Alice-Azania Jarvis: Is this a record for criminal incompetence?

BTW...

Remember the shortest-lived crime caper in history? Recounted in these very pages just a few weeks back, it involved the unwitting actions of an anonymous man, arrested after pocket-dialling the police while at the very same time committing an act of crime. Well, Anonymous Man: you have yourself some competition. In Augusta, Georgia, one Tyrone Jackson has been detained after attempting to steal a laptop computer, knocking down a shop attendant, and then stabbing a Marine. At the time of his arrest, he was, reports the local paper, sporting "two broken arms, a broken ankle, a broken leg, several missing teeth, possible broken ribs, multiple concussions, assorted lacerations, a broken nose and a broken jaw". Injuries he obtained while tripping over the kerb.

* To Israel now, where urgent intervention is needed. New parents Lior and Vardit Adler have chosen a name for their daughter: Like, in honour of the Facebook feature. "When I posted her name on Facebook, I got 40 'likes'," a proud Mr Adler has told the Maariv newspaper."That's a lot considering I've only 100 friends." A full 100?

* Eating breakfast? Lunch? Anything at all? No? Jolly good. The latest rapid-loss diet is upon us, courtesy (unusually) of the US Food and Drug Administration. They've dealt struggling slimmers a charitable hand with the publication of the Food Defect Action Levels Handbook, detailing the extent to which food products may be left – for want of a better word – to decay, before being banned. Jam, it turns out, must have an "average mould count" of 75 per cent or more. Tinned mushrooms should have an "average of over 20 or more maggots of any size per 100 grams (drained)". And asparagus, apparently, is totally OK until individual spears are "infested with six or more beetle eggs and/or sacs." Now, you need never eat anything again.

* You know what they say. Two's a coincidence, three's a trend. So imagine the outrage when it was discovered a nine-year-old boy had been caught driving under the influence in Cumbria – hot on the heels of a 10-year-old in Northumbria and a 12-year-old in Cleveland. Trend alert! So disappointing to learn he was, in fact, 19. Cumbria Constabulary and their "system errors".