The 23-year-old Falmouth, Maine resident accomplished the dubious feat Tuesday, when the police agreed to make him a confidential drug informant. But less than 10 minutes after participating in a controlled hand-to-hand drug purchase from an East Falmouth dealer, Yarrington used his $100 police payment to buy drugs for himself.

The only problem was Yarrington returned to the scene of the crime and allegedly bought heroin from the same dealer, who was still under police surveillance.

“It’s a case of the dumb get dumber,” Falmouth police Detective Christopher Bartolomei said.

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Did you hear about the Camden cop whose 4-year-old disabled son wasn’t allowed to pass through airport security unless he took off his leg braces?

Unfortunately, it’s no joke. This happened to Bob Thomas, a 53-year-old officer in Camden’s emergency crime suppression team, who was flying to Orlando in March with his wife, Leona, and their son, Ryan.

Ryan was taking his first flight, to Walt Disney World, for his fourth birthday.

The boy is developmentally delayed, one of the effects of being born 16 weeks prematurely. His ankles are malformed and his legs have low muscle tone. In March he was just starting to walk.

Mid-morning on March 19, his parents wheeled his stroller to the TSA security point, a couple of hours before their Southwest Airlines flight was to depart.

The boy’s father broke down the stroller and put it on the conveyor belt as Leona Thomas walked Ryan through the metal detector.

The alarm went off.

The screener told them to take off the boy’s braces.

The Thomases were dumbfounded. “I told them he can’t walk without them on his own,” Bob Thomas said.

“He said, ‘He’ll need to take them off.’ ”

Ryan’s mother offered to walk him through the detector after they removed the braces, which are custom-made of metal and hardened plastic.

No, the screener replied. The boy had to walk on his own.

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After texting 90999 almost 200 times and donating $1,880 to the Haiti relief efforts, Washington teen Cara Peacock found out something she didn’t know — the money was being billed to her phone.

“I thought it was just a free thing,” she told friends on Facebook.

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It was quiet in the office till the cleaning lady showed up.
This winner uses scissors to silence her vacuum cleaner.

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The U.S. Feeds One Quarter of its Grain to Cars While Hunger is on the Rise!

The 107 million tons of grain that went to U.S. ethanol distilleries in 2009 was enough to feed 330 million people for one year at average world consumption levels. More than a quarter of the total U.S. grain crop was turned into ethanol to fuel cars last year. With 200 ethanol distilleries in the country set up to transform food into fuel, the amount of grain processed has tripled since 2004.

When the growing demand for corn for ethanol helped to push world grain prices to record highs between late 2006 and 2008, people in low-income grain-importing countries were hit the hardest. The unprecedented spike in food prices drove up the number of hungry people in the world to over 1 billion for the first time in 2009.

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