Boy finds $8,160 stuffed in charred backpack

ALTON, N.H. – A 10-year-old boy picking up litter in New Hampshire found a charred backpack stuffed with more than $8,000 in cash.

Arie Johnston of Dover was helping his grandmother with her town’s annual roadside cleanup when he spotted the backpack Saturday. He told Foster’s Daily Democrat his first thought was that a person had been killed for the money.

Arie’s grandmother called the Alton town clerk, who identified the bag’s owner based on the passports and other documents found with the money. The owner was a woman who had lived across the street until a fire damaged her apartment last year.

Police say the woman has since moved to Maine and has asked that her belongings be given to her sister who lives in Alton. Arie’s grandmother says a reward may be coming.

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Woman finds ‘Twilight Moon’ sequel script in trash

A beauty salon owner found the highly sought after script in St. Louis, and returns it to studio

ST. LOUIS (AP) — A St. Louis beauty salon owner accidentally happened upon one of the hottest Hollywood scripts — the pages from an upcoming “Twilight” sequel — in a trash bin.

Casey Ray found two scripts, one for the vampire sequel “New Moon” and one for a different movie titled “Memoirs.” She decided to return them to the studio making the films. In return, she was invited to attend the movies’ premieres, her lawyer said.

Ray recently was waiting for her fiance to finish work when she spotted two scripts in a trash container. She was outside a hotel where actors were staying during a St. Louis shoot for the upcoming George Clooney movie, “Up in the Air.”

It’s not clear how the scripts wound up in the bin.

The Clooney movie includes actress Anna Kendrick, who is also in the “Twilight” vampire movie. A spokeswoman for Kendrick, Lisa Perkins, said the actress wouldn’t have left scripts lying around.

When Ray found the scripts, she considered leaking them to a national tabloid but decided against it, said her lawyer, Al Watkins.

“My client didn’t really want to get paid,” he said, but she was interested in hanging onto the scripts as collector’s items.

Watkins helped her return them to Los Angeles-based Summit Entertainment LLC, the studio making the movies. He said the studio invited Ray to premieres for the two films, and will certify the scripts as authentic after the movies are released.

“Summit doesn’t comment on any of the deals it does,” Summit spokesman Paul Pflug said. But he added, “We thank Ms. Ray for doing the right thing.”

The “Twilight” movies are based on the novels of Stephenie Meyer, so many of the plot turns are well known to readers. But keeping the “New Moon” script written by Melissa Rosenberg out of the public eye preserves which elements of the book will be included in the films, Pflug noted.

Last year’s original “Twilight” film grossed over $350 million worldwide.

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Man jailed 83 days for skipping jury duty

McKINNEY, Texas – A man arrested for allegedly failing to appear for jury duty was released Saturday after spending 83 days in jail, a length of detention that a judge called “unacceptable.”

Douglas Maupin was released a day after The Dallas Morning News brought his plight to the attention of a Collin County judge.

Maupin, a masonry contractor, was arrested Feb. 15 after police pulled him over for speeding. Police then detained him on a 2003 warrant for failure to appear for jury duty.

He wrote a letter to the newspaper about his lengthy jail stay, then said in a jailhouse interview that he, his friends and family could not afford his $1,500 bail.

He said his attempt to get a public defender was rebuffed by a jail clerk.

District Judge Chris Oldner said he was unaware of Maupin’s detention until Friday, even though the case was assigned to his court. The judge who signed the original 2003 warrant had retired, and officials said the case was assigned to the court of his replacement but the offense didn’t fall under that court’s responsibility.

“He should not have spent that much time. This is unacceptable,” Oldner told the Morning News. “I don’t know why the process failed to notify us.”

Oldner also said that Maupin should have been allowed to apply for a public defender.

Maupin, 34, said he just wanted his day in court.

“I do know I have the right to due process and a speedy trial,” he said. “I’ve had neither. It’s not right.”

The judge said he was “disappointed this has happened,” and promised to investigate.

msnbc.com

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IRS agent cheats on his own taxes

SANTA ANA, Calif. – An Internal Revenue Service agent who audits taxpayers in California has agreed to plead guilty to cheating on his own taxes.

In a plea agreement filed Monday in Orange County, 43-year-old Jim H. Liu of Diamond Bar admitted that he filed a tax return claiming a loss on a real estate transaction when he in fact saw a large profit.

He pleaded guilty to one federal count of subscribing to a false tax return, a charge that carries a penalty of up to three years in prison.

According to the plea agreement, Liu sold a property in Pomona in 2002 for a profit of more than $48,000, but reported a loss of $4,200 on his taxes.

