PETA wants sign to memorialize fish
From the “PETA never ceases to amaze us” file comes this report from The Orange County Register.
An Irvine, CA, resident, Dina Kourda, on behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), has asked the city to install a sign to memorialize the hundreds of fish killed in a traffic crash on Oct. 11 as they were being taken to Irvine Ranch Market. The truck, carrying 1,600 pounds of live saltwater bass and several tanks of pure oxygen to keep the fish alive, crashed with two other vehicles.
The letter, asks the city’s street maintenance superintendent to place the sign at the site of the crash.
Her proposed sign would read, “In memory of hundreds of fish who suffered and died at this spot,” to remind tractortrailer drivers of their responsibility to the animals who are “hauled to their deaths every day,” according to the letter provided by PETA.
DEA agent’s gun left in airport john
The loaded .45-caliber Glock left in a crowded Denver International Airport restroom belonged to a Drug Enforcement Administration agent based in Houston, according to records obtained by the Houston Chronicle.
The pistol, with one round in the chamber and 10 in the magazine, was found by another traveler on the back of a toilet seat beyond TSA checkpoints, according to a Denver police report.
It was later returned to the agent, who was traveling on Southwest Airlines from Denver to Houston.
The DEA has stayed mum on the gun, declining to confirm the agency’s ties to the incident.
The agent’s name is redacted from a report by Denver police, but his agency is noted, as is his gender, age, race and home city.
When it comes to losing a gun, the Houston agent is not alone.
There have been a string of incidents involving officers and agents from various agencies who have their guns in restrooms in airports and—at least once—on a plane.
In August, a Secret Service agent left a gun in a restroom on presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s plane. It was found by a reporter traveling with the campaign.
In 2011, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer left a gun in a restroom at Bush Intercontinental Airport.
Also last year, a federal agent left a gun in an El Paso airport restroom.
When guns are found, especially in airports, the incidents tend to make news. But many more are quietly lost under an array of circumstances.
Hoods ram gun shop with stolen truck
The Woodlands Tactical, a Montgomery County, TX, gun store, was open for business on Oct. 24 despite a bizarre overnight break-in that left a truck-size hole in the front window.
About 12:30 a.m. the previous night, two men hijacked the shopping area’s patrolling security guard, took the guard’s truck and rammed it through the gun store’s front glass. All they got for their trouble was a few handguns, because 95% of the store’s guns were in the safe. Usually it’s 100 percent, the proprietor said, but that night a few were not.
Another reason the thieves took so little was the quick response time of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office deputies who arrived within 10 minutes.
In this caper, the perpetrators apparently made elaborate preparations.
To hijack the security guard, one of the men lay in the road as if he had been injured. When the security guard responded, another man came out of the woods with a rifle.
Shortly before that, some shots were apparently fired outside another store in the center, as if to create a distraction, the Houston Chronicle report said.
Technology works, but only if used
Across Washington state, police department evidence rooms are overflowing with guns taken from arrests, search warrants or traffic stops.
Many of those guns could hold answers to unsolved violent crimes, but most are not being tested by police agencies in the state, according to KING 5 TV in Seattle.
The Integrated Ballistics Identification System (IBIS), part of a nationwide network that compares shell casings fired from guns to shell casings from all other guns that have been entered into the system, makes large scale ballistics testing possible.
But 13 years after IBIS’ arrival in Washington state it appears many police agencies still do not have policies and procedures in place to take advantage of IBIS’s potential.
Through public records requests, the KING 5 investigators received inventories of crime guns in police property rooms, and found that while Seattle and Kent Police test-fire and submit all guns in evidence rooms for IBIS analysis, police in Spokane, the state’s second largest city, requested IBIS tests on 2% of crime guns. Similarly, police in Bellevue, the fifth largest city, entered 2% into IBIS, and Federal Way, the tenth largest city, submitted 15% of their crime guns into IBIS.
Among the ten largest cities, KING 5 found 2,818 “crime” guns in police possession that are not in the ballistics network.
Man robs chicken shop with samurai sword Here’s proof that when swords are outlawed, only outlaws will have swords.
A man robbed a Kansas City, MO, restaurant on a later October evening armed with a samurai sword, according to local TV news.
The suspect entered a Church’s Chicken shop just before 10 p.m. wearing a dark-gray hooded sweatshirt and carrying the sword, according to a statement from the Kansas City Police Department.
The man was described as a light-skinned black male standing between 5 foot 4 and 5 foot 5, weighing 120 to 130 pounds.
The suspect reportedly drove off in an older-model brown two-toned Chevy pickup truck, possibly from the 1980s.
If seen, contact police after putting up your shield.
