Off the wall news.

[Old-Navy]

According to 2005 transcripts made public by The Wall Street Journal in September, a British Airways 747 flew its entire 10-hour-plus route from Los Angeles to Manchester, England, even though the pilot knew that one of its four engines had caught fire and burned up 30 seconds after take-off.

The pilot surprised the Los Angeles tower by radioing his decision to fly on "as far as we can" (after checking with BA headquarters, which might have been mindful that returning to Los Angeles would have meant dumping $30,000 worth of fuel and possibly incurring $275,000 in European Union fines for the delay).

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration initially proposed a fine for BA but recently closed its investigation. [Wall Street Journal, 9-23-06]

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Even though protests grow against Wal-Mart for supposedly treating its employees badly, Kellie Guderian is not fazed.

In October, she and her husband won Iowa's $200 million Powerball lottery, but she cheerfully said she was keeping her job at the Fort Dodge Wal-Mart.

Guderian, said her husband, "loves her job, and the people she works with are like family." [Omaha World-Herald-AP, 10-4-06]

[Old-Navy]

In September, health officials in Macerata, Italy, rescued a 57-year-old woman identified only as Carmela, after a brother reported he wouldn't be able to keep delivering food to her.

It turns out that Carmela had become fearful of influenza 26 years ago, had sealed the windows of her apartment, and had not ventured out the entire time except to collect the food her brother left at her door.

She weighed about 65 pounds and had hair 7 feet long, and workers required respirators to enter the home. [Reuters, 9-10-06]

[Old-Navy]

  The City Council of Greenleaf, Idaho, passed an ordinance in November to require nearly all residents to keep a gun at home in case the town becomes overrun by people relocating after Gulf Coast storms.

Also in November, a report from the Missouri House's Special Committee on Immigration Reform blamed much of their state's acquiescence to illegal immigration on the fact that since Roe v. Wade in 1973, 80,000 potential Missourians have been aborted, thus helping to create job vacancies for aliens. [MSNBC-AP, 11-16-06] [Jefferson City News Tribune, 11-14-06]

[Old-Navy]

At the county jail in Dubuque, Iowa, in November, Michael Kelley Jr., 29 and accused of attempted murder, was swapping stories with inmate Jamie Brimeyer, 34, when he asked about Brimeyer's facial scar.

As Brimeyer described being stabbed in the cheek by an unknown assailant in 2005, Kelley realized that he was the one who had stabbed him and recalled the incident so well that he corrected some of Brimeyer's recollections.

Brimeyer later reported Kelley, who is now also charged with assault with a dangerous weapon. [Des Moines Register, 11-6-06]

[Old-Navy]

England's Liverpool Magistrates Court granted police a temporary "sexual offenses prevention order" in October against Akinwale Arobieke, 45, who had been jailed for pestering people with requests to feel their muscles.

Arobieke is prohibited from touching, feeling or measuring muscles or asking people to do squat exercises.

(2) In October, airline baggage courier Rodney Petersen, 30, pleaded guilty in Melbourne, Australia, to stealing hairs (head and pubic) from clothing or hairbrushes in women's luggage.

At his home, police found 80 plastic bags containing hairs, labeled with each owner's name. [The Guardian (London), 10-26-06] [Agence France-Presse, 10-20-06]

[Old-Navy]

In November, a judge upheld a rule passed by a condominium association in Golden, Colo., prohibiting owners from smoking even inside their own units (in that neighbors had been complaining for five years that a couple's cigarette smoke had been seeping into their town houses).

A few days earlier, Belmont, Calif., became the first American city to ban smoking everywhere in the city limits, including condominiums and even cars (but not detached, single-family homes).

(A day before that, however, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to instruct the police to treat marijuana-smoking as the city's lowest law-enforcement priority.) [WSB-TV (Atlanta)-AP, 11-17-06] [San Mateo Daily Journal, 11-15-06] [San Francisco Chronicle, 11-14-06]

[Old-Navy]

The Powys County Council in Wales warned the maker of Welsh Dragon sausages in November that it must label its product better, such as by marking it "pork sausages" (so as not to mislead about the type of meat it contained).

And in October, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sought to extend its abstinence education program (which currently gives grants to states for programs for teenagers), to start reaching unmarried people up to age 29. [The Times (London), 11-18-06] [USA Today, 10-31-06]

[Old-Navy]

A 48-year-old woman died from a timber rattlesnake bite during services at the East London Holiness Church in London, Ky., in November.

The church features a monthly snake-handling service, during which people can prove they are true believers by not getting bitten.

[Old-Navy]

In Shamokin, Pa., in October, Terry Jackson, 36, distraught for an undisclosed reason, kept police at bay in a suicidal standoff in which she wielded five poisonous snakes (from an aquarium in her home).

They bit her hand and face numerous times, leaving her bloody, until police subdued her with a Taser gun. She was hospitalized in critical condition but survived and will face charges for threatening police.

[Old-Navy]

 In November, the upscale New York City menswear and accessories store Jack Spade removed from its holiday catalog a $40 frog-dissection kit (with a real carcass) after numerous queries from people wondering what in the world the store was thinking.

[Old-Navy]

A holiday party for inmates at Britain's Peterborough Jail promised a fun time with Xbox and PlayStations, along with cash gifts of 5 pounds each (about US$9), which is greater than the value of the candy boxes the jail will give its guards for Christmas.

[Old-Navy]

Police in Rock Hill, S.C., put a 12-year-old boy under arrest at the insistence of his mother after he had defied her and opened his Christmas gift three weeks early.

[Old-Navy]

The North Carolina Court of Appeals overturned the cocaine-possession conviction of Timothy Stone in September, ruling that a search of his person was unconstitutional even though he had given police permission.

The judges agreed with Stone that when he consented, he never expected that the search would include the officers holding out the waistband of his sweatpants and shining a flashlight on his genitals (which is where he happened to be hiding a small container of cocaine).

[Old-Navy]

The "Berkeley Pit" in Butte, Mont., is the nation's largest environmental-disaster site, with 40 billion gallons of highly toxic copper-mine waste that the federal government has long feared too expensive to clean up.

However, Montana Tech researchers, writing in the Journal of Organic Chemistry in July, have found more than 160 types of "extremophiles" (organisms that thrive in toxicity) in the pit and have demonstrated that some are effective against lung and ovarian cancers.