November 13, 2012 Associated Press

    BILLINGS, Mont. — A man taking a nap in a Montana cornfield was startled out of his snooze when he was run over by a large harvesting machine — and Yellowstone County deputies say he's lucky to be alive.
    Sheriff's Lt. Kent O'Donnell says the 57-year-old man had been traveling the country by bus and decided to take a rest three rows deep in a field on the outskirts of Billings, the state's largest city.
    A farmer harvesting Wednesday felt his combine hit something. When he turned the machine off, he heard screaming.
    Emergency responders found the man's clothing had been sucked into the cutter, ensnaring him in the blades.
    O'Donnell says the man, whose name was not released, suffered cuts requiring stitches and may need skin grafts, but given the circumstances, he is "incredibly lucky."

    LONDON — A European official says her staff members were hacked when they joined her for a conference on Internet security in Azerbaijan.
    European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes said in a blog post Saturday that her advisers' computers were compromised as they attended a meeting of the Internet Governance Forum in Baku, the Azeri capital.
    Her spokesman, Ryan Heath, said the attack occurred while they were in their hotel.
    Heath said he and a colleague got messages from Apple Inc. warning them that their computers had been accessed by an unauthorized party, something he said he believed was an attempt to spy on him.
    "I'm presuming it was some kind of surveillance," he said in a telephone interview. "What we're going to do is to get the computers forensically analyzed to see what if anything was taken out of them."
    He declined to say who he thought might be responsible.
    Kroes was critical of her hosts when speaking before the forum on Wednesday, attacking the Azeri government for allegedly spying on activists through the Internet and "violating the privacy of journalists and their sources."
    In her blog post Saturday, Kroes cited the hacking as one of several violations which she said highlighted the "harsh" reality of political life in Azerbaijan, an oil-rich nation on the shores of the Caspian Sea.
    Kroes said that Azeri authorities reneged on a deal to allow her to see political prisoners, and she claimed that activists at the Internet conference were harassed.
    "So much for openness," she wrote.

    LONDON — British police say a 16-year-old boy who used prosthetics and dreadlocks to conduct armed robberies in disguise has been jailed for five years.
    Police say Miles Alura pretended to be an elderly man with facial prosthetics, make-up and a hair piece to steal 50,000 pounds ($79,500) of jewelry from a shop in Kent in July. They say he produced two handguns and tied up employees before fleeing.
    That robbery was linked to one in London a month earlier, when Alura wore fake dreadlocks to rob a jeweler of 100,000 pounds ($159,000) worth of stock.
    Alura was jailed Friday at Kingston Crown Crown Court.
    Two teenage accomplices who cannot be named for legal reasons were sentenced to three years in jail and a 12-month detention order.

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