Bradenton - Sheriff's officers said a 19-year-old man snatched a Starbucks customers laptop after being told he could not use it to check his Facebook account. According to officers, the man then grabbed the customer's laptop and ran out of the coffee shop, located in an outlet mall.

There seems to be an inherent contradiction between the local and international aims of the Slow Food movement. What do you think such an organisation ought to be doing?

Slow Food UK is in crisis. Slow Food itself is a weird organisation. It has a charismatic founder/leader, Carlo Petrini, who presides over and directs the movement from Italy. It purports to be a grassroots movement, inherently democratic because the only thing you have to do to qualify for membership and join is to pay your sub - the £35 fee goes to Slow Food UK and the new member is assigned to a local convivium.

(The vocabulary of Slow Food is its most peculiar feature - there are convivia, presidia, arks and terra madre - an apparent lexical cross between Stalinism and religion, though in fact, I think it reflects the Italian anarcho-syndicalist origins of the movement.)

Seven-times winner of the Tour de France widens search for stolen time trial bike

What do you do if your bike has just been nicked? If you're the Tory leader, David Cameron, you get laughed at and call for the reintroduction of sharia law for bike theft. If you're the seven-times winner of the Tour de France, Lance Armstrong, you turn to Twitter.

"Someone stole my time trial bike! Wtf?!? APB out to the twitterati," he told his 112,000 followers on the microblogging site after a gruelling stage on the Tour of California.

Washington - A little more than a month after the first family's move to the White House, reports of strange happenings have continued to surface, with Sasha Obama confirming Tuesday that she had once again been visited by the eerie specter of the Bush twins.

Sasha, who was playing in the East Wing of the executive mansion so as not to disturb her busy father, reported seeing the former first twins while riding her Big Wheel tricycle down the Cross Hall corridor. The frightening apparitions, the 7-year-old said, emerged out of thin air and were dressed in identical outfits consisting of spaghetti strap tank tops and denim skirts.

A pet pig saved its own bacon by jumping in the bath after it burned its owner's house down in Sweden.

The porker knocked over a table lamp setting fire to the curtains and trapping himself inside the house.

It sounds too good to be true. Now, for a limited time - the year of St. Paul, to be specific, which ends in June - say a prayer, pop by a designated church and qualify for an indulgence that deducts time from your scorching sojourn in the cleansing fires of purgatory.

Indulgences (no relation here to bubble baths or truffles) have been part of Catholic doctrine since the Crusades. When the Church offered them for sale in the 1500's - call it mercy for money - religious reformer Martin Luther protested. These days, they can't be bought. "How does that MasterCard ad go?" muses Sister Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "Some things are priceless."

The pardons have fallen by the wayside in the past few decades, but they're being revived in conjunction with a new emphasis on the importance of charity in Christian life. Catholicism, with 67 million followers in the U.S., is big on formulaic repetition of the Hail Mary and Our Father variety. But the Vatican is starting to move away from that and toward, according to the church's Manual of Indulgences, a "greater zeal for the exercise of charity."

It's no longer enough to repeat a prescribed number of prayers; you also have to do good such as volunteer at a soup kitchen, help resettle refugees or donate to a worthy cause. Much like many high schoolers have to fulfill a community service requirement, Catholics too are being urged to become do-gooders. "The church's teaching has evolved," Walsh says. "Part of indulgences is not just saying special prayers, but also doing good works."

At the core of indulgences is sin, which can lead to either eternal punishment, i.e., hell, or time spent in purgatory, a place of suffering where imperfections are scrubbed away in preparation for entering heaven. Confession erases eternal punishment, but temporal punishment remains. Plenary, or full, indulgences are the equivalent of a get-out-of-purgatory-free card. Partial indulgences simply shorten your stay.

Boca Raton, Florida - A woman in Florida says she's offering her parrot to end a dispute between two other women fighting over the ownership of another parrot.

Leah Dellapelle, 28, said she loves Travis, her African gray parrot, but she can't afford his $100-a-month diet, The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported Sunday.

Dellapelle says Travis may be the answer to a lawsuit filed Friday by Angela Colicheski, 52, against Sarita Lytell, 47, both of Boca Raton.

An Oregon woman finally received an invitation to her nephew's high school graduation in New Jersey, but she may be a little late - it was in 1987.

Theresa Schlossarek, of La Grande, found the invitation last week in her mailbox. The envelope, which had been opened, was postmarked June 2, 1987, from Toms River, N.J., where her brother, Hermann Ilnseher, lives.

Ilnseher said the lack of response from his sister was noticed but dismissed.

A South Korean housewife has broken a world record in marathon singing after crooning for more than 76 hours without stopping at a Seoul karaoke bar, local record verifiers say.

Kim Sun-Ok, 54, broke the 75-hour Guinness World Record held by Marcus Lapratt of the United States, the private Korea Record Institute said.

She started singing at 11.14am local time on Thursday and sang a total of 1,283 tunes before she gave up at 3.21pm on Saturday following her family's appeal for her to quit for the sake of her health, it said.