The riot resulted not out of the sheer happiness of the stores customers, but over the fact that the woman was lying about having won the lottery. It was all a hoax.

She had announced on Tuesday after entering the store that she’d spend $500 on everyone at the Burlington Coat Factory. This prompted customers to gather at the cash registers and call their relatives.

When police arrived, 500 people filled the store and another 1,000 were outside.

Cashiers rang up sales before discovering the woman had no money. Angry customers grabbed clothes without paying.

The limo driver turned the woman in.

Police say she was arrested on three outstanding warrants but wasn’t charged for the coat store chaos pending a mental health evaluation.

Well .. that’s an interesting way to start a riot!

“I had never seen it before,” said Schule, 34. “I looked at it, and it kind of looked like a missile launcher.”

The device was confiscated on Wednesday afternoon by an ordnance disposal team from Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.

Schule discovered the unarmed anti-tank weapon on Tuesday on his land miles away from a military installation.

“I don’t know if it fell out of something or if somebody just dumped it,” he said.

Schule did not want to leave the launcher on his vacant property, so he loaded it in his truck and took it to his house. He’s said to have spent Tuesday afternoon calling the FBI, Homeland Security and other agencies to report his find.

Military officials are trying to track who last had the launcher in their possession via the serial number that was found on it.

More than 20,000 people gathered at Sun Moon University campus in Asan, south of Seoul, for the “blessing ceremony” on Wednesday while some 20,000 more joined simultaneous ceremonies in the U.S., Brazil, Australia and elsewhere.

Some were new couples in unions arranged by the church; others were renewing their wedding vows. The brides wore wedding dresses or their national dress; the men wore black suits with red ties, with white scarves around their necks.

The global ceremony is meant to mark key anniversaries in the leader’s life: his 90th birthday and the 50th anniversary of his marriage to Han Hak-ja, church officials said.

Critics say the weddings show the church operates like a cult, brainwashing adherents into turning their lives and salaries over to Moon. In the past, Moon routinely paired off couples, with many first meeting on their wedding day.

These days, arranged couples usually meet several times beforehand, church officials said. But they’re not expected to skip off to a honeymoon; couples are required to observe a 40-day waiting period before living together.

Reynolds Smith Jr. was a stalwart Democratic voter, however, the Alabama Democratic Party overlooked a very important fact when it appointed Smith to an interim party panel:

He died in November at age 83.

The mistake was caused by outdated records according to Party executive director Jim Spearman.

He said the party received Smith’s name from a 2006 list of candidates for the Mobile County committee and then used a voter list to verify him as an active voter.

The panel was charged with replacing the local party’s executive committee.

Uh … I think they need to updated their records before they appoint anyone else to any committees!

This strange request is one of the measures the airline is taking to reduce fuel consumption.

All Nippon Airways has estimated that if half it’s passengers went to the bathroom before boarding they could reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by 4.2 tons per month.

The airline also plans to recycle paper cups, plastic bottles and use chopsticks that were produced from wood from forest thinning projects in order to become more environmentally friendly.

These measures are being taken on 38 domestic flights and four international flights throughout October.

The move follows earlier steps by airlines to reduce the weight of flights by trimming the size of in-flight magazines, slimming the handles of forks and spoons and using lighter drink trolleys and porcelain.

It is not the only airline looking to the lavatory to save money. Irish budget airline Ryanair has previously said it is considering charging passengers to use on-board toilets.

She went on to say that not only had she expected Kangaroos at the airport but she also expected a welcoming hug. (from the kangaroos or Aussies?)

“I, like every other stupid American, assumed the kangaroos would meet us at the airport and they would want to hug us as much as we wanted to hug them,” she told AAP news agency in an interview in Los Angeles.

“That’s really the perspective we have here. Going there kind of opened my eyes that that’s not the case.”

Please tell me that this isn’t true … that all Americans expect Kangaroos when they arrive at the airport in Sydney?

Scary thought huh?

Well this actually happened in early June to a driver in Switzerland!

He was driving his car along a busy motorway when his car lost all four wheels causing his vehicle to come to an immediate and likely jarring halt!

Apparently the cars tires had just been changed from winter tires to summer tires and the wrong bolts were used to secure the new tires! Luckily no one was injured when the accident occurred!

Among them was a watercolor of a pensive figure sitting at the end of a stone bridge with the letters “A.H.” written beside it, which sold for 10,000 pounds.

The work is dated 1908, at a time when Hitler was a struggling artist in Vienna. The figure’s face lacks a nose and mouth, as well the trademark square mustache.

