Etc...

Hey, it makes a great story

Acting on a tip earlier this month, police in India's capital, New Delhi, arrested a suspect in at least 20 burglaries and 56 car thefts as he and three accomplices were meeting to plan more strikes. Good work, right? Yes, but what made it notable was Suspect No. 1's background. He's a newspaper reporter by trade, employed to cover ... the crime beat . Police say he used the knowledge of the underworld - plus a network of contacts - built up over time to fence the stolen items.

Imagine the surprise of the guests at Ilie Floricica's wedding in Simian, Romania, when the bride-to-be who walked down the aisle to join him wasn't the woman they'd been led to expect. It seems Floricica's original fiancée had backed out 24 hours earlier and left town. Rather than lose face , he phoned all his former steady dates until one of them accepted his hasty proposal.

In its latest annual study, SGMA International, the trade group of sporting goods manufacturers, finds inline skating the most popular of so-called extreme sports. These are the activities whose thrills come mostly from pushing personal performance to the edge, not in defeating an opponent. Inline skating attracted more participants in 2004 than baseball and tackle football combined. The most popular extreme sports, with number of participants for each (in millions), from the study:

1. Inline skating 17.3
2. Skateboarding 11.6
3. Paintball 9.6
4. Artificial wall climbing 7.7
5. Snowboarding 7.1
6. Trail running 6.4
7. Mountain biking 5.3
8. Wakeboarding 2.8
9. BMX bicycling 2.6
10. Mountain/rock climbing 2.2
11. Roller hockey 1.8
12. Boardsailing/ windsurfing 0.4