The “spam king” was sentenced on Tuesday to 47 months in prison, with a ruling that the court hopes sends a message to other online criminals.

Robert Soloway, the man known as the spam king for the massive volume of spam he sent out, pleaded guilty to fraud, spamming and tax evasion after being indicted in May 2007. After an unusually long sentencing hearing lasting two-and-a-half days, Judge Marsha Pechman handed down her sentence in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle. (more…)

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - State police say they arrested a man early Tuesday whose blood alcohol level was 0.491 percent — the highest ever recorded in Rhode Island for someone who wasn’t dead.

Stanley Kobierowski was taken to a hospital, put in the detoxification unit and sedated, said Maj. Steven O’Donnell. He was arraigned Tuesday on charges of driving while intoxicated and resisting arrest, and he was released after promising to appear Friday at a court hearing.
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NEW YORK, July 21 (Reuters) - A New Jersey man trying to exterminate insects in his apartment blew it up instead, the New York Daily News reported on Monday.

Isias Vidal Maceda was unhurt in the incident, but 80 percent of his apartment was destroyed, Eatontown, New Jersey police told the newspaper.

The accident occurred as Maceda was spraying for pests in his kitchen. Somehow the bug spray ignited a blast that blew out the apartment’s front windows and triggered a fire that quickly spread, the newspaper said. (more…)

If you’re looking to plan a vacation sometime in September or October, might I suggest Schultz’s Country Barn in Wisconsin? I mean, you could go somewhere where you don’t need a parka and a ski mask, but ask yourself this: Where else can you pay tribute to Brett Favre and corn at the same time?

Of course, the people at the Schultz Country Barn put this plan in motion before any of the current “Waaah, I can’t make a decision” controversy came into existence. Not nearly as many Wisconsiners are eager to thank Brett Favre now, but fortunately, the Schultz people left room to carve, “FOR STABBING US IN THE BACK, EGOMANIAC” under the “THANKS.”

More info on the great Brett Favre ‘08 Corn Maze can be found here.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - San Francisco voters, never thrilled with George W. Bush, may give the U.S. president a parting shot in November by naming a sewage plant after him. (more…)

MIT’s FreeCulture club has started “YouTomb” — a graveyard for youtubes taken off the Internet due to copyright complaints.

YouTomb is a research project by MIT Free Culture that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation. More specifically, YouTomb continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown. The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm.

Link

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A newborn red panda rejected by its mother in Amsterdam’s Artis zoo has been adopted by a domestic cat, the zoo said Friday.

The cat is nursing the red panda, currently about the size of a kitten, along with her own four kittens, the zoo said.

The red panda was born on June 30 and rejected by its mother soon afterwards. Red pandas look like raccoons and when fully grown are slightly larger than a domestic cat — substantially smaller than the black and white giant panda. (more…)

BEIJING - Canine cuisine is being sent to the doghouse during next month’s Beijing Olympic Games.

Dog meat has been struck from the menus of officially designated Olympic restaurants, and Beijing tourism officials are telling other outlets to discourage consumers from ordering dishes made from dogs, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Friday. (more…)

ST PETERSBURG (Reuters) - A Russian woman in St Petersburg killed her drunk husband with a folding couch, Russian media reported on Wednesday.

St Petersburg’s Channel Five said the man’s wife, upset with her husband for being drunk and refusing to get up, kicked a handle after an argument, activating a mechanism that folds the couch up against a wall. (more…)

BALTIMORE - FedEx prides itself on reliability. But a mistaken delivery tipped off police to a 200-pound shipment of marijuana that someone tried to send from Pembroke Pines, Florida to Baltimore via the shipping company.

Police tell The (Baltimore) Sun they learned about the shipment when it was delivered Tuesday to the wrong resident.

Authorities posed as FedEx employees and arrested the shipment’s intended recipient, 30-year-old Richard Gwatidzo. (more…)

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian man who described local police as “scum” in an Internet posting was given a suspended jail sentence on Monday for extremism, prompting bloggers to warn of a crackdown on free speech online.

Savva Terentiev, a 28-year-old musician from Syktyvkar, 1,515 kilometres (940 miles) north of Moscow, wrote in a blog last year that the police force should be cleaned up by ceremonially burning officers twice a day in a town square. (more…)

WAUKESHA, Wis. - A 52-year-old Milwaukee-area man has been accused of faking heart attacks to avoid paying restaurant bills and cab fares.

Police say the Waukesha (WAWK’-uh-shaw) man took a cab to a mall Monday and pretended to have a heart attack. The cab driver left unpaid.

Authorities say the man then ran up a $23 bill when he had a steak dinner at Applebee’s. He again pretended to have a heart attack. (more…)

BEND, Ore. - Riding a green lawn chair supported by a rainbow array of more than 150 helium-filled party balloons, Kent Couch succeeded Saturday in his third bid to fly from central Oregon all the way to Idaho.

Couch kissed his wife and kids goodbye, and patted their shivering Chihuahua, Isabella, before his ground crew gave him a push so he could clear surrounding light poles and a coffee cart.

Then, clutching a big mug of coffee, Couch rose out of the parking lot of his gas station into the bright blue morning sky, cheered by a crowd of spectators.

“If I had the time and money and people, I’d do this every weekend,” Couch said before getting into the chair. “Things just look different from up there. You’ve moving so slowly. The best thing is the peace, the serenity.

“You can hear a dog bark at 15,000 feet.” (more…)

ERLIN (Reuters) - A man tore the head from a controversial waxwork figure of Adolf Hitler on the opening day of Berlin’s Madame Tussauds museum Saturday, police said.

Just minutes after the museum opened, the 41-year-old German man pushed aside two security men guarding the figure before ripping off the head in protest at the exhibit, a police spokesman said. The police were alerted and arrested the man. (more…)

NORWALK, Calif. - A convenience store became an unwilling drive-in when a 74-year-old woman plowed her car through the front window and then tried to buy a six-pack of Budweiser, police and the owner said.

Lynne Rice of Norwalk drove her 1988 Cadillac into Joe’s Food Mart and Video on Sunday evening, Los Angeles County sheriff’s Lt. Jenny Ha said.
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