The Telegraph reports:

Breaking into the exclusive Highgate property market in north London is notoriously difficult. But yesterday a homeless man apparently did the almost-impossible, managing to secure his very own slice of prime real estate on Hampstead Heath for free.

Harry Hallowes, 70, says he has been given the title deeds to a piece of land on the edge of the heath on which he has been squatting for more than two decades. The 65ft by 131ft plot has been estimated to be worth up to £2 million.

The Land Registry’s decision marks the end of a three-year dispute between Mr Hallowes and the property developer Dwyer.

The developers originally wanted to build on the land, which forms part of the grounds of Althone House. In 2005 Dwyer, which is turning a plot of land including a former nursing home into 25 luxury flats, failed in an attempt to evict Mr Hallowes.

At a court hearing over the eviction, lawyers presented evidence that Mr Hallowes had lived on the plot for 18 years. This later became the basis for his title claim for the land. Possession of the title deeds means the plot could now be sold or passed on.

Adverse possession is a standard principle of British and American Common Law.

The Swiss don’t think the North Koreans are responsible for $50 million worth of counterfeit “supernote” $100 bills of superior quality to real US currency. They don’t think the North Koreans have the technology.

The counterfeit bills could only be produced by a government, since only a government could afford the necessary machinery.

Who is doing the counterfeiting, and why, remains a mystery, since they evidently have not produced enough currency to pay for the costs of the necessary equipment.

Iran, Syria, and the late East Germany are other possible suspects.

McClatchy Washington

World’s oldest Rock group: the Zimmers.

3:40 video

Barcepundit reports a pretty spectacular election promise made by Tania Derveaux, a protest candidate for the Belgian senate running on behalf of the NEE (I think that translates as: “No!” -JDZ) Party. She is pledging to deliver 40,000 oral sexual services, either in person, or in the computer game Second Life.

The young lady’s campaign promise is clearly intended as a response to what her party believes are exaggerated promises of new jobs by other Belgian parties, so I would not necessarily count on receiving that promised service from Tania (live or on-line) if I were you.

She will probably get Bill Clinton’s endorsement though.

AP:

VILNIUS, Lithuania – Climbing into a giraffe’s cage at the local zoo seemed a good idea after a few drinks. But the prank went wrong when the 1.3 ton animal flew into a rage and attacked the three student trespassers at a zoo in Lithuania on Monday night.

Ruta Greiciute, a 22-year-old student at Kaunas Technology University, was hospitalized with a broken collar bone and nose after the nine-year-old male giraffe, named Solut, attacked her.

The other students survived the incident unscathed.

“This was a very silly thing they did. The scared giraffe could have stomped her to death,” Kaunas Zoo spokeswoman Angele Grebliauskaite said.

The zoo reported that many animals had been disturbed Monday night as students celebrated a festival in a nearby condominium.

Police have launched an investigation to find out how the intoxicated students entered the zoo at night and climbed the 10 foot high fence surrounding the giraffe cage.

WIS10:

Police in Indiana think an injured man who was found in a cemetery over the weekend might be guilty of vandalism.

He was found amid 14 damaged headstones — including a thousand-pound stone that had tumbled over and pinned the young man to the ground. Police say the 22-year-old was found unconscious, with both legs broken.

They say it took five officers to lift the headstone. The impact left the letter “V” imprinted on Michael Schreiber’s thigh. Police say the “V” stood for the name on the family tombstone.

Schreiber will face charges of criminal trespassing, criminal mischief and public intoxication. He may also be ordered to pay for damage to 14 headstones.

AP reports:

For the past several weeks, drivers near Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville have been noticing odd things about some of the roadkill on the sides of the area’s highways.

Some of the dead possums and raccoons have been dressed in pet or human baby clothes and have had their claws painted with nail polish. The carcass of a deer has been adorned with gold paint.

The culprit is SIU-Edwardsville graduate art student Jessica May, 24, of West Lafayette, Ind.

In an interview with the Belleville News-Democrat, May said she is not an animal rights activist; she is just interested in seeing if people would give more thought to the animals if they were somehow given human attributes.

“I think this is my way of slowing down and paying homage to these animals,” she explained. “I don’t particularly find it offensive, but I understand why some people who don’t understand what I’m doing could find it that way.”

May, a 2006 graduate of Purdue University, said she takes precautions in dealing with the carcasses.

“I wear gloves,” she said. “I don’t know that I could touch it with my bare hands, because by the time I find them, they’re pretty far gone.

