PUYALLUP, Wash. – A small airplane dropping from the sky after its engine failed wound up on a cushioning bunch of portable toilets — and the pilot was able to walk away apparently unhurt.

Gary Mayor of the Federal Aviation Administration says the Cessna 182 crashed Friday afternoon in Washington state after taking off from Thun Field, an airfield owned by Pierce County southeast of Tacoma.

Sheriff’s spokesman Ed Troyer says the plane was about 150 feet in the air when the engine quit.

Troyer told The News Tribune that the pilot tried to turn around to land but didn’t quite make it.

The plane hit a fence, flipped over and landed upside down on top of the portable toilets standing in a storage yard.

Authorities didn’t immediately give the pilot’s identity in time for publication.

ARVADA, Colo. – A man in a cowboy hat who rode a horse through a Denver suburb has been cited for riding an animal under the influence. Police said Brian Drone was given a $25 traffic violation ticket in a strip mall parking lot Friday. Drone told KUSA-TV that he was out for a “joyride” in Arvada with his horse, Cricket.

Sgt. Jeff Monzingo says the citation was the first he’d seen in 15 years of working in law enforcement.

Police say deciding what to do with the horse was a “tricky call” because “you can tow a car” in typical drunk driving cases.

A stable owner eventually offered Drone and his horse a ride home.

A phone number listed for a Brian Drone in Arvada was disconnected.

LONDON – Queen Elizabeth II was at home at Windsor Castle, the sentries who guard her were on duty, and the large park surrounding the magnificent building was full of tourists on a Sunday afternoon. So it didn’t take long for people to realize that something was out of order when an inebriated couple arrived from a nearby restaurant and began having sex on a grass bank outside the castle, according to witnesses.

“One window from the guardroom opened up and when a soldier saw what was going on he told his mates — and lots of windows opened up,” witness Mark Robinson told The Sun newspaper.

“The couple did not care who was looking and just kept going as if they were in their own bedroom.”

Japanese tourists filmed the couple, who only stopped when police officers arrived on the scene, witnesses said.

Thames Valley Police said the man and woman were arrested and given a written warning about outraging public decency.

The queen was in the castle at the time, but her office declined Friday to comment about what had happened.

DENVER – A pregnant woman who was fleeing a bear when she was struck by a slow-moving car said she would honor the euthanized animal by giving her baby the middle name “Bear.”
Ashley Swendsen, 26, said she thought the bear followed her more out of curiosity than malice because it kept a distance of about 10 feet Thursday morning on a hiking trail in northwestern Colorado Springs.

As she ran, she thought, “If it was going to hurt me, it already would have.”

Swendsen managed to scramble up an embankment and was crossing the street when she was hit by a slow-moving car. Although she was not seriously injured, she was taken to a hospital as a precaution.

Police said they’re looking for the driver of the car that hit Swendsen. The driver stopped and spoke to her but left before police arrived.

Swendsen said she first spotted the bear as it was coming out of a creek.

“I didn’t know what to do, so I just kept walking,” she said.

Seraphin said the brown-colored North American black bear was tranquilized and later euthanized after Swendsen identified it.

HAMILTON, Ohio–A school spokesman said a southwest Ohio teacher has resigned after acknowledging she accompanied four female students to a male strip club. Butler Tech school district spokesman Bill Solazzo said the 47-year-old teacher resigned Thursday.

He said the teacher told Edgewood High School administrators that the students, all cheerleaders, asked her to take them to the bar in February.

The teacher told school officials in an e-mail that she got permission from the parents of the 17- and 18-year-olds to bring them to the club.

The teacher taught marketing at the school and previously served as a coach for the district’s eighth-grade cheerleaders.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -A Mississippi woman who was shot in the head not only survived but made herself tea and offered an astonished deputy something to drink, authorities said Friday. Tammy Sexton, 47, remained hospitalized three days after being wounded by her husband, who killed himself after he shot his wife. A bullet struck her squarely in the forehead, passed through her skull and exited through the back of her head, authorities said. She is expected to fully recover.

“There’s no way she should be alive other than a miracle from God,” said Sheriff Mike Byrd of Jackson County, Miss.

“She was at her bed, and he shot her right in the head,” Byrd said. “Then he went out on the back porch and shot himself.”

A deputy was greeted by the woman when he arrived minutes after she was shot with the slug from a .380-caliber handgun.

“When the officer got there she said, `What’s going on?’ She was holding a rag on her head and talking. She was conscious, but she was confused about what had happened,” he said. “She had made herself some tea and offered the officer something to drink.”

Byrd said the bullet apparently passed through the lobes of the woman’s brain without causing major damage. She was rushed to a Mobile hospital by a helicopter.

While such cases may be rare, neurosurgeons say such an outcome is possible. Medical journals also confirm people have been shot in the head with little or no lasting injury.
“You just don’t hear of something like this. Somebody gets shot in the head and they’re dead,” Byrd said.

HOBOKEN, N.J. -Police say a man posing as a waiter collected $186 in cash from diners at two restaurants in New Jersey and walked out with the money in his pocket.

