GPS, hidden cameras watching over Baby Jesus

When Baby Jesus disappeared last year from a Nativity scene on the lawn of the Wellington, Fla., community center, village officials didn't follow a star to locate him.

By ERIC GORSKI

AP Religion Writer

J PAT CARTER / AP

When Baby Jesus disappeared from the creche in front of the Wellington, Fla., community center_village officials did not follow a star to locate him. A GPS device had been mounted inside the ceramic figure.

When Baby Jesus disappeared last year from a Nativity scene on the lawn of the Wellington, Fla., community center, village officials didn't follow a star to locate him.

A GPS device mounted inside the life-size ceramic figurine led sheriff's deputies to a nearby apartment, where it was found face down on the carpet. An 18-year-old woman was arrested in the theft.

Giving up on old-fashioned padlocks and trust, a number of churches, synagogues, governments and ordinary citizens are turning to technology to protect holiday displays from pranks or prejudice.

About 70 churches and synagogues eager to avoid the December police blotter jumped at a security company's offer of free use of GPS systems and hidden cameras this month to guard their mangers and menorahs.

Others, like the Herrera family of North Richland Hills, Texas, took matters into their own hands. Upset after their teeter-totter was stolen, the family trained surveillance cameras on their yard and was surprised when footage showed a teenage girl stealing a baby Jesus worth almost $500. Police have obtained the tape.

"They took the family Jesus," said Gloria Herrera, 48, a Catholic. "How can anybody do that?"

For two consecutive years, thieves made off with the baby Jesus figurine in Wellington, a well-off village of 60,000 in Palm Beach County, Fla. The ceramic original, donated by a local merchant, was made in Italy and worth about $1,800, said John Bonde, Wellington's director of operations.

So last year, officials took a GPS unit normally used to track the application of mosquito spray and implanted it in the latest replacement figurine. After that one disappeared, sheriff's deputies quickly tracked it down.

Sensing opportunity in that kind of success story, New York-based BrickHouse Security is offering up to 200 nonprofit religious institutions a free month's use of security cameras and LightningGPS products it distributes.

Chief executive officer Todd Morris said the idea was born after a few churches asked about one-month rentals instead of longer contracts that are the norm. The first 20 or so applications came from synagogues, he said.

Rabbi Yochonon Goldman of Lubavitch of Center City, a Philadelphia-area branch of the Chabad Lubavitch movement, signed up even though his previous biggest scare involved the wind knocking down a menorah.

"People are very security conscious, and this is simply a precaution," said Goldman, who will put a GPS on one menorah and a camera on another. "It's sad ... but it's the reality we're faced with."

As members of a minority religion, Jews are probably hit harder when their religious symbols are vandalized, said Deborah Lauter, national civil rights director for the Anti-Defamation League.

"If Baby Jesus is removed, it tends to be seen as a prank," Lauter said. "Vandalism or theft of a menorah is just more sensitive. You feel like you're really being targeted for your religion."

The ADL identified 699 incidents of anti-Semitic vandalism in 2007, consistent with recent years.

So far in 2008, Baby Jesus has appeared in several police reports. At First United Methodist Church in Kittanning, Pa., a baby Jesus was stolen and replaced with a pumpkin. In Eureka Springs, Ark., someone who absconded with a plastic baby Jesus from a public display last week also took the concrete block and chain that was supposed to act as a deterrent.

Previously, stolen Jesus figurines have also been defaced with profanity or Satanic symbols.

The incidents raise a question: Is stealing Baby Jesus harmless juvenile fun, or anti-Christian?

"I suspect most of it is childish pranks," said attorney Mike Johnson of the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative Christian legal group. "Clearly, there are adults with an agenda to remove Christ from Christmas. But they tend to occupy themselves with the courts and courtroom of public opinion."

Stephen Nissenbaum, a retired history professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of "The Battle for Christmas," views the thefts as neither innocent vandalism nor religious hate crimes.

"What it means is that it's OK to go around violating even pretty important norms, as long as real human harm isn't being done," he said. "It's not exactly devaluing Christianity, but it is sort of a ritualized challenge to it. It could be Christian kids doing it - and on Jan. 2 they become good Christians again."

4-foot reptile sightings spike

FORT WALTON BEACH - In the dark, a shadowy figure looked ominous to some residents on Marshall Court.

It was an alligator, they told Fort Walton Beach police.

Police investigated the incident but found nothing startling in a fenced-in area around an apartment complex.

The "alligator" was actually a 4- to 5-foot-long broken tree limb.

The people who called police had spotted the limb from a second-floor window, and "could not see very well due to low light," an officer wrote in his report.

A 4-foot alligator was, however, lassoed in Destin last week. It was relocated to Blackwater Creek.

And in related wildlife news, a 4-foot boa constrictor was caught inside a garbage can at Wholesale Nation on Dec. 1. When no one from Panhandle Animal Welfare Services or the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission could respond, police took it to the station for safe keeping.

Firefighters called to rescue plastic owl

RAYLEIGH, England, Dec. 10 (UPI) -- An animal protection officer and the fire brigade called out to rescue an owl in Rayleigh, England, only to learn the owl was a fake.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said an officer was sent to the scene after a mailman reported seeing an owl on a telephone pole that hadn't moved for days, the Daily Mail reported Wednesday.

The officer observed the owl for hours and eventually called the fire brigade to mount a rescue. It was not until firefighters were preparing to deploy aerial platforms that residents informed the rescuers that the owl was a plastic decoy put in place by a telecommunications firm to scare off smaller birds.

"It is not the first time we have been called to rescue an animal that isn't real but we'd rather be safe than sorry," society spokeswoman Klare Kennett said.

