WhiteBoard News for Friday, June 20, 2003

Normandy Park, Washington (AP):

It was a very short trip to paradise for one 13-year-old boy: He flew from Washington to Hawaii and back in less than a day. 

The unidentified teen managed to charge the airline ticket online to his mother's credit card and got himself to the airport and aboard the flight to Maui. 

But his mom figured out where he was going at her expense, so a Maui County officer met him on his arrival last week. The boy was booked on a return flight, and was back home before midnight. 

Aloha, indeed. 

"He expected to get a flower in his ear. Instead, he got a ride in a police car," Normandy Park police Chief Rick Kieffer said. 

The boy's mother, whom Kieffer did not identify, realized her son was missing June 11 and checked their home computer, which showed he had ordered a plane ticket to Hawaii. 

"He got mom's credit card and punched it in," Kieffer said. 

The family lives just over 2 miles from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, not a long walk for a 13-year-old. 

His mother sentenced him to "two years of yard work" to cover the cost of his ticket. 

"We had a happy ending, from the police side of it," Kieffer said. "How Mom felt about it might be different." 
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Los Angeles, California (AP):

Cosmetics heir Andrew Luster's arrest in Mexico this week has sent the cast and crew of a movie on his life scrambling to stitch together a new ending. 

Jason Gedrick of NBC's "Boomtown" stars as the former fugitive in the film, "A Date With Darkness: The Trial of Andrew Luster," set to debut Aug. 11 on the Lifetime cable channel. Marla Sokoloff, formerly of ABC's "The Practice," portrays one of the three women Luster was convicted of attacking. 

The movie was originally set to wrap next Wednesday in Vancouver, British Columbia, but shooting will be extended at least one day, executive producer Larry Thompson said by phone Thursday. 

"Our writer is writing and rewriting, our locations are changing and we are trying to figure it out as we go," Thompson said. "I've got my hair and makeup people trying to find a goatee." 

Luster had grown a goatee but otherwise looked little different when he was taken into custody Wednesday than he did when he disappeared during his trial in January. 

Gedrick said Luster's actions "confirm choices" he had made in portraying the fugitive as someone for whom "a crime of impulse escalated to a crime of habit." 

After Luster jumped his $1 million bail, a Ventura County Superior Court jury convicted the 39-year-old great-grandson of Hollywood makeup legend Max Factor of multiple counts of rape, poisoning and drug possession. 

Luster was staying at a $34-a-night hotel next door to a police station in Puerto Vallarta when he left his room before dawn Wednesday to order tacos from a street vendor and was confronted by bounty hunters. Mexican police responding to reports of a brawl early Wednesday caught up with the bounty hunters and took Luster and his captors into custody. 
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Christchurch, New Zealand (Ananova):

New Zealand farmers are angry after the government announced plans to tax the flatulence of their livestock.

Farmers face a levy of up to 25p a head on cattle and 3p on each sheep as part of the government's policy to combat global warming.

Methane from the animals' belching from the grass they munch, and nitrous oxide from their dung and urine accounts for more than half of all New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions.

The government will spend the tax it collects from the flatulent animals on researching ways to make them less windy.

Farmers accused the government of a political sleight of hand in making them pay for research after promising the agricultural sector would be exempted from emission charges.

Federated Farmers' president Tom Lambie complains New Zealand is the only country to impose a levy like this on its farmers.
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