Eideard

Shellie Leonard — neighborly burglar

At first, on Wednesday, she helped herself to some craft supplies. And a knife. A purse. One hundred CDs.

The window curtains.

Shellie Leonard wanted more, authorities said, and on Thursday she went back to her neighbor’s house on Dalwood Drive with plans to steal a computer and electronics. Her neighbor was incarcerated at the Pasco County jail. But Thursday happened to be the day the neighbor came home — and caught Leonard stealing, the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office said.

Leonard, 43, of 4004 Darlington Road in Holiday, was arrested and charged with two counts of burglary. Information on the victim — and what crime the victim is suspected of committing — was not available from authorities…

Leonard remained Friday at the Pasco jail in lieu of bail…

Har! More konvoluted karma.

Har!

Click on the image twice – to bring up the whole disaster.

For young, single city professionals, the Spring Festival holidays present many reasons to be fearful: standing in line for hours to get a train ticket, exhausting long journeys, stuffing red envelopes with cash. Arguably the No 1 reason is the prospect of turning up at home alone. Not only does it give parents the opportunity to nag – “Your classmates and cousins are married and have children. What’s wrong with you?” – but it is also likely to result in a holiday spent on blind dates. To ease the pressure, Chinese singletons are simply paying people to pose as partners for their holiday homecoming.

On Dec 14, Tang Yongxue stood on a street in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, and waved a placard that read: “Fake boyfriend needed for Spring Festival – 10,000 yuan ($1,500) for five days’ work.” She told reporters she wanted to rent a man to accompany her home to reassure her parents. The candidate had to be aged 26 to 30, at least 1.75 meters tall and “insightful”.

Although dismissed as a publicity stunt by many people, the incident highlights the huge pressure on China’s growing population of single urbanites to marry.

Tang’s tactic has been widely adopted online by desperate bachelors and bachelorettes. Want ads for fake holiday partners run for pages on many popular Chinese micro-blogging websites, such as Sina, while some stores on Taobao, the online marketplace, also offer boyfriends and girlfriends for hire.

“It’s a fun idea to help another person temporarily release the pressure of getting married,” said netizen “Howe.C”, who declined to give his real name. “Plus, spending the holiday with total strangers is interesting.”

The office worker, who is in his late 20s and lives in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, said he will not go home this Spring Festival as he fears the long journey may stop him from returning to work on time. He posted an advertisement on Douban, a major online community, offering to pretend to be someone’s boyfriend in Wuhan or neighboring cities. He describes himself as athletic, outgoing and humorous, not handsome but well educated and polite.

Speaking for his generation, “Howe.C” said: “We shouldn’t marry simply because we reach marital age. We’ll find true love but it takes time. Sometimes parents push us too hard. The pressure is especially bad for women who are almost 30. The general conception goes that the older a woman gets, the fewer marriage opportunities she is left with. I empathize with them…”

Although renting a boyfriend or girlfriend sounds like cheating the people who care most, supporters often defend the practice by saying it is a white lie with mutual benefits. Not only does it bring comfort to elderly family members, they argue, but it also saves singles from a holiday of arguing with their parents. For hired lovers, they get their fee, as well as free accommodation and travel.

There’s already been an episodic drama based on this “solution” on Chinese TV. It probably would make a decent film on the order of “You’ve got mail”. Which Hollywood would copy and set in New York City for Xmas, no doubt.

The interest for me is in the dynamics of a rapidly-changing society. It ain’t ever easy.

Two British pensioners landed in hospital in southern Germany after their car’s global positioning system directed them to drive into a church.

While driving their Renault in the evening on a back road near the Austrian border, the navigation system instructed the couple to turn right where there was no road.

“They were confused and didn’t notice that the navigation system was faulty,” a police spokeswoman said.

The 76-year-old driver then plowed into the side of the village church, writing off the car, knocking a picture off the wall and damaging the building’s foundations. Total damages were some 25,000 euros, police in the nearby town of Immenstadt said.

The couple, who were traveling to France, spent the evening in hospital recuperating from minor injuries.

That’s got to leave a mark.

Welcome to Disney World – unless you’re a 9-yr-old Brit with the wrong passport

A nine-year-old boy’s dream trip to Disney World was ruined when US immigration officials ruled he was a threat.

Civil servants Kathy and Edward Francis planned to surprise their grandson Micah Strachan with the holiday of a lifetime to Florida in February. They were only going to tell Micah about it when they took him to the airport on February 19 for the flight to the US.

They had already spent more than £1,500 on plane tickets and had been organising the trip for months.

But this week US Embassy officials denied the schoolboy a visa to enter the US.

They said there was a risk he would not leave the US at the end of his holiday and refused his application under Section 214 (b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act…

He holds a South African passport because his grandparents Kathy and Edward, who have lived and worked in Britain since 1990, only got him a South African passport. They are originally from South Africa…

But the US Embassy’s rejection letter to Micah said: “Because you either did not demonstrate strong ties outside the United States or were not able to demonstrate that your intended activities in the US would be consistent with the visa status, you are ineligible.”

Given this kind of elitist behavior, the supremo attitude of some government flunky, I wonder why anyone would wish to visit the United States on holiday? I’d understand the kid wanting to stay at Disney World. He’s 9 years old, fer cripes sake.

Given the risk of senseless and arbitrary decisions by immigration robots, why even consider offering your child up to the caprices of a government obviously run by idiots?

