The least competent criminals and IT-challenged fireman  are the main weird news stories of the week.

Least Competent Criminals

Questionable Judgments: Christopher Lister, 21, pleaded guilty to a home burglary in June in Leeds (England) Crown Court. He and two pals had attempted to steal a plasma TV in broad daylight last year, but witnesses easily identified Lister. He is 7 feet tall and lives only a few doors down from the crime scene.

Markeith Webb, who was wanted by police for a bank robbery in Easton, Pa., in June, left a string of indignant phone messages at a police station, angry that cops had released his photograph to the media. Just for that, he said, he would make sure they never caught him. He was captured six days later.

More Sci-Fi Movie Ideas

Researchers in Japan and Spain found recently that Argentine ants, normally highly aggressive and territorial, are actually one huge global colony with three expanding centers: a 3,700-mile-long stretch in Europe, a 560-mile strip in California, and a swath of Japan’s west coast. Researchers hypothesized the kinship because, when members from those groups were thrown together, they became docile. [

A June article in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases reported the worldwide reach of incidents of tapeworms that grow inside humans to nearly 40 feet in length. The most serious carrier, according to a Scientific American summary, is salmon sashimi. (Anthony Franz’s 2008 lawsuit against a Chicago sushi restaurant, for a 9-foot-long tapeworm, is still pending.)

Can’t Possibly Be True

Until Mayor Sharon McShurley changed the protocol this year, fire stations in Muncie, Ind., had been delivering reports to department headquarters downtown by dropping them off in fire engines. McShurley ordered the department to learn how to send reports by e-mail.

In June, the New York Police Department spent $99,000 on a typewriter repair contract, which will take on increasing importance since last year NYPD bought thousands of new typewriters, manual and electric, costing the city almost $1 million. The NYPD still is not even close to computerizing some of its daily-use forms, such as property and evidence reports.

Source: newsoftheweird.com