A female PlayStation 3 owner was “sexually assaulted” while she played Sony’s free-to-play virtual world PlayStation Home, according to her outraged roommate. Not the woman herself, you understand, but her on-screen avatar. O … kay.

PlayStation user “Whoef” complained that her roomie was “sexually assaulted near the Festive Tree while she was helping others with the puzzle,” which, I’ll grant her, isn’t a sentence you expect to read every day. “She would move and the harasser would follow,” wailed Whoef. “Each time trying to get behind her and use the crouch gesture. This apparently went on for some time.”

Hugely traumatizing, I’m sure, so fortunately Whoef has a solution: a “Home Jail” where those guilty of such harassment can be sent. I shit you not:

“There is no reason Home can’t make money on future rapists. After losing all their items, like a real jail, Home can sell them orange jumpsuits, flip-flops and they can decorate their jail cells with a few items such as bunk bed, toilet and a bed roll. They might as well get use to it, that’s where they are headed if they don’t change their criminal behavior.”

Just to remind you, this idiot is complaining about the sexual harassment of an avatar, or a bunch of polygons in a world made of polygons, thus totally trivializing real sexual assault in the process. I think we can all say today has been a bright day for humanity.

[Via Inquisitr]

NM family sues funeral home over brain in bag (10:21 a.m.)
By The Associated Press
Posted: 01/06/2010 10:16:23 AM MST in the Las Cruces Sun-News

ALBUQUERQUE – Members of a New Mexico family are suing an Espanola funeral home after their grandmother’s brain was sent home in a bag of personal effects given to them after her death.

The discovery was made the day after interment, when relatives “smelled a foul odor coming from the bag” they received from DeVargas Funeral Home and Crematory of the Espanola Valley, according to a lawsuit filed on behalf of four family members in state District Court in Albuquerque. The Albuquerque Journal reported on the lawsuit in a copyright story published Wednesday.

Funeral home owner Johnny DeVargas says the fault does not lie with his business and that another entity in Utah – where the woman died in a September car crash – was responsible for what had happened.

A D.C. police detective angrily confronted a group of snowball fighters, at one point even drawing his weapon, after they pelted him and his Hummer with snowballs near the intersection of 14th and U Streets NW Saturday, witnesses said. Responding in part to this and other videos, D.C. police said the detective, who they have declined to identify, has been assigned to desk duty pending the outcome of an investigation into the matter. (Chris Strohm/for The Washington Post)

via The Guardian:

On 21 September 2004, Michelle Weinberger woke up on the 79ft powerboat that she and her husband, Mark, owned as it rocked gently in the waters of a marina on the Greek island of Mykonos.

“I put my hand on his side of the bed, and I remember feeling it empty,” she later told the US television channel NBC. Weinberger leapt from bed in alarm to find that her husband had vanished, taking with him his passport and money he had stashed secretly on board.

It was the beginning of a five-year flight from justice that ended this week even more strangely than it began, almost 6,000 feet up in the Italian Alps. Two officers of the paramilitary Carabinieri, led by a mountain guide, trudged up to the southern slopes of Mont Blanc to find one of America’s most wanted fugitives living in a tent. He was surviving in temperatures as low as -18C on dried and tinned food and snow he melted on a portable stove.

Dr Mark Weinberger, a 46-year-old ear, nose and throat specialist, was tonight in a secure ward at the Molinette hospital in Turin recovering from a wound he sustained when he tried to take his own life at the Carabinieri station in Courmayeur, below Mont Blanc.

The US authorities have 40 days in which to apply for his extradition. He faces trial on 22 counts of healthcare fraud, having previously been indicted by a grand jury.

Brought up in a prosperous New York suburb, Weinberger was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and the UCLA medical school. He later worked with one of Chicago’s most renowned plastic surgeons before opening his own practice, the Weinberger Sinus Clinic, in Merrillville, Indiana.

The “nose doctor”, as he came to be known, met his future wife, 12 years his junior, in 2000. “He just swept me off my feet,” she said. “He was the kindest, most gentle man I had ever met.”

Weinberger proposed to her eight months later in a Rome piazza while on holiday, and they were married in characteristically ostentatious style in three separate ceremonies in the US and Italy in 2001.

Michelle Weinberger later said she reckoned her husband was earning $200,000 (£124,000) a week, performing between seven and 15 operations.

They owned a house in a wealthy lakeside neighbourhood of Chicago. Mark Weinberger travelled to and from his surgery in a chauffeur-driven limousine. He employed maids, cooks, a personal trainer and a skipper for his boat. Every month, his wife recalled, he would take 10 days off to enjoy his seemingly abundant income, often jetting off to Europe to indulge a passion for idling in the Mediterranean.

The first hint of trouble emerged in October 2002 when a lawyer acting for the estate of a woman who had died of throat cancer filed a complaint with the Indiana department of insurance. The complaint claimed Weinberger failed to diagnose her cancer and instead carried out an unnecessary operation on her sinuses that was paid for by her insurance company.

The lawyer said he was subsequently contacted by dozens of the doctor’s former patients who alleged that they too had had surgery they suspected was unnecessary. A similar complaint was filed by a second attorney on behalf of 25 former patients.

As the malpractice suits piled up, Weinberger arranged what he said would be a very special 30th birthday party for his wife. He flew her, her mother and three friends out to the Greek islands and promised her a present that would be “something that only the movie stars have”. Before disappearing, he bought her two expensive diamonds.

