Curses, foiled again A clerk at a variety store in Biddeford, Maine, told police a robber threatened to “blow her head off,” took several hundred dollars and then crossed the road to a pizza restaurant. There, according to WLBZ-TV, police found Mary Gorsuch, 48, who matched the clerk’s description and was already on probation for armed robbery, waiting for a pepperoni pizza she had ordered.

A pizza delivery driver alerted police after he spotted a man carrying laptop computers through a broken window at a computer store in Anchorage, Alaska.

The Anchorage Daily News reported that cops chased the fleeing car until it crashed into a concrete pole and then arrested Peter Enmon, 44. Police said most of the stolen laptops were being repaired and were unusable.

Setting the example An arbitrator ruled that the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is responsible for ensuring fair treatment of workers, willfully violated the Fair Labor Standards Act. “The case before me, in my view, demonstrates action that went beyond mere negligence,” Steven M. Wolf wrote, declaring that the agency’s practice of offering compensatory time off instead of overtime pay amounted to “forced volunteering.”

A 13-year search by Washington state environmental regulators to find the source of pollution of a creek near Vancouver Lake ended at their own office building. The Columbian newspaper reported the sewer line from the Vancouver building that houses the Washington state Department of Ecology regional offices, as well as those of the Department of Fish and Game and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was mistakenly connected to a storm drain instead of the municipal sewer main. Agency director Jay J. Manning called the discovery “embarrassing and upsetting.”

Germ-free drinking Britain’s National Health Service warned that hospital patients were drinking disinfectant hand gel from dispensers as a cheap way to get drunk.

The Daily Telegraph reported that the gel, which is used to reduce hospitalacquired infections such as MRSA, contains nearly twice as much alcohol as whiskey. It is supposedly undrinkable because of the addition of bitter-tasting Bitrex, but authorities said addicts simply “drink through” the taste.

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