MICHIGAN CITY, Ind. - MacGyver’s got nothing on this monkey.

A spider monkey new to the city’s Washington Park Zoo used a garden hose to scale the walls of a moat and make a break for freedom.

Workers were cleaning the moat at the time Wednesday. Zoo Director Johnny Martinez says workers had figured the monkeys would remain inside their enclosure during the cleaning even though the moat was empty of water. (more…)

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A Singapore man with a penchant for sniffing women’s armpits was sentenced to 14 years in jail and 18 strokes of the cane for molesting his victims, a local newspaper reported Friday.

The 36-year-old, who the Straits Times said was mentally unstable, had previous convictions for drug and sex-related offences.

He molested 23 women over the course of 15 months, smelling their armpits and touching them in lifts, staircase landings and their homes, the paper said. He was caught after a housewife reported him to the police. (more…)

WELLINGTON - Drivers in New Zealand’s largest city of Auckland are turning to inflatable passengers to try and beat transit lane rules.

Blow-up dolls, shop mannequins and dogs dressed up as children have all been used to try and justify driving in lanes where vehicles are required to have at least three occupants. (more…)

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Unlucky for some? Dutch statisticians have established that Friday 13th, a date regarded in many countries as inauspicious, is actually safer than an average Friday. (more…)

Chris Cocker, 36-year-old man from Blackburn England, was watching a comedy show at home. He laughed so hard he fell off his sofa. His neighbor in the apartment below heard the thud and called the police. When the police came to Cocker’s door, he refused to let them in. Cocker tried to shut to door, but the officer stuck his foot in the door and pepper sprayed Cocker.

After being sprayed with pepper spray, Mr Cocker was put into a police van and taken to a police station where he said he was stripped naked and spent a night in the cells.

A spokesman for Lancashire Police said officers used a pepper spray as “reasonable force” for their own protection after they feared for their safety when he became aggressive.

The BBC has a video. Link (via Arbroath)

ROME - A deer with a single horn in the center of its head — much like the fabled, mythical unicorn — has been spotted in a nature preserve in Italy, park officials said Wednesday.

“This is fantasy becoming reality,” Gilberto Tozzi, director of the Center of Natural Sciences in Prato, told The Associated Press. “The unicorn has always been a mythological animal.” (more…)

BELGRADE (Reuters) - A Serbian bank clerk who stole nearly 1.5 million euros from his bank left a note reading “I’m sorry,” buried the loot in a park and waited at a cafe for police to arrest him.
(more…)

SHAWNEE, Kan. - George Chandler said he feels fine, even though a nailgun fired a 2.5 inch nail into the top of his head on Friday. Chandler and a friend were doing a project in a backyard when the nailgun hose became tangled, causing the tool to fire one nail. (more…)

JAKARTA, Indonesia - Scuba divers swept away in strong currents survived 12 hours in shark-infested waters before scrambling onto a remote Indonesian island where they faced yet another threat: a Komodo dragon. (more…)

A 29-year-old man leaped out of a plane at 10,000 feet with a camera but no parachute Saturday. His body was found next to a house with a damaged roof, police said.

Sloan Carafello of Schenectady, who was observing on the flight, followed an instructor, student and videographer out the door, wearing no skydiving gear, officials said. (more…)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Alison DeLauzon thought the snapshots and home videos of her infant son were gone for good when she lost her digital camera while on vacation in Florida.

Then a funny thing happened: her camera “phoned home.”

Equipped with a special memory card with wireless Internet capability, DeLauzon’s camera had not only automatically sent her holiday pictures to her computer, but had even uploaded photos of the miscreants who swiped her equipment bag after she accidentally left it behind at a restaurant. (more…)

Emilio “Millito” Navarro boarded a jet in San Juan on Wednesday morning, three months before his 103rd birthday.

He was bound for Orlando, Fla., bound for Major League Baseball’s amateur draft, bound for the New York Yankees, his favorite team. (more…)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The man known as the French “Spiderman” climbed The New York Times building on Thursday to draw attention to global warming, and six hours later another climber made an apparent copycat ascent. (more…)

ABC News reports on the humorous story of Gaith Pharaon, a Saudi financier who is wanted by the FBI for alleged bank fraud that cost US taxpayer $1.7 billion. The funny part is that the US military just awarded him an $80 million contract to supply jet fuel to US military bases in Afghanistan.

The US military has awarded an $80 million contract to a prominent Saudi financier who has been indicted by the US Justice Department. The contract to supply jet fuel to American bases in Afghanistan was awarded to the Attock Refinery Ltd, a Pakistani-based refinery owned by Gaith Pharaon. Pharaon is wanted in connection with his alleged role at the failed Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), and the CenTrust savings and loan scandal, which cost US tax payers $1.7 billion.

As a purely coincidental aside: “Pharaon was also an investor in President George W. Bush’s first business venture, Arbusto Energy.”Link (via Reason Hit & Run )