“It was just two nerds comparing notes,” the spokesman said. “Keep the speculation in check.”

But when those nerds happened to be the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Robin Li, the head of Baidu – the biggest search engine in China – there was no way a quiet business lunch was going to remain quiet.

Moments after Zuckerberg and Li were seen strolling through the canteen in Baidu’s Beijing headquarters today, an employee posted a blurred mobile phone photograph of them on his microblog…

Zuckerberg – recently named person of the year by Time Magazine – has made no secret of his desire to expand in China, where Facebook has been blocked by the government censors’ Great Firewall since 2008…

Zuckerberg’s current holiday is his first known trip behind the Great Firewall. But he has started taking Mandarin lessons, and recently asked Facebook members for tips on places to visit with his girlfriend, Priscilla Chan.

In a recent speech at Stanford University, he said the company may turn its attention to China in a year if it can first crack Japan, South Korea and Russia.

“How can you connect the whole world if you leave out a billion people?” he asked then…

Zuckerberg appears to have found common ground with Li, an internet entrepreneur who has completed a postgraduate course in the US.

Since then, he has shrugged off Google and Yahoo, as well as criticism about a supposedly weak stance on censorship and copyright piracy, to make Baidu the dominant force in the Chinese search engine market…

Commerce can do more to bring reluctant democracies forward into the modern world than any prating about the holiness and destiny of democracy. Instead of spending time lecturing each other on politics and history, methods and practice – learn how to profit and grow together.

Leave the purity of your bodily fluids for priests, pundits and politicians.

Unlike most of my disclaimers, I actually own a boatload of Baidu. Only because I bought a wee bit when it was much cheaper – and before they had their 10:1 stock split.

My Christmas dinner was up in one of those trees. It was snowing lightly on a minus-two-degree dawn, and I was lying on my belly bundled in white camo, pointing the muzzle of a Benelli 12-gauge through a cluster of fireweed.

The cold hurt my hands in a way I wondered if I should worry about. In front of me, a snow-coated field stretched for 500 yards to a line of bare trees silhouetted against a blush of sunrise. The trees’ branches were dotted with roosting turkeys, and their occasional gobbles carried back across the field to where I waited, breathing into my face mask.

Next to me, rising on his knees to better see the birds, was Brent Lawrence, a friend who worked for the National Wild Turkey Federation, a nonprofit conservation group. We were hunting together outside the town of Kearney, Nebraska, for three days in December — one of which had already passed.

Now he tapped my shoulder and pointed: The dots had started flapping to the ground, and single-file lines of birds were bobbing into the field, their chatter echoing in the cold air. I took a deep breath and adjusted my grip on the gun.

I’d started hunting a few years before, shocking everyone who knew me…My reformative logic went like this: For every turkey wrap or club sandwich I’d ever eaten, something had been killed for my benefit — I’d just never done the killing myself. The deer hunt invitation seemed an opportunity, a challenge even, to reclaim my place in the food chain by assuming responsibility for the meat on my plate…

Gradually the turkeys spread out, and one wandered a little closer to us. It pecked at the ground, then raised its head and stood perfectly still for one moment. I squeezed the trigger.

The blast of the gun is always a bit of a surprise — more like something that happens to me than something I initiate. All at once, my ears were ringing, the turkey was thrashing in the snow, and Brent and I were racing down the hill toward it.

“Don’t worry; it’s dead,” he shouted. Though its wings were flapping, its head was limp on the ground. I wanted to look away but didn’t — this was part of my responsibility.

RTFA. Read the whole article.

Enjoyable writing and reading from someone worth reading.

Amateur photographer captures his own arrest

Police questioned an amateur photographer under anti-terrorist legislation and later arrested him, claiming pictures he was taking in a Lancashire town were “suspicious” and constituted “antisocial behaviour“.

Footage recorded on a video camera by Bob Patefield, a former paramedic, shows how police approached him and a fellow photography enthusiast in Accrington town centre. They were told they were being questioned under the Terrorism Act…

He and his friend were taking photographs of Christmas festivities on 19 December, after attending a photography exhibition. The last images on his camera before he was stopped show a picture of a Santa Claus, people in fancy dress and a pipe band marching through the town.

He turned on his video camera the moment he was approached by a police community support officer (PCSO). In the footage, she said: “Because of the Terrorism Act and everything in the country, we need to get everyone’s details who is taking pictures of the town.”

She replied: “I’m an officer of the law, and I’m requiring you, because I believe your behaviour to be of a suspicious nature, and of possibly antisocial [nature] … I can take your details just to ascertain that everything is OK.”

Patefield and his friend maintained that they did not want to disclose their details. They were stopped a third and final time when returning to their car. This time the officer was accompanied by an acting sergeant. “Under law, fine, we can ask for your details – we’ve got no powers,” he said. “However, due to the fact that we believe you were involved in antisocial behaviour, ie taking photographs … then we do have a power under [the Police Reform Act] to ask for your name and address, and for you to provide it. If you don’t, then you may be arrested…”

Patefield was arrested for refusing to give his details, while his friend, who gave in, walked free. Patefield was held for eight hours and released without charge.

Yeah, yeah. I know. Discretion is the better part of valor.

But, sometimes you have to stand up and be counted for the freedom we’re supposed to be fighting all over the world to protect. Even if some petty pop-up snoop has the authority to shut you down. UK or US? It’s all the same.