ABRACADABRA

Lions, bears in gangster's property !

Bucharest (Romania): Authorities have removed 4 lions and 2 bears from the estate of Ion Balint, a Romanian gangster, who used them to threaten his victims.

US landlord whips late-paying tenant

Waynesville: A US landlord is accused of whipping a tenant with a belt on his bare buttocks for falling behind on his rent. Ron Kronenberger, 53, was charged with assault for the January 22 encounter in his office, police said. They said the 29-year-old tenant was late with a USD 2800 rent payment. “If you’re going to act like a child, I’m going to treat  you like one,” Kronenberger was quoted in the report as saying before striking the tenant four times with a belt.

Boy fools security & flies without ticket

London: A 12-year-old Belgian boy managed to sneak into the international departure zone of the Brussels airport and boarded a plane to Spain without a ticket. 

Belgium's RTBF broadcaster said the boy, whose name was not disclosed, was spotted by a police officer in the airport of the southern Spanish city of Malaga. 

Asked where his parents were, the child answered in French that they were registering for a flight. It turned out, however, that the boy arrived in Malaga on a Jet Air flight without a boarding pass or ID.

Girl steals train, crashes it into building in Sweden

London : In a bizarre incident that seems straight out of a movie, a 20-year-old cleaner girl in Sweden stole an empty commuter train and drove it straight into an apartment building suffering severe injuries.

The young girl appears to have been unable to stop the train once she reached the end of the line in the exclusive suburb of Stockholm. The woman was going at such speed that the train continued for nearly 100 feet off-rail before it smashed into the apartment house where three families were asleep, the Daily Mail reported.

The train-thief was trapped inside the drivers cabin for two hours before emergency services were able to cut her from the wreckage. She was conscious but suffered serious injuries and had to be airlifted to Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm.The train was empty and stationary at the time of the theft and none of the five adults reportedly in the house at the time of the accident were hurt. Train operators Arriva said the woman, who was employed by an external cleaning company, “really put her foot down”.

“The train drove straight through the barrier, so it must have been going a lot faster than these trains normally do,” spokesman for Stockholms Lokaltrafik Fredrik Cavalli-Bjorkman said, adding that at normal speed, the train would have been blocked by the buffer stop.  

Police commander Ulf Lindgren said: “The fact that we’re not dealing with a more serious accident is absolutely unbelievable, both for those who were inside the building and on the train. It’s incredible lucky that the situation is not worse.” It is not clear how the woman got the keys to start the train’s engine, but a rail technician at the scene told Swedish newspaper Expressen that one of his colleagues “lost the keys to this train, is in a bad state and is blaming himself”.

£ 10 million car fails to start

London : It can happen to just about anyone! Queen Elizabeth II was left waiting as her 10 million pound luxury Bentley failed to start after a church service, but the monarch made light of the situation andremained  unfazed.

Standing nearby, the Queen was seen laughing and pointing as her chauffeur tried to coax the motor into action outside St Mary Magdalene church on the Norfolk estate.

The 86-year-old Queen evidently saw the funny side when her state Bentley, said to be worth 10 million pounds, refused to come to life after the church service at Sandringham, The Telegraph reported.

Peeping Tom held for camera in bathroom

Thiruvananthapuram: A 44-year-old electrician has been arrested for allegedly installing a hidden camera in a water heater he had fixed in his neighbour's bathroom. The electrician, identified as Reghunath, installed the miniature camera inside the heater's altometer box to capture images from the bathroom, police said. The house, at Muttada near here, belonged to his long-time neighbour. The camera had a small radio AV transmitter which sent the images from the bathroom to the computer-linked receiver installed at the electrician's house.

Russian takes hostages: settles for a pizza & cold drink

A man in southern Russia took four people hostage for several hours in a bizarre abduction where his only demand was a takeaway pizza and a fizzy drink, police said. Police cordoned off the building and met the man's demands by delivering the requested food and drink, the police added. After the negotiations that lasted several hours, all the hostages were released unharmed.