking pictures of trains from the passenger platform at New York City’s Penn Station for Amtrak’s annual Picture Our Trains contest when Amtrak police arrested him. He said the officers who handcuffed him to the wall of a holding cell told him “it was illegal to take photos of the trains.”

Stand Up for Freedom
nCIA agents began supplying Viagra to win support from Afghan warlords in the war against Taliban insurgents. “Whatever it takes to make friends and influence people, whether it’s building a school or handing out Viagra,” a CIA operative told The Washington Post. The paper reported the erectile dysfunction drug has proved more welcome than customary bribes, such as guns and money. Aging chieftains often have up to four wives, for example, and see the Viagra pill as a way to “put them back in an authoritative position.”

One official told the Post that four Viagra pills transformed the attitude of one 60-year-old warlord, who had been wary of the United States. “He came up to us beaming,” the official said. “And after that, we could do whatever we wanted in his area.”

From First to Worst
nPolice who arrested Charles Barkley, 45, for drunk driving in Scottsdale, Ariz., reported that the former basketball star told them he ran a stop sign because he was in a hurry to pick up a girl who had “given him a ‘blow job’ one week earlier” that Barkley described it as “the best one he had ever had in his life.”

• Authorities arrested Charriss Bowers, 27, for biting her husband’s penis. The couple began having oral sex at their home in Deltona, Fla., but after a few minutes, she decided she didn’t want to continue and began biting down hard enough that Delou Bowers asked her to stop, according to a Volusia County Sheriff’s report. When she refused, he started punching her in the head and face until she finally let go. The deputies decided his injuries warranted a charge of battery.

Twenty Miles to the Pound
nDr. Alan Bittner declared he is saving the planet by running his Ford Explorer and his girlfriend’s Lincoln Navigators on fat removed from at least 7,000 liposuction patients. “The vast majority of my patients request that I use their fat for fuel,” the Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeon said on the website LipoDiesel.com, “and I have more fat than I can use.”

Since the United States bans the use of human medical waste to power vehicles, California’s public health department began investigating Bittner after his claim came to their attention because several patients filed lawsuits accusing him of letting his assistant and his girlfriend, both unlicensed, perform the procedure. Three patients said the assistant and girlfriend removed too much fat, leaving them disfigured. A small notice on his official clinic Website reveals that Bittner has relocated to Bogota, Colombia, “where I can help those most in need.”

The Meter’s Running
nA Scottish court heard that Perth taxi driver James Hendry, 58, repeatedly groped a 22-year-old female passenger while driving her home and then charged her the full fare.

Bird in the Hand
nForty-six percent of the women who responded to a survey said they would rather go without sex for two weeks than give up the Internet. Only people already using the Internet were surveyed. The poll by the online research firm Harris Interactive found that only 30 percent of the men would forgo real sex. Altogether, 95 percent of the 2,119 adults sampled rated access the Internet as “very important, important or somewhat important.”

Compiled from the nation’s press by Roland Sweet. Submit items, citing date and source, to P.O. Box 8130, Alexandria VA 22306. tttt