Diners described the bogus waiter as a spikey-haired 20-something wearing a dark blue or black button-down shirt, yellow tie and khaki pants.

Police say he approached two women dining at Hobson’s Choice in Hoboken, N.J. around 7:20 p.m. on Thursday. He asked if they needed anything else before paying. They said no and handed him $90 in cash.

About two hours later he approached three women dining at Margherita’s Pizza and Cafe. He asked if they were ready to pay, took $96 and never returned with their change.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.–Prax Sanchez says he doesn’t recall any serious hammer-and-nail mishaps in his past.

Yet doctors administering an MRI on the 72-year-old Colorado man last month abruptly stopped the exam to tell him there seemed to be something metallic in his face.

Right after the MRI, Sanchez coughed up an inch-long nail.

His doctor, Jamieson Kennedy, told television station KKTV in Colorado Springs that the nail might have been embedded there as long as 30 years. The MRI’s magnetic force apparently dislodged the nail, causing Sanchez to cough it up.

Sanchez says he can’t remember ever using a nail like it.

“I’ll probably frame it,” he said Friday.

BERLIN–A German woman has divorced her husband because she was fed up with him cleaning all the time.

German media reported the wife got through 15 years of marriage putting up with the man’s penchant for doing household chores, tidying up and rearranging the furniture.

But she ran out of patience when he knocked down and rebuilt a wall at their home when it got dirty, Christian Kropp, court judge in the central town of Sondershausen, said on Thursday.

“I’d never had anyone seek a divorce for this,” he said.

ALLENDALE, S.C.–James Hines was a giant–a 6-foot-7, 300-pound preacher and funk musician so big that after he died in 2004 a macabre rumor began circulating in this small town that the undertaker had to cut off his legs to fit him in the coffin.

This week, after years of whispers, Hines’ body was exhumed, and the gruesome story appeared to be all too true.

The coroner’s office said only that it had found “undesirable evidence,” and a criminal investigation has been opened. But Hines’ widow said investigators told her that his legs had been cut off between the ankle and calf, and his feet had been placed inside the casket.

“It’s just like pulling the scab off an old sore. I was kind of like smoothing things out. But now it’s like starting all over again,” Ann Hines said Thursday, two days after investigators pulled the casket from the ground, lifted the lid, photographed the contents and returned it to the earth, all without leaving the graveyard.

Under South Carolina law, destroying or desecrating human remains is punishable by one to 10 years in prison.

Reached this week, a man who identified himself as the owner of Cave Funeral Home, which handled the funeral, declined to comment.

The allegations were so startling that funeral directors around the country are talking about the case.

“You hear old wives’ tales about this around the turn of the century, but, no, this was a shock to me,” said Doggett Whitaker, a past president of the National Funeral Directors Association.

Ann Hines said that she and her family went to the funeral home after her husband’s death to make the final arrangements, and she picked out a standard-size casket. At the funeral, only the top half of the lid was open, showing Hines from the chest up, she said. She said nobody ever suggested a bigger box.

Funeral directors sometimes pull up the knees or shift the padding in the coffin to make sure the body fits. But the best solution is usually a longer casket, Whitaker said, adding: “Just being upfront and honest with the family is the best path to take.”

He said bodies are usually measured and families told where a corpse’s head will rest in the casket. Longer caskets are routinely manufactured, though they cost more than standard ones.

Duffie Stone, the county prosecutor, would not comment on the investigation.

Around town, Hines was an unforgettable figure, and not just because of his size. An albino black man, he performed for decades as a soul and funk guitarist.

His group, J. Hines and the Boys, never hit it big but filled clubs and auditoriums in the Southeast, and small radio stations played some of its recordings, including “Funky Funk” and “Can’t Think of Nothing (Blank Mind).”

He gave up what he called his instrument of sin when he found God in the early 1990s. But his pastor had heard Hines’ recordings and, convinced that Hines should share his gift, took him to buy a new guitar.

Eventually, Hines became a minister in Allendale, about 75 miles southwest of the capital, Columbia. He played his guitar during services at the church he built and on a nearby Christian radio station until his death from skin cancer at 60.

At his funeral, several people, including one of Hines’ five children, said the casket looked too small. Hines was about 79 inches tall in his bare feet, according to his family.

The interior length of a standard coffin is about 80 inches but can vary by a few inches, depending on the padding, the thickness of the walls and other features, said Scott Jones, chief executive of Service Casket Co., a casket distributor in Columbus, Ga.

After the funeral, the rumors began — started, some say, by a former funeral home worker — and it seemed as if all 3,700 people in town were talking about the burial.

Ann Hines said she threatened to sue Cave Funeral Home and the business agreed to settle out of court as long as she did not tell anyone how much she received. She said workers at the funeral home never told her exactly what happened. She said she accepted the deal and tried to forget about the whole thing and stop wondering why nobody even apologized.

Eventually, someone called the South Carolina Board of Funeral Service, and the coroner and an investigator with the agency received the widow’s permission to dig up the grave.