A drunken 78-year-old Swede stole a dinghy after a night out in the Danish town of Helsingor and tried to row back to Sweden, but fell asleep halfway, Danish police said.

When the man discovered he lacked the necessary funds to pay for the ferry from Helsingor to Helsingborg in Sweden on Saturday, he decided to row the three miles across the strait of Oresund that separates the two.

He quickly grew tired and, trusting fortune and the currents to see him safely home, took a snooze at the bottom of the boat, where Danish police later found him out at sea, still asleep.

The strait is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. Police said the owner of the dinghy had decided not to press charges.

Police in Australia have charged a man for drink driving in a motorized wheelchair after he was found to be six times over the legal alcohol limit, local media reported on Monday.

Police in the tropical northern Queensland city of Cairns said the man had a blood alcohol reading of 0.31, and was so drunk he was asleep at the controls of his motorized wheelchair in a turning lane of a major highway.

“It beggars belief,” Police Inspector Bob Walters told the Cairns Post newspaper, adding wheelchairs, bicycles, horses and skateboards were all considered to be vehicles under the state’s road laws.

“It’s unlawful, it is unacceptable and people should realize it could lead to a fatality,” he said.

Other motorists on the four-lane highway had to swerve to avoid the wheelchair, police said.

A 1.8 meter (nearly six feet) python has been found in a toilet bowl in a highrise apartment in Australia’s northern tropical city of Darwin, media reported on Friday.

The Northern Territory News said the black-headed python was found in a 10th floor toilet.

Reptile catcher Chris Peberdy told the newspaper the python, likely to be a runaway pet, had been traveling through the building’s sewer pipes.

“When I saw it I was pretty shocked,” he said. “There is no possible other way it could have got there than through the toilet. I had to give him a wash because he was wet and a bit smelly.”

A woman who attempted to escape from jail in Sydney had to be rescued by police after she became stuck in an air conditioning duct, police said on Thursday.

The 22-year-old woman had just been refused bail by a Sydney court when she attempted the escape, but then spent about an hour stuck in the air vent before she was rescued.

Police in the New South Wales state said the woman would now face an extra charge of attempting to escape

Alison DeLauzon thought the snapshots and home videos of her infant son were gone for good when she lost her digital camera while on vacation in Florida.

Then a funny thing happened: her camera “phoned home.”

Equipped with a special memory card with wireless Internet capability, DeLauzon’s camera had not only automatically sent her holiday pictures to her computer, but had even uploaded photos of the miscreants who swiped her equipment bag after she accidentally left it behind at a restaurant.

“I opened up the Eye-Fi manager on the computer and, lo and behold, there are the guys that stole our cameras,” said DeLauzon, a native of New York’s Long Island suburb. “Not only is it the guy who stole our camera … but the guy took a picture of (his accomplice) holding our other camera.”

DeLauzon received the Eye-Fi, a 2-gigabyte SD memory card that fits into millions of digital cameras, as a holiday gift to go with her Canon camera.

Priced at about $100, the card automatically uploads pictures to a home computer or online photosharing service as soon as the user is linked to a familiar wireless network.

Luckily, the culprits passed by an unsecured network, whose factory-installed setting matched that of DeLauzon’s home system, and the Eye-Fi automatically shipped the photos: first baby pictures, then the snap-happy scoundrels.

Her experience reflects the rise of technology that empowers everyday gadgets to protect themselves or the priceless personal data — from family phone numbers to business budgets — that consumers keep on portable electronics devices.

Cameras are perhaps the most common home-phoning gadget used to thwart criminals.

An eerie case occurred last month, when a Japanese man set up a hidden camera because food was disappearing from his kitchen. While he was out, the camera sent pictures to his mobile phone of the intruder — an unknown woman living secretly in his closet.

Sixteen members of a smuggling gang in China and Hong Kong have been arrested for rigging a 300-metre long cable to send contraband goods across the heavily-policed border, a newspaper reported Thursday.

The gang had initially used a crossbow to shoot the cable across the fenced-off border between the two sides, before stringing it from the top of a Chinese highrise down to a village house in Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post reported.

Investigators said the gang had likely been operating for two to three weeks, using a zip wire and pulley system to whisk small batches of goods along the cable, mostly at night.

“They took 10 to 15 seconds to smuggle goods weighing 3-5kg, such as 20-30 mobile phones each time,” Leo Sin, a senior Hong Kong customs’ intelligence officer was quoted as saying.

Electronics goods worth more than $770,000 were seized, including 3,300 mobile phones and 2,100 computer memory cards, the paper reported.

The newspaper said it was the first time such a method had been deployed by cross-border smugglers, who have in the past dug tunnels to ferret electronics underground and to pump contraband diesel between the two sides.

Twelve people from mainland China and four from Hong Kong were arrested.

A homeless woman who sneaked into a man’s house and lived undetected in his closet for a year was arrested in Japan after he became suspicious when food mysteriously began disappearing.

Police found the 58-year-old woman Thursday hiding in the top compartment of the man’s closet and arrested her for trespassing, police spokesman Hiroki Itakura from southern Kasuya town said Friday.

The resident of the home installed security cameras that transmitted images to his mobile phone after becoming puzzled by food disappearing from his kitchen over the past several months.

One of the cameras captured someone moving inside his home Thursday after he had left, and he called police believing it was a burglar. However, when they arrived they found the door locked and all windows closed.

“We searched the house … checking everywhere someone could possibly hide,” Itakura said. “When we slid open the shelf closet, there she was, nervously curled up on her side.”

The woman told police she had no place to live and first sneaked into the man’s house about a year ago when he left it unlocked.

She had moved a mattress into the small closet space and even took showers, Itakura said, calling the woman “neat and clean.”