Bank robbers, firefighters and more

Men pretend to be women to rob a bank. A woman gets kicked out of a bathroom because someone thinks she's a man. It's a crazy world out there.

Published July 3, 2007 8:40PM (EDT)

According to Reuters, two men broke into a bank in Sarajevo today and got away with $40,000. How'd they do it? They wore burqas to make it look like they were Muslim women, then threatened the customers with guns and emptied the tills. Great.

In better news, News Wales reports that Wales wants more female firefighters. "The Welsh Assembly Government has joined forces with Wales' three fire and Rescue services to raise awareness of the opportunities available," reports the article. "A one stop phone number has been created to help women considering a career as a firefighter. The initiative also includes a country wide advertising campaign featuring four female firefighters from across Wales and supported by an awareness raising DVD."

The International Herald Tribune offers up this headline: "Lesbian says restaurant ejected her from women's bathroom for looking too masculine." It turns out that Khadijah Farmer, who was eating dinner at the Caliente Cab Company after New York City's gay pride parade, got kicked out of the bathroom by a bouncer who said that another customer had complained that there was a guy in the women's room. When Farmer offered to show identification proving herself to be a woman, the bouncer told her "'that's neither here nor there,'" Farmer's quoted as saying. If proving that you're a woman when someone accuses you of not being a woman is "neither here nor there," I'd like to know where the bouncer thought he was in the first place.

Lastly, here's a piece from the Huffington Post that ties into my earlier comment in a post about Pixar about the lack of women on "The Daily Show." In this article, Alex Remington asks why ex-"SNL" women rarely are famous. Sure, they've got an obvious disadvantage to begin with, seeing as how out of the 116 cast members in the show's 32-year history, only 36 have been women (and as Remington points out, only 20 of those survived past their first seasons). But still -- it's remarkable how few of those women, as compared to their male peers, have actually managed to maintain their fame in their post-"Saturday Night Live" lives.


By Catherine Price

Catherine Price is an award-winning journalist and author of Vitamania: How Vitamins Revolutionized the Way We Think About Food. Her written and multimedia work has appeared in publications including The Best American Science Writing, The New York Times, Popular Science, O: The Oprah Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post Magazine, Salon, Slate, Men’s Journal, Mother Jones, PARADE, Health Magazine, and Outside. Price lives in Philadelphia.

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