Explosion hurts 3, forces evacuation

Indianapolis An underground explosion injured three people Saturday and forced authorities to evacuate dozens of residents from a downtown condominium.

The blast shortly before noon was similar to one that cut power Wednesday to about 400 downtown businesses and homes, including the federal courthouse. Officials said both explosions likely were caused by heavy rains and later freezing and thawing that triggered a series of short circuits in underground utility lines.

Saturday’s explosion buckled a bookstore’s 3-inch concrete floor into jagged 4-foot mounds and blew a steel door off its hinges. Two workers and a customer were injured.

Tony Bayt had just opened the front door of the store when he was blown off his feet.

“I was flying through the air,” he said while medics checked his injuries before putting him into an ambulance.

Man enters guilty plea in bogus Viagra case

Los Angeles A man pleaded guilty Thursday to smuggling tens of thousands of counterfeit Viagra tablets from China and manufacturing hundreds of thousands more.

Frank Fu Jen Huang, 58, entered his plea the day his trial was to begin. He could face as much as 51 years in prison on charges of conspiracy, trafficking in counterfeit goods and causing a counterfeit drug to be made or sold, authorities said.

Prosecutors said Huang dealt in $5.6 million worth of the counterfeit male sexual potency pills, including importing at least 50,000 tablets into the United States from China. Federal agents seized four shipments containing about half those pills between September 2001 and February 2002.

Authorities said Huang and another man began manufacturing about 700,000 counterfeit tablets at a laboratory in Azusa after the shipments were intercepted.

The counterfeit pills did not have the right mix of ingredients but looked like the blue pills manufactured by Pfizer Inc., authorities said.

Prostitute calls police over child pornography

Hollywood, Fla. A prostitute turned in a customer after seeing child pornography, including a video of an apparent toddler rape, on the man’s home computer, police said.

Detective Carlos Negron said police were contacted by the woman on Tuesday, saying that while working at the man’s apartment as a prostitute she saw numerous pictures of children who appeared to be between ages 3 and 16 performing sex.

The woman told police that it was a disturbing video that showed the rape of a younger child, perhaps no older than 2, that caused her to make the call after she left the apartment, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported.

Negron said Federico Eduardo Amezaga, 29, let investigators search his apartment, where they found numerous photos and videos of children performing sex acts.

Officers arrested Amezaga on 15 charges of possessing child pornography.

Wal-Mart greeter fired for showing nude photo

Muscatine, Iowa A Wal-Mart greeter was sacked for apparently showing too much of his friendly side to customers.

Dean L. Wooten, 65, was accused of greeting customers with a computer-generated photo of himself in which he appeared to be naked – except for a carefully placed Wal-Mart bag — and of telling customers that Wal-Mart was cutting costs and the sack was the company’s new uniform.

A supervisor at the Muscatine store where Wooten had worked for seven years told him to knock it off after customers complained. He was fired five days later, in September, after he displayed the photo again.

Wooten’s application for unemployment compensation was rejected by an administrative law judge, who said “a reasonable person would know the act of showing a naked body wearing a Wal-Mart sack would not be good for the employer’s business.”

Wooten said he did not see the harm in the photo, which he said was made by a friend who spliced a picture of Wooten’s head onto a shot of another man’s body.

“When I first seen it, I pretty near died laughing,” he said.