oddly enough

oddly enough

Police: Pa. robbery suspect used infection threat

SHARON, Pa.

Police say a man tried to rob a western Pennsylvania gambling parlor by threatening to spread a staph infection.

Online court records don’t list an attorney for 41-year-old Fred Parker, of Coolspring Township.

Police say he walked into Lucky’s Internet Cafe in Sharon on Monday night and began touching the walls and gambling machines, claiming he has MRSA — a serious staph infection that resists antibiotics.

Sharon police Chief Mike Menster says Parker then threatened to infect the cashier if he didn’t give Parker money.

The chief told The Herald newspaper of Sharon, “It’s our first case of robbery by threat of an infectious disease.”

Police say Parker left when the cashier refused but was arrested a short time later based on his description.

Parker remained in jail Wednesday.

Facebook campaign wants all presidents named Havel

PRAGUE

Vaclav Havel airport, Vaclav Havel library, Vaclav Havel street, Vaclav Havel school.

Numerous efforts to rename places to honor the former Czech president who helped bring down communism in his homeland have provoked a Facebook initiative designed to last generations: It demands that all the country’s future presidents bear Havel’s name.

Ridiculing the wave of renaming, the initiative calls on Parliament to adopt such a law. It also wants current President Vaclav Klaus, the late Havel’s political archrival, to “immediately” take Havel’s name.

“Something majestic has to bear the name of Vaclav Havel, something that will forever and ever exist beyond our mere mortal lives, and that is the presidential office!” says the initiative, which has been joined by almost 6,000 people.

The Czech government is to discuss a plan to name Prague’s state-owned international airport after Havel after more than 80,000 signed a petition in support.

Paris will open a new library with Havel’s name next year, and Gdansk — the birthplace of Poland’s Solidarity anti-communist movement — already has renamed a street after the former dissident playwright, who led the 1989 peaceful Velvet Revolution that ended more than 40 years of Communist rule in then-Czechoslovakia.

Havel died Dec. 18 at age 75.

Associated Press