some of the news

In the news ...

Willie Sutton (1901-1980)

-- Eat your heart out, Willie Sutton! The prolific American bank robber occasionally credited with saying that he robbed banks "because that's where the money is" was upstaged in Brussels late Monday when eight masked gunmen divested a plane of an estimated $50 million in diamonds and precious metals all in the space of five minutes and without firing a shot.

-- A seventy-five-year-old Indiana farmer is due in the U.S. Supreme Court because he thought he had found a way around agricultural giant Monsanto's headlock on soybean production. Monsanto's grip on genetically-altered seed that is resistant to weed-killers means that farmers have to buy new seed every year -- a costly business that has left other parts of the world starving. Monsanto's grip on the seed market means that buying the old seed is all but impossible. Vernon Hugh Bowman found what he thought was a loophole in the monopoly ... and now the case will go before the Supreme Court. Monsanto wants to protect its revenue stream and the Obama administration is backing the claim.

-- Even as China is accused of hacking into all sorts of business and military secrets, fast-food outlet Burger King faces its own Internet disaster: Someone apparently hacked its Twitter account and replaced its profile picture with ... gasp! ... a McDonald's icon.