News that sounds like a joke

• A star athlete at Brigham Young University was arrested in Provo, Utah, in June after police saw him angrily dueling with a street cleaner using the man's mops. The cleaner had crossed a street slowly, provoking driver Kyle Perry to leap from his car, grab a mop and swing it at the cleaner (who parried the attack with another mop). • The representative from Boulder, Colo., in the National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., in May was 14-year-old Miss "Maithreyi Gopalakrishnan" (that's M-a-i-t-h-r-ey i G-o-p-a-l-a-k-r-i-s-h-n-a-n). • Once-classified reports obtained by the Associated Press in May revealed that three times in late 2005 and early 2006, the U.S. Department of Defense issued espionage alerts regarding newly designed Canadian 25-cent pieces, which the Pentagon warned may contain embedded transmitters capable of eavesdropping, and which perhaps were given purposely to U.S. contractors working in Canada. Some time later, according to the reports, the Pentagon learned that the coin's coating was not a film-and-mesh transmitter but merely a covering to preserve the limited issue coin's unique design.