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Vermont State Police charged Stewart Fuller, 41, of Cavendish with burglarizing his neighbor's home, then holding a three-day yard sale to sell about $30,000 worth of goods. The sale netted $547.90, police said. The investigation began after Roger and Shirley Labelle returned from a two-month absence to find their home ransacked and various neighbors in possession of their property. The couple said they thought Fuller was looking after their dog while they were away.

Another Weapon in Saddam's Arsenal

Researchers have identified a new after-effect of the first Gulf War: burning semen syndrome. Among the military veterans who suffer from the condition, semen causes burning, pain and swelling at the tip of their penis and in the vaginal areas of their partners. It also can cause severe allergic reactions in some female partners, including hives, wheezing, dizziness and unconsciousness. Dr. Leonard Bernstein of the University of Cincinnati medical school, who helped conduct a study funded by the Army, speculated that veterans might have been exposed to chemicals that changed the proteins in their semen. Noting that condoms provide protection in fewer than half the cases, Bernstein reported that in some couples, the pain is so severe "they just don't want to have sex or as much sex as they used to have."

Slightest Provocation

An unidentified 25-year-old woman attacked a cookie-stand clerk at a shopping mall in Ann Arbor, Mich., after being told that kind of cookie she wanted was unavailable. Police Sgt. Andrew Zazula said that the woman "exchanged words" with the clerk, then hit her in the face with a 2-pound box of tissue wrappers, went around the counter and punched the clerk.

Follow the Money

Police in Northampton, Mass., arrested Nikita Santor, 27, after they smelled marijuana in the car she was driving, and a search turned up marijuana and $12,000. When her parents showed up at the Hampshire County Jail to bail her out, they presented $50,000 in $20 bills. Claiming the money smelled like marijuana, police said that it might be the proceeds of drug deals and confiscated it. They also kept Santor in custody.

Expecting to receive $4.5 million promised her in a fax from the Ministry of Mining in South Africa for her help in transferring money to America, bookkeeper Ann Marie Poet, 61, paid $2.1 million in fees requested by the perpetrators of the so-called Nigerian Fraud. Since she didn't have any money of her own, the FBI said, she embezzled what she needed from the small law firm in Berkely, Mich., where she worked, wiping out the company. "She took all of our money, all of our money," Jules Olsman of Olsman Mueller & James said.

Although an FBI investigator handling the Poet case said it was "unbelievable that she fell for this," law enforcement agencies have estimated that victims of the widespread con are losing $100 million a year as a result of it. The average victim, motivated by greed, hands over $342,000 to the scammers to keep the bogus money-transfer scheme in play.

Family Values

After receiving word that the bank was going to foreclose on their home in Barnegat Township, N.J., 14-year-old twins Alicia and Chelsea Jones donned ski masks and armed themselves with a silver pellet gun. Their mother, Kathy Jones, 34, drove them to a nearby bank, then waited outside in her idling vehicle while the girls robbed the bank of $3,200, according to Ocean County prosecutor Gregory Sakowicz. Three days later, police arrested the girls and their mother, along with her husband Kelvin Jones, 37, and an unidentified 16-year-old stepdaughter.

Lowered Expectations

If jet airliners flew lower, their engines would emit more carbon dioxide, but researchers at London's Imperial College suggested that the overall effect would be to reduce the impact on global warming. Their findings indicated that if aircraft reduced their altitude from about 33,000 feet to between 24,000 feet and 31,000 feet, they would stop producing contrails, comprising water vapor and ice, that form in an aircraft's wake. Persisting for several hours, contrails trap heat in the atmosphere. An earlier study of the effect on climate by the three-day grounding of aircraft following Sept. 11, 2001, concluded that contrails add more than 1 degree Celsius to the atmospheric temperature.