Hitler applied to art school in Vienna but was rejected, and went on to join the army and fight in World War One.

An Alpine landscape painted in oils fetched 13,500 pounds.

“I was completely gobsmacked to be honest,” said Richard Westwood-Brookes, a historical documents expert who ran Thursday’s sale for Mullock’s Specialist Auctioneers and Valuers.

He had expected the 12 watercolors, oil painting and two other works on offer to fetch between 400 and 1,000 pounds each.

“I put their artistic merit as on a par with a good, competent amateur,” Westwood-Brookes told Reuters.

“But people do not want to acquire these for their artistic merit. They just want to have something that belonged to someone famous from history.”

He said he believed the works, all signed “A. Hitler,” were genuine. An Austrian expert issued certificates of authenticity for the pictures, which once belonged to a British soldier who was stationed in Essen, Germany, in 1945.

But Westwood-Brookes conceded that no one could be sure.

Two years ago, 21 paintings attributed to Hitler were sold for 118,000 pounds or more than twice the pre-sale estimate, by an auction house in England.

The authenticity of items associated with Hitler has long been a bone of contention. In 1983, German magazine Stern published what it said were extracts from Hitler’s diaries. They were later exposed as forgeries.

Matteo Borrini, an anthropologist from the University of Florence, said the discovery on the small island of Lazzaretto Nuovo in the Venice lagoon supported the medieval belief that vampires were behind the spread of plagues like the Black Death.

“This is the first time that archaeology has succeeded in reconstructing the ritual of exorcism of a vampire,” Borrini told Reuters by telephone. “This helps … authenticate how the myth of vampires was born.”

The skeleton was unearthed in a mass grave from the Venetian plague of 1576 — in which the artist Titian died — on Lazzaretto Nuovo, which lies around three km (2 miles) northeast of Venice and was used as a sanitorium for plague sufferers.

The succession of plagues which ravaged Europe between 1300 and 1700 fostered the belief in vampires, mainly because the decomposition of corpses was not well understood, Borrini said.

Gravediggers reopening mass graves would sometimes come across bodies bloated by gas, with hair still growing, and blood seeping from their mouths and believe them to be still alive.

The shrouds used to cover the faces of the dead were often decayed by bacteria in the mouth, revealing the corpse’s teeth, and vampires became known as “shroud-eaters.”

According to medieval medical and religious texts, the “undead” were believed to spread pestilence in order to suck the remaining life from corpses until they acquired the strength to return to the streets again.

“To kill the vampire you had to remove the shroud from its mouth, which was its food like the milk of a child, and put something uneatable in there,” said Borrini. “It’s possible that other corpses have been found with bricks in their mouths, but this is the first time the ritual has been recognized.”

While legends about blood-drinking ghouls date back thousands of years, the modern figure of the vampire was encapsulated in the Irish author Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula,” based on 18th century eastern European folktales.

Alicia Carroll, who runs Los Angeles-based royal memorabilia dealership Everything Royal, said the heir to the British throne had written the letters to Montreal-based Janet Jenkins between 1976 and 1980.

The letters, which are being sold for 30,000 dollars, were bought by Carroll in 2002 when she was contacted by Jenkins, who worked at the British Consulate in Montreal when she met the young prince.

In one letter dated June 8, 1980 — only eight months before Charles announced his engagement to the future Princess Diana — Charles wrote of the pressures of having to find a bride.

“I can see that I shall just have to get married as soon as possible and then all these people might relax a little …! I still think my solution of marrying a girl from each commonwealth country is the best one,” he said.

“Don’t worry — whatever happens I will make sure you are given early warning,” he writes, signing off “with much love, Charles.”

Carroll told AFP that the letters were historically significant because they were from “a man who is going to be the king of England.”

“There’s nothing salacious in them. They’re 30-year-old letters written by a man enamored with a young lady,” Carroll said. “There’s nothing provocative in them. They’re just romantic letters from a man to his girlfriend.”

Carroll said she has had “four or five” offers for the letters but says she will take them off the market if no bidder meets the asking price.

But she rejected criticism from the former owner of the letters, who told Canadian television Friday she had expected the correspondence to end up in a museum.

“I was surprised to discover this morning they are back on eBay,” Jenkins said. “I hope nobody buys them, actually.”

Carroll dismissed Jenkins’s comments.

“I bought them directly from her,” Carroll said. “I’m sorry she’s embarrassed they’re up for sale. I’ve had them seven years and I’m a businesswoman and she knew they were for resale.

“If she’s embarrassed why would she want the letters in a museum where millions of people could go daily and read them? It would be better to see them sold to a private collector.”