False Alarms

On a recent morning while Glenn Geraghty was away, the security alarm at his Watts home went off. When Los Angeles police officers arrived, a neighbor with a key to the house offered a sheepish apology: Geraghty's dog, Checkers, had pawed open the gate on his cage and tripped the alarm's motion sensors. The police left, only to be summoned back hours later when the dog got free a second time. That should have been the end of it. A city law grants only two false alarms every 12 months.

The ambulance entrance to the emergency room at St. Josephs Hospital in Orange was closed for nearly five hours Friday after a woman walked in with a bag containing an unknown material that was believed to have made her and a police officer sick. It turned out to be Alfredo sauce mix and an empty herbal vitamin package with some residue inside.

An elderly man who wrote in a letter to the editor about Saddam Hussein's execution that "they hanged the wrong man" got a visit from Secret Service agents concerned he was threatening President Bush. A Secret Service spokesman said it was the agency's duty to investigate Dan Tilli, 81, who the agents decided was not a threat.

Before Tom Cruise's "Mission: Impossible III" exploded last May across movie screens, its promotional campaign bombed on Los Angeles newsstands. That's the view of federal officials who say they intend to sue the Los Angeles Times and Paramount Pictures Corp. over the April 28 placement in news racks of digital devices that played the familiar "Mission: Impossible" theme song when the racks' doors were opened.

New York to Boston: Get over it. The Big Apple's neighbor to the north was brought to a halt Wednesday when some harmless blinking signs advertising a cartoon were mistaken for bombs. In New York? Fuhgeddaboudit. The city's 911 operators logged no calls -- not a single one -- when the identical devices depicting in lights a character from "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" were planted around Manhattan and Brooklyn several weeks ago.

Turner Broadcasting has agreed to pay all costs of a security scare triggered by a marketing campaign that disrupted travel in Boston, a spokeswoman for Mayor Thomas Menino said. Travel on major roadways and rail lines was suspended as police responded in large numbers Wednesday after discovering the battery-powered devices, which were intended to promote a cartoon on a Turner cable network, in Boston and surrounding cities. Authorities blew up one of them.

The Los Angeles Times, Paramount Pictures and the advertising company whose "Mission: Impossible III" promotional campaign prompted an evacuation of a Veterans Affairs hospital have finalized a settlement with the government, the U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles said Thursday. The paper, the studio and Allied Advertising agreed to pay $75,000 to settle the case but did not admit wrongdoing.

When authorities were told a 4-year-old girl had reported that a man tried to kidnap her from a playground, they dispatched eight squad cars, a helicopter and a dozen deputies to track down the perpetrator. For four hours Tuesday, they canvassed the girl's Midway City neighborhood, an unincorporated area in the middle of Orange County.

Capitol Police said Thursday that they were looking at their early-warning system as part of the investigation into a nerve-gas scare that forced the evacuation of a Senate office building. Investigators have not determined whether the system malfunctioned during Wednesday evening's scare, police spokeswoman Sgt. Kimberly Schneider said.

Police cordoned off downtown Pittsburgh streets for nearly two hours and SWAT teams searched buildings for a possible sniper with a rifle, but it turned out to be a man with a pellet gun, which he used to shoot pigeons. Police Chief Dom Costa said charges were being considered because it was illegal to shoot a pellet gun in the city. While it may be legal to carry a pellet gun, Costa said, "there's not a lot of common sense to it."