| Written by Steve Thornton on Friday, June 26th, 2009 |
It'll be in the mail
If it can happen in Italy, it can happen in Britain — that's what everybody always says — and so in the UK they've had to cancel 28,899 speeding tickets.
The problem this time is not with uncalibrated radar units, however, but with an illegally-set speed limit.
The equivalent of nearly $3 million Cdn will be returned to people caught "speeding" along the Seatown Road before the speed limit was legally defined there.
The speed limit had been lowered to 30 mph on the A35 at Seatown Road, but when one British driver received a ticket for speeding after he went through there at the normal 40, he fought back, claiming there was no "Seatown Road," and four years later the court decided he was right.
The Dorset Speed Camera Partnership has until November to return the money.
Always the bright one
A few potted plants will brighten up any room
They say criminals are the smart ones — otherwise how else would they get away with it? — but one Florida man appears to be reversing the trend.
He stole a 2007 CBR1000RR equipped with a Lojack tracking device, then parked it outside his home while he took a nap.
Police found the 26-year-old duffus asleep next to a loaded shotgun and found a marijuana growing facility in the house as well.
Mr. Smart Guy now faces charges of grand theft, cultivation of marijuana, and perhaps some incidental weapons charges.
Wear a helmet, keep your liver
A recent study by Michigan State University found that repealing helmet laws can improve the numbers of organs available for transplant.
It's long been considered humorous among non-riding doctors to call them "donorcycles," but this study formalizes the word and tells us that when a state throws out its helmet law the number of organ donations rises by 10 per cent.
The paper is titled "Donorcycles: Do Motorcycle Helmet Laws Reduce Organ Donations?"
But even though it finds that helmet laws reduce the numbers of organs available for transplant, the paper concludes that even repealing all helmet laws would not significantly improve the rate of organ donations, since death by natural causes provides a vastly larger source of organs.
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