Karl's Weird News

Bakersfield woman hounded over pet pooch

A Bakersfield woman says she has been hounded by county animal control officers to license her dog. Funny thing is, the pooch officials were so concerned about is a stuffed animal.

Dottie Elkin lives by herself in a quaint home in south Bakersfield. For the past few months the 83-year old says she’s hated getting the mail, due to letters she’s receiving from the Kern County Animal Control Department.

“I told them I do not have a dog, it’s a stuffed dog,” Elkin said. That’s right, Elkin has a stuff “guard dog” named Wolf, keeping watch at her front door.

For the last six months she’s been getting letters from animal control asking her to license the dog or face a $200 fine.

MADOFF WOWED KID PROBERS

YOUNG, inexperienced government regulators were so wowed by Bernard Madoff’s ritzy Midtown headquarters that they asked about job openings and dropped off resumes while missing clear evidence he was running a massive Ponzi scheme, a new book claims.

“No wonder they never found anything,” Madoff firm secretary Elaine Solomon told author Andrew Kirtzman for his book, “Betrayal: The Life and Lies of Bernie Madoff,” The Post’s Dan Mangan reports.

In the book out today, Solomon, speaking out for the first time since Madoff’s epic downfall last winter after years of operating his multibillion-dollar scam, said the arch-fraudster got anxious every time investigators from the Securities and Exchange Commission came knocking at his Third Avenue office in the Lipstick Building.

“But he needn’t have worried,” Kirtzman writes. “He and his aides were amazed at the youth and experience of the regulators who showed up at their door.” Solomon said, “They would walk in and we’d look at them and we’d say to each other, ‘What do you think their combined age is, 12?’

Teacher makes teen smoke 42 cigarettes

A Malaysian teacher forced a student to smoke 42 cigarettes for four hours as punishment after a cigarette and lighter were found in his locker, a news report said Thursday.

A school official confirmed that the English teacher subjected the student to the unusual punishment, but said the teenager was made to smoke fewer than 42 cigarettes.

He declined to elaborate. He said the teacher was upset when she found a model student, 16-year-old Mohamad Alif Arifin, had a cigarette and lighter in his locker in the school in the northern island of Langkawi.

The boy was also smelling of cigarettes, said a school official, who declined to be named citing protocol. He said the school apologized to the boy’s uncle, who lodged a police report when he found out about the punishment.

Marines Ban Twitter, MySpace, Facebook

The U.S. Marine Corps has banned Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites from its networks, effective immediately.

“These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries,” reads a Marine Corps order, issued Monday.

“The very nature of SNS [social network sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage that puts OPSEC [operational security], COMSEC [communications security], [and] personnel… at an elevated risk of compromise.”

The Marines’ ban will last a year. It was drawn up in response to a late July warning from U.S. Strategic Command, which told the rest of the military it was considering a Defense Department-wide ban on the Web 2.0 sites, due to network security concerns. Scams, worms, and Trojans often spread unchecked throughout social media sites, passed along from one online friend to the next.