Least Competent Criminals; How relatively easy it is to sell sand to Arabs

•Employees of the Marshalls department store in Longmont, Colorado, said they had been hearing noises but were unable to locate the source for several days until finally, on Nov. 10, they summoned firefighters, who tore out an interior wall and freed a weak, injured Paul Felyk, 35, who had been trapped between that wall and an exterior wall after falling through the roof. A scrawled note near him was three days old. Burglary charges were filed against Felyk, who has a substantial rap sheet. [KDVR-TV (Denver), 11-14-2014]

•The desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula are fine-grained and smooth -- unable to be used in manufacturing or, especially, the concrete industry, which is crucial to the massive upscale developments in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and other countries. Nor does desert sand work for beach restoration in the United States and other areas -- because it blows away so easily.

The resultant "sand crisis," with various countries bidding against Middle Easterners for the Earth's sea sand (described in a November New York Times essay), sounds much more severe than the first time News of the Weird mentioned (in 2007) how relatively easy it is, contrary to cliche, to sell sand to Arabs. [New York Times, 11-4-2014]

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