The tax loss to the government was more than $14,000.

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Woman has brain surgery for weight loss

LOS ANGELES – Brain surgery for weight loss?

West Virginia mother of two Carol Poe, 60, is only the second person in the United States to undergo deep brain stimulation for weight loss after trying everything from diets to having her stomach stapled.

Last month, she took part in a clinical trial at West Virginia University hospital in which neurosurgeons drilled into her brain and used electricity to control her feelings of hunger and satisfaction.

Poe’s story will be told on ABC Television’s “Nightline” program on Monday, March 9.

Poe, who is 5 feet 2 inches tall and who weighed 230 pounds before the surgery, said that at her heaviest she weighed about 490 pounds.

Dr Julian Bailes, chairman of West Virginia University’s department of neurosurgery, said Poe was a good candidate for the radical treatment.

“This is not for overweight patients. It’s for obese patients,” Bailes told “Nightline.”

“This is a frontier of medicine…to be able to generate tiny pulses of electricity in these deep nuclei of the brain, and to see what effect they may have on behavior, including in this case the behavior of eating and the issue of uncontrolled appetite,” he said.

Bailes told Reuters that the West Virginia University hospital was the only one in the United States, and the only center he knew of worldwide, using the deep brain stimulation technique specifically on obese patients.

He said the first patient underwent surgery in November 2008. The second, Poe, took place in February. Both are part of a clinical trial, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, conducted by fellow neurosurgeons Michael Oh and Donald Whiting.

Poe was awake during the three-hour surgery, in which wires carrying an electrical impulse were inserted into her brain in the region where the stomach is controlled, and linked to two pacemaker devices implanted in her chest.

The voltage going into her brain is turned up slowly over future months to give Poe the sensation of feeling full.

“We hope her sensation is a sensation of satiety, a sensation of fullness, a lack of compulsion to consume excess calories,” Bailes told “Nightline”. “And a sensation again of satisfaction, of not having the feeling we need to eat some more when we know we don’t.”

Doctors said it would be several months before any weight loss is noticeable while the voltage to the brain is gradually increased. But a week after the voltage was turned on, Poe told “Nightline” she had already lost three pounds.

“When I eat, I get full faster. I just don’t have the cravings like I used to have,” she said.

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Food Stemp Diet

CNN correspondent Sean Callebs has just finished a long assignment: living on food stamps during all of February. He tracked his experiences on the American Morning blog.

This meant no eating out, no food on the run while covering stories and no enjoying king cake and other New Orleans specialties during Mardi Gras.

The food stamp program, newly named the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), is run by the Department of Agriculture and provides food to those in need. The latest numbers show 31 million Americans are relying on supplemental food assistance to get by every month.

Callebs is based in New Orleans, so he worked through the Louisiana Department of Social Services. The agency gave him a gift card worth $176, the maximum amount of assistance for which he was eligible, instead of an actual EBT card or food stamps.

This week, he reflected on what he learned in an interview with House Call.

House Call: Did living on a limited food budget have an impact on your health?

Callebs: I wouldn’t say it had a big impact on my health. I think that towards the end, I wondered if having fewer calories than I normally eat and also not having as much meat and fish — I wondered if that affected my energy levels. I was running maybe 4 to 5 miles and toward the end of this diet when I got to three miles I just got kind of winded. I don’t know why that happened.

HC: Were there also some benefits?

Callebs: I think I lost weight. I wouldn’t say noticeable. It’s not like I came out of this 30 days later and people were like “Wow, what happened to you?” but all my clothes are looser. I don’t have a scale, but I can tell you my pants are much looser.

HC: You write in your blog about your love of diet soda and how you had to drop it.

Callebs: (Laughing) It’s funny, because for the first 10 days it was really on my mind a lot. It was probably more than anything else I missed — probably a sad commentary on my lifestyle. Then toward the end, I didn’t even think about it and my photographer, as a joke the last day, he brought over two 20 ounce bottles of diet soda and said, “At midnight tonight you can have these,” and I didn’t drink them. I don’t miss it as much and, I can’t guarantee this is what caused it, but I’ve always had a problem with acid reflux and once I got started eating on the food stamp diet, it seemed to go away. I can’t conclusively say that that was the cause, but I sleep better and I feel better.

HC: How does your $176 compare with the average food stamp allotment?

Callebs: I think it’s difficult to say that there’s an average food stamp allotment because it really breaks down to how many people you have in the family and to what degree you live at or below the poverty level. I went to the state, and I said, “I want to pretend I have no income so how much can I get?” and they said this is the maximum you can get: $176. I did get a lot of e-mails, A LOT of e-mails, from people who have lived with government assistance and they said, “Look, $176 is a ton of money to live on. So you think it’s hard? You should put yourself in our shoes.” That was sobering because I thought $6.28 a day — that’s basically a super-sized fast-food meal.

