Hoaxes

Police arrested a sister and brother-in-law of Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu on Thursday and charged them with faking the kidnaping of their own 22-month-old son. "We needed money, but we knew Rigoberta would never give us any, so we decided to say the child was kidnaped and ask for ransom money," Menchu's sister, Cristina Menchu, told reporters after her arrest.

A nonprofit group that aids tenants facing evictions claims it is the victim of beeper hacking. The Unlawful Detainer Assistance Project, a program of the Los Angeles County Bar Assn., said it had received several threatening phone calls from an unlicensed tenant-assistance paralegal, allegedly angry that the project was taking tenant business away.

Queen Elizabeth II was tricked into going on the air with a radio host impersonating the Canadian prime minister largely because of a foul-up in Ottawa, Buckingham Palace said Saturday. After Montreal radio host Pierre Brassard asked to speak to the queen, Buckingham Palace checked with Canadian officials. An official in Prime Minister Jean Chretien's office said the Canadian leader probably wanted to update the queen on Monday's separatism vote in Quebec.

Mailings of a suspicious white powder to 10 Church of Scientology addresses prompted the evacuation of dozens of people and the closure of a major thoroughfare Wednesday as hazmat teams were called to examine the packages. The letters were sent via the Postal Service to Scientology properties in Hollywood, the San Fernando Valley, Santa Monica, Glendale and Tustin.

The soldier staggered, wounded and bloody, into an Apple Valley mini-mart last weekend claiming to be a victim, shot and robbed while on leave from Iraq. Now investigators say it was all a ploy: They believe that Army Pfc. Matthew Myers, 20, of Apple Valley arranged for a friend to shoot him so he could avoid returning to Iraq. Myers first called 911 about 9:30 p.m. Sunday from the AM/PM convenience store at 15333 Rancherias Road, said San Bernardino County sheriff's spokeswoman Arden Wiltshire.

The gripping memoir of "Margaret B. Jones" received critical raves. It turns out it should have been reviewed as fiction. The author of "Love and Consequences," a critically acclaimed autobiography about growing up among gangbangers in South Los Angeles, acknowledged Monday that she made up everything in her just-published book. "Jones" is actually Margaret Seltzer.

A Washington state teenager has been sentenced to three years in a California prison for tricking 911 dispatchers into sending a SWAT team to the Orange County home of a randomly selected family. Randal T. Ellis, 19, of Mukilteo was sentenced Wednesday in Orange County Superior Court after pleading guilty to felonies including false imprisonment by violence and falsely reporting a crime. He was ordered to pay $14,765 in restitution, nearly all of it to the Orange County Sheriff's Department.

Hazardous-materials teams investigating a cargo container that arrived at the Port of Long Beach on Wednesday marked with black graffiti saying "Anthrax a gift from Osama" found no signs of contaminants, authorities said. "Everything we've been able to test does not indicate any kind of a contaminant, including anthrax," said Long Beach Fire Battalion Chief Frank Hayes. The local teams turned over test samples to FBI investigators, who will need at least 72 hours to process the results, Hayes said.

An article and related materials published on the Los Angeles Times website on March 17 have been removed from the site because they relied heavily on information that The Times no longer believes to be credible. The article, titled "An Attack on Tupac Shakur Launched a Hip-Hop War" and written by Times staff writer Chuck Philips, purported to relate "new" information about a 1994 assault on rap star Tupac Shakur, including a description of events contained in FBI reports.

A mother's frantic 911 plea for help in finding her injured teenage son lost in the Santa Cruz Mountains led to an expensive search that ended with rescuers locating him allegedly stoned on drugs. Eighteen-year-old Matthew Rosenberg had used his cellphone Monday night to call his mother and tell her he had tripped, broken his leg and was lost. But Capt. Bill Finch of the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said the Los Gatos High School senior had apparently swallowed hallucinogenic mushrooms, possibly dropped some acid and just "thought" his leg was broken.