Janesville, Wisconsin Gazette-Xtra

A Janesville real estate agent can’t believe she didn’t realize that a form on the bed at a house she showed Monday night was a woman who apparently had been dead for two weeks.

“I’ve smelled death. I know what death smells like,” she said. “I can’t believe my sinuses were that bad.”

Linda Chabucos-Galow, a realtor with Shorewest, was showing the east side house at 1160 N. Claremont Drive to Justin and Colleen McKeen.

Chabucos-Galow stood in the dining room while the couple walked through the house. She heard Colleen scream as the couple stood at the doorway of the front bedroom.

“I thought, ‘What’s wrong?’ Maybe it was a dead mouse or something,” Chabucos-Galow said.

But when Chabucos-Galow peered into the bedroom, she saw what looked like a dummy on the bed.

“It looked like a Halloween prop,” Chabucos-Galow said.

It wasn’t.

The Washington Post reports a tale of spectacularly excessive litigation.

When the neighborhood dry cleaner misplaced Roy Pearson’s pants, he took action. He complained. He demanded compensation. And then he sued. Man, did he sue.

Two years, thousands of pages of legal documents and many hundreds of hours of investigative work later, Pearson is seeking to make Custom Cleaners pay — would you believe more than the payroll of the entire Washington Nationals roster?

He says he deserves millions for the damages he suffered by not getting his pants back, for his litigation costs, for “mental suffering, inconvenience and discomfort,” for the value of the time he has spent on the lawsuit, for leasing a car every weekend for 10 years and for a replacement suit, according to court papers.

Pearson is demanding $65,462,500. The original alteration work on the pants cost $10.50.

By the way, Pearson is a lawyer. Okay, you probably figured that. But get this: He’s a judge, too — an administrative law judge for the District of Columbia.

I’m telling you, they need to start selling tickets down at the courthouse.

Oh, where to start: How about the car? Why should Ki, Jin and Soo Chung — the family that owns Custom Cleaners on Bladensburg Road NE in the District’s Fort Lincoln section — pay Pearson $15,000 so he can rent a car every weekend for 10 years?

The plaintiff, who says he has devoted more than 1,000 hours to represent himself in this battle, says that as a result of poor service at Custom, he must find another cleaner. And because Pearson does not own a car, he says he will have to rent one to get his clothes taken care of.

And somebody made this character a judge!

Read the whole thing.

AP:

A man and a woman were killed at a luxury oceanfront resort when police fired into their bungalow after they refused to drop a handgun, authorities said.

Is that so?

The story says there was an affluent couple, a domestic dispute, a naked woman, and two people pointing the gun at the police in turn.

They can’t really both have been pointing the gun at the police at the same time, now can they? So why did these cops need to shoot both of them? For that matter, since the police story does not include anyone actually firing at the police, why was it necessary to shoot anybody.

The last few decades have featured the ill-advised militarization of American police; a virtually infinite increase in police paranoia, cowardice, and incompetence; and the vanishing of common sense from police work. There are federal sources of training, operational standards, and philosophy behind these developments which badly need to be stopped.

Reuters reports that a small Iowa town has identified itself as the future birthplace of Star Trek Captain James T. Kirk.

A small Iowa town is trying to lure tourists by going where no town has gone before — forward 200 years in time to be the birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk from cult science fiction show “Star Trek.”

Welcome to Riverside, a once prosperous little farming town with a population of 928 that has fallen on hard times, wants to attract tourists and much needed money with a “Star Trek” museum to revive its largely lifeless, boarded-up main drag.

The town has no famous offspring like West Branch, 25 miles away, where former U.S. President Herbert Hoover was born in 1874, and can’t boast the “World’s Largest Strawberry,” a 15 feet high fiberglass fruit, like Strawberry Point, 100 miles to the north.

So former town councilor and self-declared “Trekkie” Steve Miller in 1985 persuaded the council to declare Riverside the future birthplace as Kirk, a main character of the “Star Trek” television series that began in 1966 and following films.

“Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry wrote a book saying Kirk will be born in Iowa, but didn’t say where,” said Miller. ”So I thought ’why not here?”’

Kirk’s birthday was never officially established but the town lists it on a plaque as March 22, 2228. The show’s official Web site, however, says he was born on March 22, 2233. Canadian actor William Shatner who played the captain of the starship Enterprise was born in real-life on March 22.

Read the whole thing.

Christopher Booke reports that Secretary of State for Health Patricia Hewitt has issued a strong condemnation of Iran’s propaganda photographs of captured British hostages.

It was deplorable that the woman hostage should be shown smoking. This sends completely the wrong message to our young people.

Hat tip to Chuck.