NewsQuirks 699

Curses, Foiled Again

Two armed men tried to rob a Boston pizza restaurant but couldn't open the safe because it had a time-delay lock. They tied up the lone employee in the bathroom while they waited, then tied up a second and third employee when they arrived. When a fourth employee showed up, the robbers took him to the men's room, but he told them his girlfriend was waiting for him outside. They let him go but warned him not to alert the police. As soon as he reached the parking lot, he called 911. Meanwhile, two other employees showed up. Then the police knocked on the door.

The gunmen began pleading for their victims to show mercy and ditched their weapons to try to pose as hostages, too. "They were telling us, 'Oh, please help us. Tie us up,'" manager Orlando Reyes, 20, told the Boston Herald. "I said, 'I'm going to go outside and tell the police officers the bad guys left and you guys were tied up with us.'" Once the police were inside, Reyes pointed out Johnathan Ortega, 23, and Miguel Angel Correa, 27, as the robbers.

Getting Better

On Nov. 4, officials lowered the death toll from the Sept. 11, 2001, collapse of New York's World Trade Center to 2,795 after locating five persons who had been reported missing and feared dead and discovering one victim who had been listed twice. The initial estimate had been more than 6,000 deaths. Ellen Borakove of the New York chief medical examiner's office predicted the death tally would continue to fall by small increments.

Litigation Nation

A group of people is suing the U.S. government for losses they think that global warming will cause them in the future. New Scientist magazine reported the litigants include a couple that fears their coastal home will be lost to storm surges resulting from climate change, a Vermont syrup maker who insists that he'll go out of business if his maple trees die and a marine biologist who's worried that he'll lose his job if corals become extinct. "This is a lawsuit that we intend to win," co-litigant Will Toor, the mayor of Boulder, Colo., said.

Edition Peters, publishers of the late American composer John Cage, sued British musician Mike Batt, claiming that a recording of a minute's silence by Batt's rock group the Planets plagiarized Cage's 1952 composition "4-33," which consists of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. After agreeing to pay an undisclosed six-figure sum to the John Cage Trust, Batt speculated that the avant-garde composer "would have loved the spectacle of the Planets being all over the press protesting that their silence was original and not a quotation from his silence." He insisted, however, that his silent piece was superior, explaining, "I am able to say in one minute what took Cage four minutes and 33 seconds."

Fooled Again

More than 27,000 people voted for former Ohio Rep. James A Traficant Jr., who ran his re-election campaign from a Pennsylvania prison cell, where he is serving eight years for bribery and racketeering. Traficant had appealed to voters to re-elect him to show they don't fear the government. "I believe I can do a better job than half the people down in Washington," Traficant said in a low-budget campaign ad filmed the day before he was sentenced in July.

In Orbit

Bart Sibrel, 37, told police in Beverly Hills, Calif., that Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, 72, punched him in the face after he asked the astronaut to swear on a Bible that he had been to the Moon. Sibrel, an independent filmmaker from Nashville, Tenn., said he believes that the Apollo 11 astronauts faked their July 1969 lunar expedition to fool the Soviet Union into thinking the United States had won the space race. He said he was trying to confront Aldrin about the lunar mission when Aldrin swung at him. "He has a good punch. It was quick, too," Sibrel said. "I didn't see it coming."