Whistleblowers sent to mental ward, Chinese paper says

BEIJING: Local officials in Shandong Province have apparently found a cost-effective way to deal with gadflies, whistleblowers and all manner of muckraking citizens who dare to challenge the authorities: dispatch them to the local psychiatric hospital.

According to an investigative report published Monday by a state-owned newspaper, public security officials in Xintai city have been institutionalizing residents who persist in their personal campaigns to expose corruption or to protest the unfair seizure of their property. Some people said they were committed up to two years, and several of those interviewed said they had been forced to consume psychiatric medication.

The article, in The Beijing News, said most inmates had been released after they agreed to give up their causes.

Sun Fawu, 57, a farmer seeking compensation for land spoiled by a coal mining operation, said he was seized by the local authorities on his way to petition the central government in Beijing and brought to the Xintai Mental Health Center in October.

During a 20-day stay, he said he was tied to a bed, forced to take pills and given injections that made him numb and woozy. When he told the doctor he was a petitioner, not mentally ill, the doctor reportedly said, "I don't care if you're sick or not. As long as you are sent by the township government, I'll treat you as a mental patient.

In an interview with the paper, the hospital's director, Wu Yuzhu, acknowledged that some of the 18 patients brought there by the police in recent years were not deranged, but he had no choice but to take them in. "The hospital also had its misgivings," he said.

Although China is not known for the kind of systematic abuse of psychiatry that occurred in the Soviet Union, human rights advocates say forced institutionalizations are not uncommon in smaller cities. Robin Munro, the research director of China Labour Bulletin, a rights organization in Hong Kong, said such "an kang" wards - Chinese for peace and health - are a convenient and effective means of dealing with pesky dissidents.

In recent years practitioners of Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement, have complained of coerced hospitalizations and one of China's best-known dissidents, Wang Wanxing, spent 13 years in a police-run psychiatric facility under conditions he later described as abusive.

In one recent, well-publicized case, Wang Jingmei , the mother of a man convicted of killing six policemen in Shanghai, was held incommunicado at a mental hospital for five months and only released last Sunday, the day before her son was executed.

The Beijing News story about the hospitalizations in Xintai was notable for the traction it gained in China's constrained state-run media. Such Communist Party stalwarts as People's Daily and the Xinhua news agency republished the story, and it was picked up by scores of Web sites. At the country's most popular portal, Sina.com, it ranked the fifth most-viewed news headline and readers posted more than 20,000 comments by evening. The indignation expressed was universal, with many clamoring for the dismissal of those involved. "They're no different than animals," read one post. "No, they're worse."

Reached by phone on Monday, a hospital employee said Wu, the hospital director who voiced his misgivings to The Beijing News, was unavailable. The employee, Hu Peng, said local government officials had taken him away for "a meeting" earlier in the day and had also looked through patient records.

Although Hu said the hospital was not authorized to diagnose patients, he nonetheless defended the hospitalizations, saying that all the patients delivered by the Public Security Bureau were certifiably ill. "We definitely would not accept those without mental problems," he said.

Bull storms mall, scares shoppers

DHAKA (Reuters) - A bull bought for the Muslim Eid al-Adha festival charged through a posh shopping mall in the Bangladesh capital Dhaka Monday, causing panic and damaging several shops.

No one was hurt in the incident which took place in the city's Gulshan diplomatic area.

Guards captured the bull in a net and handed it back to its owners, police and witnesses said.

Parts of the Bangladesh capital, a city of 11 million people, have turned into cattle markets ahead of Eid on Tuesday, when officials say up to 2.5 million bulls and goats would be slaughtered across the city.

Slaughtering animals and sharing meat with relatives and the poor are mandatory for every Muslim who can afford it.

Parking ticket fight stretching into 2009

NEW YORK, Dec. 8 (UPI) -- A New York man said he has been fighting the same parking ticket for more than two years, causing the fine to nearly double.

Simon Belsky, 61, said he was issued a $115 fine Nov. 3, 2006, for allegedly blocking a fire hydrant with his parked 1990 Chrysler van. But he claims the only hydrant in sight when he parked was a good distance down the block, the New York Post reported Monday.

The fine has since increased to $200 with penalties, but Belsky said he does not plan to give up the fight.

"I got nothing else to do. I'm retired," Belsky said.

He said he filed a petition in state Supreme Court in August suing the New York City Department of Finance. However, during his court appearance last week, the city's attorney was granted an adjournment -- the second in the case -- until Feb. 2.

Belsky said if his suit is successful, he plans to file a civil suit against the city to recoup his legal expenses and other fees incurred, which he estimates cost him about $7,500 thus far.

Lebanon farmer grows super-sized spud

AFP – Lebanese farmer Khalil Semhat holds his giant potato in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre. The enormous …

TYRE, Lebanon (AFP) – A farmer from Lebanon couldn't believe his eyes when he discovered he had grown a prize-winning potato on his land, he told AFP on Saturday, saying he was hoping to enter the Guinness World Records.

"This giant weighs 11.3 kilos (24.9 pounds)," Khalil Semhat said at his farm in the Tyre area, 85 kilometres (50 miles) south of Beirut.

"I've been working the land since I was a boy, and it's the first time I've seen anything like it."

Semhat, 56, said he had not done anything special to cultivate such a super-sized spud. "I didn't use any chemicals at all," he insisted, adding that he had to ask a friend to help him haul the huge tuber out of the ground.

Now he hopes the find will get a mention in the famous Guinness Book of Records, and said he will send in the details for possible inclusion next year.

He said he was "very proud" to have grown the enormous specimen on his farm, which took a pounding in 2006 during the war between Israel and Lebanon's Shiite Hezbollah movement.