Two men staged a phony traffic accident in Pruzhany, Belarus, towing an old junk car to a remote intersection and making it look like it had crashed to defraud the insurance company.

The jig was up when the investigating policeman looked under the hood of the car and discovered it had no engine.

YAWN! THINK I'LL TURN IN, GOODNIGHT

In order to get out of the house to be with her friends at night, a 15-year-old Kenosha, Wis., girl put her stepfather's anti-depressant pills in her parents' coffee so they would go to sleep.

She got away with it for about two months.

HERE KITTY, NICE KITTY, AIEEEEE!

A British woman climbed up a 10-foot-high barrier at an animal sanctuary in Madrid, Spain, to get closer to the lions.

She stuck her hand between the bars of the cage, and a lioness named Martha responded by playfully ripping her arm off.

YOU THINK I WAS NEGATIVE BEFORE?

A Pennsylvania woman went to a psychic who advised her that she need to erase the "negative thoughts" that were holding her back.

To accomplish this, the psychic sold her three magic wands for $5,400. Alas, the wands had no effect whatever. Police have become involved.

DO YOU PLAN ON HAVING CHILDREN?

The mayor of Corbel-Essonnes, France, refused to marry a French woman and a Tunisian man because he suspected the union was a sham designed to gain French citizenship for the groom.

The tipoff was their ages: The man was 25 and the woman, 52.

A LITTLE TOO COOL

Radio station BRMB in Birmingham, England, staged a "Coolest Seats In Town" challenge which required contestants to sit on blocks of dry ice - frozen carbon dioxide with a temperature of 108 degrees below zero - to win tickets to a music festival.

Four of them suffered extreme frostbite to the buttocks.

GRAMMY, YOU'VE GOT TO HELP ME!

Two New York brothers were arrested for swindling 71 grandmothers - ranging in age from 75 to 87.

It worked this way: One of them would phone the victim pretending to be her grandson. He would say he was in trouble and needed between $4,000 and $6,000, and would send a friend over to get it. Don't tell the family, he would say. They got more than $300,000.

SLEEP WELL, MY DARLING

Even though she was videotaped offering a Florida undercover policemen money to kill her husband and was charged with solicitation to commit murder, her hubby stood by her, saying he loved her anyway. But the judge, concerned about the man's safety, forbade them have any contact at all.

Ultimately, the case fell apart and she was allowed to plead to a lesser charge. They are back living together.

RECORD? I HAVE NO RECORD, MON AMI

A 19-year-old computer whiz, arrested for drunken driving in Besacon, France, went to his hearing at the police station where he saw a computer no one was using.

He sat down and broke into the police database, then erased his record and replaced it with a winking smiley face. The police were not amused.