Peeping tech

San Francisco, June 26 (Reuters): Fusing age-old lust with the kind of technology that made Silicon Valley famous, a Californian allegedly rigged up a tiny camera on his shoe to look up women’s dresses —until he was nabbed by police.

“It’s kind of like a modern version of the guy with a mirror on his shoe,” Palo Alto detective Jim Coffman said today. “It was a pinhole camera — it is something that we use for surveillance purposes.”

Police said James Rich, 56, was nabbed at a classic car show on Sunday when someone noticed that he had little interest in cars and a particular focus on skirted woman attending the event.

A camera lens the size of a pinhead was discovered placed on his shoe laces and linked via a wire in his pants to a video camera, police said.

Rich was arrested and then released on misdemeanor charges for taking photographs of skin or underwear when there is an expectation of privacy, Coffman said.

Colour clash

Berlin (Reuters): The colour of your home’s walls can be a matter of life and death, as a German man found out when he was fatally stabbed by his wife after they rowed about what colour to paint them, police said on Wednesday. The dispute flared as the 53-year-old man and his Polish wife of 30 years were redecorating their house. Angered and frustrated by the escalating feud, the man got a kitchen knife and suggested to his wife she use it on him, police said. The 50-year-old woman then grabbed the knife and plunged it into his heart. Rescue services were unable to save the man. Both had been drinking alcohol, according to police. “It’s a tragic story,” said police spokesperson Christiane Leven, in the western city of Hamburg. Police arrested the woman, who now faces prosecution. They could not say what colours the couple were arguing over.

Loot for sale

Tampa (Reuters): Auctioneers sold a drug dealer’s glittering stash of gold coins and other artifacts from Spanish shipwrecks on Wednesday, raising $761,500 for federal law enforcement, said auctioneer EG&G Technical Services. The jewellry and US and Spanish coins were among over $1 million in assets seized from Thomas Ruck after his arrest in 2001. Ruck, now serving 12-and-a-half years in prison for smuggling cocaine into Florida for Colombia’s Cali drug cartel, bought the bounty with his illegal profits. The auction drew 282 bidders. A gold ingot weighing 1,875 g drew the highest single price of $18,000. The bounty was recovered from a fleet of Spanish ships that sank off Florida in 1715.