<B> Dumb has a new definition... </B>Spanish police have arrested four Frenchmen for jumping in front of cars on a busy road so that they could film them and post the footage on the Internet, the newspaper “El Pais” said Tuesday. The four jokers took turns to leap in front of cars, forcing the drivers to swerve or brake sharply and putting themselves and other vehicles in danger, town hall officials in Alicante were quoted as saying on the “El Pais” Web site. Their intention was to film the reaction of drivers, on the road between Benidorm to La Nucia, and post them on the Web, the officials said. Relatively rare in Spain, a youth craze known as “happy slapping” took off in Britain last year, in which groups of teenagers slapped or mugged strangers while filming the victims’ reaction on camera phones. The images were then sent to friends or posted on Web sites. Spanish police and local government officials were unavailable for comment.

<B> Man stages one-man charity show. </B>Passers-by in the western German city of Darmstadt could not believe their luck when a retiree came out of a bank with 13,000 euros ($16,700) and started handing out the cash, authorities said Wednesday. “He sat down on a bench outside the bank from which he’d just withdrawn the money, and started giving it away,” said Darmstadt police spokesman Dieter Wuest. Police intervened after locals had alerted them to the charitable 63-year-old, who had by then given away 1,505 euros of the money he had stuffed in plastic bags and his trousers. “He said he didn’t care because he had plenty of cash,” said Wuest. “He’d had a bit to drink and was in a good mood.” Oficers confiscated the remaining cash and told the man to collect it when he had sobered up. He hasn’t come back for it yet,” said Wuest.

<B>“Sperm Monologues”: What to tell your unborn child. </B>Some sperm donation clinics invite men to leave a message behind for their unborn child to hear when they are 18. What do they say? That question inspired “The Sperm Monologues,” a thought-provoking new play at the Edinburgh Fringe arts festival about the motives behind these video time capsules. James Farrell, the play’s director and co-author, explained the process. “This is not compulsory and in the UK messages are written rather than recorded on video. Currently this is a more common practice in the United States,” he told Reuters. “We sent e-mails around to our friends asking what they might say in such a situation and that is where we got the idea for the piece.” Although the title echoes Eve Ensler’s hit play “The Vagina Monologues,” Farrell said: “The Vagina Monologues is very much about women’s liberation — this is my body, this is me. The Sperm Monologues are not about men’s liberation, but what we want to say is we do have feelings and we want to be noticed.”

<B>Jet lands safely after door falls off. </B>A jet owned by leading Brazilian airline TAM landed safely on Tuesday after one of its doors fell off and crashed to earth next to a supermarket shortly after departure from Sao Paulo. No one was hurt in the incident, a TAM spokeswoman said. The Fokker 100 plane with 79 people aboard en route to Rio de Janeiro returned to the airport safely 18 minutes after taking off. TAM has been replacing its Fokker planes since the Dutch aircraft maker went bankrupt 10 years ago. It still has 22, but expects to eliminate all of them by 2010. The same type of plane, also operated by TAM, crashed in an urban area, in 1996, shortly after taking off from Sao Paulo, killing about 100 people, including some on the ground. In 1997, an explosion of undetermined origin killed a passenger who was blown out during flight. In 2001 an engine breakup caused two cabin windows to shatter and one of 82 passengers aboard died as a result of the depressurization.