David McElroy

If you haven’t been completely honest with our friends at the IRS and you’ve been wondering how long you need to keep worrying about being caught, the Wall Street Journal has a good roundup of the limitations for when you might get the dreaded letter from Big Brother’s tax-collecting minions demanding more records or more money.

• A former reporter is suing the city of Albuquerque and a police officer because the officer illegally took a video tape from her and erased evidence of police brutality. After the tape was returned to the reporter — with that portion of the tape erased — she was able to get an expert to retrieve the deleted portion. The officer admits to taking the tape home, but says she has no idea how part of it was deleted. We believe her, don’t you?
• For brides-to-be who are worried about losing a last 10 pounds to fit into a wedding dress, there’s a new trend. Some are getting feeding tubes inserted down their throats to deliver a nutrition drip, the diet promises to let someone drop 20 pounds in 10 days. If your bride-to-be happens to use this method, you need to either cancel the wedding or else not complain when the rest of the signs of insanity appear. You were warned.

• When a physicist in San Diego received a traffic ticket for running a stop sign, he knew he wasn’t guilty, but the police officer who wrote the ticket believed otherwise. So the physicist did something that most people aren’t capable of doing. He used science to prove that the officer was mistaken. Not only that, he was able to get the proof published as a scientific paper.
• A 30-year-old man in India was separated from his family when he was 5 years old and he had no idea where they were. Years later, he’s been able to use satellite images from Google Earth to figure out where his family was — and then be reunited with his mother.
• In New Jersey, a couple say that a ghost spooked them out of the house they were renting — only a week after moving in. They’re suing the landlord for the return of their deposit, but the landlord has countersued, contending that they simply decided they couldn’t afford the rent and made up the ghost story as a cover.