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Mike Pingree

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December 31, 2000

THAT WOULD MAKE A LOVELY CHRISTMAS CARD: Police arrested a 37-year-old department store Santa Claus for contributing to the delinquency of a minor because he allegedly asked a 16-year-old girl of his acquaintance to perform a Lewinsky-type sex act on him. She complied. 
The encounter was captured on tape by surveillance cameras in a storage area of a shopping mall in Anderson, S.C.

FOR ME! OH, HOW THOUGHTFUL OF YOU! Just before Christmas, a FedEx contract driver rerouted some of the packages he was supposed to deliver, and gave them to his relatives as Christmas gifts instead, police said. 
When the recipients saw the FedEx logo on their gifts, they became suspicious and alerted authorities.

A HOUSE? NAAH, COULDN'T BE! A passenger train heading south from Seattle, Wash., collided with a house that was being towed to a new location and just happened to be crossing the tracks when the train came a-rumbling through. The structure was destroyed, but there were no serious injuries. Washington State Patrol Lt. Dan Eikum said. "You don't often see a house on the tracks."

YOU NAUGHTY, NAUGHTY GIRL: An Islamic court in Zamfara, Nigeria, sentenced Bariya Ibrahim Magazu, a 17-year-old girl, to 180 lashes with a cane for engaging in premarital sex after she gave birth out of wedlock. 
The Nigerian government has asked the local authorities to suspend the sentence.

HAVEN'T I SEEN YOU BEFORE? Police said that a 47-year-old office worker was having difficulty finding an affordable place to live in New York City, so he ensconced his family in a $95-a-night motel two years ago and got a second job - robbing banks. He is charged with committing five of them, and is suspected in 13 others since 1998. 
His downfall came when he was turned in by an employee who observed him casing a Brooklyn bank he had allegedly robbed three times before.

OFFICER, TAKE A LOOK IN HERE: Police recovered a stolen Buick Park Avenue in Maywood, Calif., and returned it to his owner, who later looked in the trunk and found the dead body of a man who had been shot to death. 
He immediately drove his passenger back to the sheriff's office

Mike Pingree writes another Looking Glass column in the Boston Sunday Herald. You can read it by clicking here:
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists.html

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