It was small recompense, though, for what she was about to discover. The unpaid berthing fees on Mykonos alone came to $40,000. Their boat was seized by the Greek authorities. Weinberger’s practice owed $5.7m and was eventually auctioned to meet his debts.

But the oddest discovery, and one that perhaps holds the key to his life on the run, was that the doctor had a room at his clinic which his employees dubbed “the scary room”. It was crammed with survival gear. And the equipment, including even a water filtration system, had been shipped to Europe before he left.

The fugitive surgeon was sought by the FBI. He featured more than once on the Fox television show America’s Most Wanted, and was supposedly sighted as far away as China. His wife continued to defend him after he vanished.

“I hope he’s safe, and I still love him,” she told the Chicago Tribune in October 2004, adding: “We can relocate. We can live on an island in a hut.” The Carabinieri who lifted the flap of Weinberger’s tent on Tuesday morning had been alerted to his presence by a mountain guide, an Italian police official said. They did not immediately reveal that they suspected his identity. They said they had used an excuse to convince him to accompany them to Courmayeur and that Weinberger tried to persuade them he just “wanted to live a life in the wild”.

After it became clear that they knew who he was, the runaway doctor asked to go to the lavatory. There, he whipped out a tiny knife he had secreted in his underwear and plunged it into his throat. But despite being an expert surgeon, he missed the artery he appeared to be aiming for, and the Carabinieri hustled him away for first aid.

via The Telegraph

The novice flier instantly shot through the jet’s perspex canopy and was blasted 100 metres into the sky by the rocket-powered emergency chair.

Experts said the man was lucky to escape unharmed following the bizarre incident, which happened on Wednesday in South Africa.

It is thought he activated the ejector seat after lurching forward during an aerobatic manoeuvre and accidentally pulling on the black and yellow emergency handle between his legs.

The lever is fitted as standard in the Pilatus PC-7 Mk II jets to allow pilots and their passengers to eject from the aircraft in the event of an emergency.

As soon as it was activated, the ejection sequence activated two rockets attached to the back of his chair.

The man, who has not been named, later floated back down to Earth on a parachute which opened automatically.

South African Airforce bosses scrambled a helicopter to pick up the passenger after the blunder near Langebaanweg airfield, 80 miles north of Cape Town.

The incident happened shortly after he took off for a joyride with an experienced pilot from South Africa’s Silver Falcons air display team.

DULUTH, Minn. – A Minnesota man has pleaded guilty to driving his motorized La-Z-Boy chair while drunk.

A criminal complaint said 62-year-old Dennis LeRoy Anderson told police he left a bar in the northern Minnesota town of Proctor on his chair after drinking eight or nine beers.

Prosecutors say Anderson’s blood alcohol content was 0.29, more than three times the legal limit, when he crashed into a parked vehicle in August 2008. He was not seriously injured.

Police said the chair was powered by a converted lawnmower and had a stereo and cup holders.Sixth Judicial District Judge Heather Sweetland stayed 180 days of jail time Monday and ordered two years of probation for Anderson. His attorney, David Keegan, did not immediately return a call for comment.

BOCA RATON — One too many orders for mozzarella caprese was apparently the breaking point for a Boca Raton chef who threatened to shoot the waitress who placed the order, according to police.

While waiting tables at Pizza Time restaurant on Southwest Second Avenue on Wednesday afternoon, Cathy Vultaggio hung a ticket for the popular salad of the fresh cheese and tomatoes drizzled with olive oil and basil.

Chef and manager Mark DeCraepeo got upset and said if he received one more ticket for mozzarella caprese, “I swear to God I’ll shoot you in the forehead,” according to a Boca Raton police report. Vultaggio and co-worker Kristee Como told police that DeCraepeo then slammed a black gun inside a holster on the counter top.

“Now you see I’m [expletive] serious. I’ll put a bullet right in your forehead,” he hollered, according to the women.

A few hours later the women phoned police to report the incident. DeCraepeo allegedly told authorities that he had a gun but could not recall what he said to the women earlier that day.

The 51-year-old Coral Springs resident was arrested for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon with intent to commit a felony and taken to the Palm Beach County Jail. Bail was set at $50,000.

A woman who answered the phone at Pizza Time this morning said no one there wanted to discuss the incident.

A man serving a six-year prison sentence for stealing millions of dollars through online credit card fraud recently succeeded in (surprise!) hacking into his prison’s computer network, effectively paralyzing the entire system. The really incomprehensible part, though, is that officials at Ranby Prison, close to Retford, Nottinghamshire, England, gave him access to the computer.

Apparently in dire need of an internal TV station at the facility, officers decided against hiring a third party (e.g., not a convicted hacker) to set up the system. They instead opted to keep the operation in (the Big) house, delegating the duty to one Douglas Havard. So, as convicted hackers are wont to do, Havard, left unguarded, worked his way into the prison’s hard drive, and set up a labyrinth of passwords to lock everyone else out of the system. And, just a week ago at this very same prison, an inmate actually got his hands on a master key…. Yeah.

It’s not clear whether or not he harbored any grandiose, Shawshankian escape plans, or if he just wanted to make a cyber statement. Whatever the motivation, Havard was put in isolated confinement (presumably, to let him think about what he did), and officials were left dumbfounded. One unnamed prison source (Captain Obvious?) expressed disbelief that “a criminal convicted of cyber-crime was allowed uncontrolled access to the hard drive.” Another unnamed Prison Service spokesman (Sergeant Optimism?) pointed out that at least Havard “was not able to access records of any other prisoners.” Phew.

posted by switched.com