A family is suing the Greyhound bus company after one of its buses emptied the contents of its sanitary tank through their car’s open windows.

According to the Toledo Blade, the family from Ottawa County, Ohio, were returning from a pleasant Mother’s Day meal when they were unexpectedly showered with a mixture of faeces, toilet paper and urine.

“My client was driving in heavy traffic. They had nowhere to go. What can you do,” Robert Bryce, lawyer for the family, asked rhetorically.

Robert Stokes was driving behind the Greyhound with his wife and children aged 9, 10 and 22 in a Ford Explorer with sun roof and windows wide open at the time of the incident. After the attack, Stokes continued to follow the bus in order to get its details, despite being drenched with effluent.

The family is after US $287,000 ($371,622) from Greyhound. This amount represents the total loss of the car — the stench rendering it undrivable — as well as damage to clothing and medical costs.

From one ball and chain to another

It seems love is blossoming in the jails of Ivory Coast. A pair of prisoners were let out of their cells for a few hours to get married, after falling in love through a peephole.

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The groom, Roland Bouabre, had sweet-talked Emilie Yobouet through a hole in an iron door while delivering her groceries.

Bouabre was in the middle of a three-year stint for stealing a bicycle, whereas his future bride was doing only one for kidnapping a child.

Then two days after the wedding, Yobouet was released a happily married woman.

“You can find love in all kinds of places, even prison,” guard Norbert Bah told Reuters.

Yobouet now visits her husband in jail, to deliver him meals.

“He eats much better now,” Bah said.

Pensioner teaches street thugs a lesson

A trio of hoodlums chose the wrong pensioner to rob when they tried to mug George Bayliss, a former army boxing champ.

Bayliss, now aged 67, is a retired builder and holder of the army’s middleweight championship from 1958 to 1960.

“They picked on the wrong pensioner,” Bayliss told The Sun in the UK.

The hardened senior citizen had received his pension only moments before when the three thugs confronted him on the street. Without hesitation, he approached the leader of the gang and clocked him with a left hook to the chin, sending the remaining cowardly cretins fleeing for their lives.

“The guy I hit got what he deserved. My only regret is that I didn’t hit him harder. I hope they think twice before picking on someone my age again,” Bayliss said.

Lisa Miller of the Suffolk police station said “we would never encourage the public to retaliate in these circumstances in case they get hurt”.

“But [Bayliss’] actions may have stopped a more serious crime.”

Mayor mistakenly fights grog with phone sex

The Mayor of Edmond, Oklahoma, was left horribly embarrassed after hand delivering flyers en masse to local residents to combat under-age drinking, only to find it included a number for an adult phone sex service.

Saundra Naifeh, the Mayor of Edmond, had personally helped dozens of volunteers to deliver 22,000 fliers giving parents advice on how to discourage their children from the devil’s juice.

Yet when well-meaning parents called the number for more information, all they received was an invitation for “exciting live talk”.

“Obviously, it made me feel sick,” Naifeh said. “I have no idea how the error happened.”

According to city manager Larry Stevens, the flier was made by the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services. Dreamt up in consultation with Naifeh, the fliers were supposed to represent Edmond’s efforts to support ‘Make A Difference Day’ — a national neighbour and community initiative.

Crim gets the scales of justice

A debt collector armed with a sawn-off shotgun failed to collect money from a drug dealer, so he stole his pet alligator instead.

The reptile thief, Gary Lee Gugin, arrived at the home of the dealer to demand the money, but the dealer had previously been raided by the police of his entire stash of drugs and money.

During the raid of the house in Frederic, Detroit, police seized $900 in cash, two guns, and a pharmacy of drugs including cocaine, crack cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine, and ecstasy.

Understandably, when Gugin arrived, the dealer’s cupboards were bare, so he took the alligator to avoid leaving empty-handed.

“I think he was going to hold [the alligator] for ransom," Crawford County Sheriff Kirk Wakefield told the Traverse City Record-Eagle.

Police later caught Gugin outside his own home, pulling the alligator from his car. He was charged with home invasion, armed robbery, possession of firearms by a felon and two other weapons charges.

Slithering out of a booze bust

In other reptile-related criminal news, a drunken man in Darwin escaped police after threatening them with a snake he grabbed from the side of the road.

The man was stopped by police when they noticed his Toyota Landcruiser snaking along the road at around midnight, swerving dangerously.

After pulling the man over, he was breathalysed and returned a reading of 0.131. But when the driver alighted from his vehicle, he took hold of a passing snake and ‘aimed’ it at the police.

“The driver allegedly armed himself with a live snake, pointed the head of the reptile at them and threatened them,” the police statement read.

Instead of acceding to the officers’ request that he drop the ‘weapon’, the man turned and ran into the bush with his serpentine companion still in hand. He is due to appear in Darwin Magistrates Court.