Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Small Bits of News You Didn’t Know you Needed

Software glitch leads to 1-cent gas in Dutch town
Nighttime was the right time to get tanked Friday in the Dutch town of Genderen.
An unmanned gas station began offering customers gas for 1 euro cent per liter, or about 1.5 cents Cdn per liter, due to a software glitch that occurred around midnight. That was a discount of more than 99 per cent.
"Most people were home in bed, so it could have been worse," Piet-Hein Bogaers, director of the company that operates the station, Vollenhoven Olie BV, said Monday.
As word of the deal spread, business boomed at the station, 100 kilometers southeast of Amsterdam.
Bogaers said that, by the time the mistake was fixed Saturday morning, customers were lined up to buy gas. Many had even called to alert the company.
"They were saying, 'This can't be right,' " he said.
It wasn't. Bogaers declined to say how much money Vollenhoven lost but hundreds of liters were sold at the discounted price.
"I guess we can consider it good publicity, even if it wasn't intentional," he said.
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Sydney woman at airport had 'heroin in shoes'
A woman faces drug importation charges after Customs officials allegedly found heroin hidden in her shoes.
Police say the 50-year-old from Cabramatta, in Sydney's west, was stopped at Sydney International Airport after arriving on a flight from Vietnam on Monday.
She is the second person in the past month discovered allegedly trying to smuggle drugs through Sydney airport in shoes.
Customs personnel became suspicious of the woman's shoes while searching her luggage, police said.
"A subsequent x-ray examination of the shoes revealed anomalies consistent with the concealment of narcotics," Australian Federal Police (AFP) said in a statement.
"The soles of the shoes were pierced and a white powder weighing approximately 900 grams was revealed."
Initial tests showed the substance was heroin.
Police charged the woman with importing a marketable quantity of a border-controlled drug.
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Man plays chicken with cars, loses
A man who played a strange mix of 'chicken' and car surfing with moving cars on the road has ended up, rather unsurprisingly, in hospital.
The young man, whose name was not released, was found bleeding on the side of the road in Boulder, Colorado.
Police had arrived on the scene after receiving emergency phone calls about a man jumping on hoods of cars driving on the road.
'He was running into cars as they were driving and wandering into the street,' said police spokeswoman Sarah Huntley.
The driver who called police reported that the man had run into one of his rear doors, before jumping on the hood of another car and breaking its front window.
The man was taken to a local hospital with non-life threatening injuries. He was also ticketed for 'interfering with a vehicle in the road.'
Reports suggest that the man had been drinking with friends in a bar before the incident.
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Pair arrested for eating iguana on Facebook
Two people have been arrested for eating an endangered species of iguana in the Bahamas after posting pictures of the grill on Facebook.
Vanessa Starr Palm, 23, of Illinois and Alexander Daniel Rust, 24, of Indiana, were arrested last Monday after pictures of the two having an iguana feast in the islands were posted on the social networking website.
According to police the pictures showed them "catching an iguana, parts of an iguana on a grill, two men eating the iguana pieces, and a man and a woman cleaning what appears to be undersized conch."
The two were arrested on the Fisheries Regulations and the Wild Animal Protection Act.
The photos ended up in the hands of Bahamian authorities, who tracked down the suspects and arrested them, the article said.
The iguanas are protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.
The peckish pair could also fall foul of American federal law that links with the Bahamas.
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