DISGRACED BUT NOT CONTRITE
Randy Adams, the former police chief of Bell, Calif., had resigned in disgrace after prosecutors charged eight other city officials with looting the municipal budget. Adams had been recruited by the alleged miscreants (at a sweetheart salary twice what he made as police chief of much larger Glendale), and his resignation left him with a generous state pension of $240,000 a year. Rather than quietly accept the payout, Adams immediately appealed to a state pension panel, claiming that his one inexplicably rich year in Bell had actually upped his pension to $510,000 a year. In September, with a straight face, Adams pleaded his case to the panel, but 20 times during the questioning invoked his right not to incriminate himself.
DOCTORS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN
A 15-year-old Swedish student, working at Malmo University Hospital on a “practical work-life” internship, was allowed by a doctor to make part of the incision for a cesarean section childbirth and to examine the patient vaginally. One alarmed cesarean patient alerted news media after reading about the orientation program in May and wondering if she had been a “hands-on” patient.
ANTI-SOCIAL MEDIA
IRS agents, investigating tax-fraud suspect Rashia Wilson, 26, turned up “thousands” of identification numbers in a September home search in Tampa. Wilson had already laid down a challenge in May, when she wrote on Facebook: “I’m Rashia, the queen of IRS tax fraud. [I’m] a millionaire for the record. So if you think that indicting me will be easy, it won’t. I promise you. I won’t do no time, dumb [expletive unpublished].” The search also turned up a handgun, and since Wilson is a convicted felon (with 40 arrests), she was jailed and denied bail in part because of the Facebook post.
WAY TOO MANY APPS
The Swiss company Blacksocks offers an iPhone app that utilizes radio frequency identification chips inserted into socks so they can be automatically sorted. Then there’s the iPoo app. It, reported Wired magazine in November, “[l]ets you chat with your fellow defecators from the comfort of your own toilet.” And “in development” now, according to Harvard freshman Olenka Polak, is a “Code Red” app that creates an exchange network so that women and girls who find themselves unexpectedly spotting can locate an emergency source for a tampon or pad.
LEAST COMPETENT CRIMINALS
Two men robbing an Open Pantry store in Madison, Wis., in October escaped, but with less money than they came with. The lead thief grabbed a handful of cash that the clerk had been counting when the pair entered. The clerk pleaded, then sternly demanded that the man give back the money. The thief thought for a moment, became remorseful, threw all the money in his pocket to the floor, and fled. The clerk told police that when she re-counted the money, there was $1 more than in her original count, meaning that the thief had accidentally tossed in a dollar of his own.