(According to SNAP, the average monthly stipend was about $96 per person and about $215 per household in 2007.)

HC: So, what did you learn?

Callebs: I think that I learned that you can stretch $176. It sounds intimidating if you’ve always had enough, but if you haven’t had enough then you learn pretty quickly how to make ends meet. That’s what I learned pretty quickly. Snacks went out the window, name brands went out the window but, all in all, I ate pretty healthy.

HC: Are you going to continue with this new way of living?

Callebs: I am. I just got back from the grocery store and I spent $27 and I got plenty of food to last me for a few days. I’ve already wrapped it up and put it in the freezer. I’m still buying the stuff I bought before. It’s a diet I’m sure I’ll stick to. I feel good.

This story was pulled out from cnnhealth.com

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Indian boy marries dog to ward off tigers attacks

In India, An infant boy was married off to his neighbors’ dog in eastern India by villagers who said it will stop the groom from being killed by wild animals, officials and witnesses said Wednesday.

Around 150 tribespeople performed the ritual recently in a hamlet in the state of Orissa’s Jajpur district after the boy, who is under two years old, grew a tooth on his upper gum.

The Munda tribe see such a growth in young children as a bad omen and believe it makes them prone to attacks by tigers and another animals. The tribal god will bless the child and ward off evil spirits after the marriage.

“We performed the marriage because it will overcome any curse that might fall on the child as well on us,” the boy’s father, Sanarumala Munda, was quoted as saying by a local newspaper.

The groom, Sagula, was carried by his family in procession to the village temple, where a priest solemnized the marriage between Sagula and his bride Jyoti by chanting Sanskrit hymns, a witness said.

The villagers then ate a feast with rich food and alcohol to celebrate.

The dog belongs to the groom’s neighbors and was set free to roam around the area after the ceremony. No dowry was exchanged, the witness said, and the boy will still be able to marry a human bride in the future without filing for divorce.

Indian law does not recognize weddings between people and animals, but the ritual survives in rural and tribal areas of the country where millions are illiterate.

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Man loses $300,000 in Starbucks jewel heist

Colorado, USA – How much is a cup of coffee at Starbucks? For a jewelry salesman from Kansas, it ended up costing about $300,000.

Police say the man stopped for coffee Monday at a Starbucks in Parker, Colo., south of Denver. He was just returning to his car when he was held up.

Three masked robbers took three “tubs” of jewelry and a briefcase containing the salesman’s handgun, the Rocky Mountain News reported.

Police didn’t identify the 64-year-old salesman.

Parker police spokeswoman Elise Penington said the victim was in town for a trade show. One of the robbers allegedly brandished a gun, but no one was injured in the robbery.

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Bangladesh man kills 40,000 rats in one year

A poor farmer from northern Bangladesh was crowned the country’s rat killing champion on Thursday with a final score of 39,650 dead rodents after a year-long hunt.

Binoy Kumar Karmakar, 40, used traps, poison and flooding to kill his quarry, and collected their tails to prove his success rate and claim a prize from the government.

Karmakar collected a 14-inch Sony colour television for winning the competition for 2008, which was part of a nationwide drive to stop food supplies being eaten up by rats.

“During the year, our farmers killed around 25 million rats,” agriculture department spokesman Abdul Halim told AFP. “Binoy Kumar Karmakar has been declared the champion for killing 39,650.”

Officials estimate that up to 10 per cent of Bangladesh’s crops – mostly rice, wheat and potato – is devoured by millions of rats every year.

Last year an invasion of rats in Bangladesh’s southeastern Chittagong hill tracts region wiped out crops and caused a famine in some remote villages.

The UN’s World Food Programme distributed food aid to 120,000 people for four months after the invasion forced affected tribal people to live on wild roots.

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Man runs out of gas after robbing gas station

Florida, USA Authorities said they arrested a man who apparently forgot to fill up when he was robbing a gas station.

The Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office said a 23-year-old man used a Bowie knife to rob a Cape Haze gas station early Sunday. Deputies said the man pulled the 12-inch blade and demanded money. But when he left, a customer followed him and called 911.

While deputies were looking for signs of the robber, a newspaper carrier told them that a man in a car matching the one from the robbery had run out of gas nearby.

The man was arrested several hours after the robbery and charged with robbery with a weapon and loitering/prowling. He was released Monday on $10,500 bail.

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