Need for speed

City officials in Liverpool, U.K., have a new treat for shoppers in a hurry: dedicated fast walking lanes. The English city painted red lanes onto a heavily used sidewalk in the city’s shopping district and advised slow walkers, tourists, and texters to steer clear. Named “Fast Track,” the fast-walker-only lanes are believed to be the first of their kind. According to research firm Argos, nearly 70 percent of young Britons support the idea of dedicated fast walking lanes.

Below grade?

An Alabama Teacher of the Year award winner and 21-year veteran educator has resigned after school bureaucrats insisted she lacked the qualifications to teach fifth grade. After winning the 2014-2015 Alabama Teacher of the Year competition, Ann Marie Corgill began this school year as a second-grade teacher. Shortly after the year began, the school moved her to a fifth-grade class. Only then did a state Department of Education official inform her that her national certification was not valid for fifth-grade duties. In an Oct. 27 letter, Corgill informed Birmingham schools she was walking away from the profession: “After 21 years of teaching in grades 1-6, I have no answers as to why this is a problem now, so instead of paying more fees, taking more tests and proving once again that I am qualified to teach, I am resigning.”

A penny saved

Otha Anders, of Ruston, La., has collected pennies for the last 45 years. On Oct. 27, Anders, 73, took them to the bank—in 15 five-gallon plastic water jugs—and deposited the grand total of $5,136.14 worth of pennies into his account. The bank’s coin machines took five hours to count all the pennies.

Signed crime

Police didn’t need much to solve a bank heist in Honolulu on Oct. 29. According to official reports, 45-year-old Albert Robledo passed a deposit slip to a teller at the Bank of Hawaii demanding $5,000 in a bag or threatening to set off a backpack bomb. Thankfully for police, Robledo signed his real name to the deposit slip. Police say the incompetent criminal then left with $2,000 but was soon apprehended by authorities who spotted him changing clothes outside.

Robbers on diet

Andronique Dossantos, 18, and Kostya Ragin, 19, will likely go to jail for stealing a salad. Boston police, who arrested the pair on Oct. 26, say the teens approached a man near a transit station, flashed what was later identified as a replica revolver, and demanded the victim turn over a shopping bag to the thieves. After obtaining the bag, the masked thieves fled on foot. According to the victim, the shopping bag contained only a packaged salad he had planned to eat for supper. Police later found Dossantos and Ragin with their masks and fake weapon. They had either discarded or eaten the salad.

Ditched cars

Authorities say it wasn’t a traditional sinkhole, but for at least 12 customers at an IHOP restaurant in Meridian, Miss., it may as well have been one. On Nov. 7, the pavement gave way under the IHOP’s parking lot, taking 12 cars with it into what police call a 15-foot-deep and 400-foot-long “cave-in.” Nobody was injured, but some customers cut it close. Gwendolyn Fikes told The Meridian Star that it had only been “about three minutes” after she and her daughter had walked from the parking lot to the restaurant when they heard a loud “boom.”

Special delivery

A British court on Oct. 29 sentenced Karl Jensen to more than two years in prison for attempting to smuggle contraband into a London-area prison. Among the items for which Jensen will be doing time: a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin. A year ago, Jensen tied a bag containing the fast-food breakfast, mobile phone sim cards, a 5-inch blade, drugs, and a bottle of vodka to a length of fishing line. From inside, an unknown prisoner yanked the bag over the walls and into the yard. But unbeknownst to the 27-year-old Jensen, a closed-circuit television caught his actions and authorities quickly confiscated the contraband. Jensen’s girlfriend also pleaded guilty to charges of helping him.

Traffic stop

They looked like traffic cones, and they acted like traffic cones. But police in Kingston, U.K., said they were definitely not traffic cones. According to a police report, on Halloween night in Kingston there were “males dressed as traffic cones blocking the road like traffic cones.” According to witness Dan Theochari, who posted a picture on Twitter.com, the pranksters were “just standing in front of the taxi and the bus not letting them get past and taking pictures of themselves.” Police were reportedly amused but advised the men dressed as traffic cones to clear the roadway.

Overnight onslaught

With hundreds of thousands of migrants swarming into Germany, Sumte, a town in lower Saxony, can be excused for not wanting to take in 750. The reason: Sumte is a one-street village with a population of 100. Town Mayor Christian Fabel told The New York Times he initially presumed the German government’s email instructing him to take 1,000 asylum seekers to be a joke or a mistake. The town, he explained, has no shops and barely any infrastructure and a 700 percent growth rate overnight would collapse Sumte’s sewer system, among other things.