Curses, foiled again
Tita Nyambi, 25, tried to withdraw $700 from his mother’s bank account by dressing in the woman’s clothes and speaking in a high-pitched voice, according to authorities in Somerset County, N.J., who added that he also presented her driver’s license and forged her signature on a bank form at the bank’s drive-through teller. Newark’s Star-Ledger said bank personnel immediately saw through the deception and called police, who responded while Nyambi was waiting for the money.
Central unintelligence agency
Dennis Montgomery, head of a small software company in Reno, Nev., duped the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security into believing he could decode secret messages from al Qaida sent via television to its operatives. Playboy, citing former CIA officials, reported that the Bush administration raised the terrorism alert level and canceled several transatlantic flights in December 2003 after Montgomery claimed bar codes on Al Jazeera TV contained targeting information for al Qaida attacks. The CIA eventually concluded there were no secret messages after French intelligence convinced the agency that the bar codes were bogus.
Kids today
Police investigating a fire in Clearwater, Fla., that extensively damaged a single-family home and sent homeowner Nancy Broadhead, 47, to the hospital with serious burns arrested the woman’s 11-yearold daughter and the daughter’s 15-year-old boyfriend, Jack Ault. They said the kids doused the mother’s bed with gasoline while she slept, plotting “to basically set the mom on fire and leave her to die,” police official Beth Watts said. Watts identified the motive as “teenage angst,” which escalated when the mom “confronted the daughter about stealing some of her cigarettes.” The St. Petersburg Times added that police charged Ault with stealing Broadhead’s car, which the children fled in after the fire. “I thought I had seen everything,” Pinellas- Pasco Chief Assistant State Attorney Bruce Bartlett told the newspaper. “Just when you think you have, along comes something like this.”
Photoshop politics
For a photo contest held in conjunction with December’s Copenhagen climate talks, Canada’s opposition Liberal Party posted on its website a submission showing a doctored photo of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot in which Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s face was substituted for Oswald’s. Another posting showed Harper with his fist in a cow’s rectum, which the site presented as one of the “best seven” depicting where Harper would rather be than in Copenhagen. Reuters reported the postings were quickly removed and an apology issued by party official Mario Lague.
The year before, Harper was forced to apologize after the Conservative website featured an animated video showing a puffin pooping on then-Liberal leader Stephane Dion.
Compiled from the nation’s press by Roland Sweet. Authentication on demand.
