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ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — An Orange County woman said she received counterfeit cash from a teller inside a bank.

The woman said she cashed a check at the Wachovia bank in Pine Hills. She took the cash straight to a bank where she had a savings account, but that’s where another teller recognized something wrong.

“She was feeling it as she counted it,” said the woman. “She pulled those two bills out of the bunch that was there and she asked another coworker to come over and he said ‘yeah, those are counterfeit.'”

Ulises Garcia said he was withdrawing cash from a Wachovia Bank and depositing it into a Bank of America so he could pay his bills online.

However, the Bank of America teller noticed something funny about 10 of the 36 $100 bills Garcia said he received from Wachovia Bank — they were counterfeit, Local 6’s Tony Pipitone reported.

However, the bank has not given Garcia or his fiancé, Joann Rodriguez, any money.

“We have big plans,” Rodriguez said. “We were planning to get married in about two or three months.”

“And this money’s pretty important?” Pipitone asked.

“Very important,” Rodrguez said. “It’s a big part of our wedding.”

“It is really frustrating for us,” Garcia said. “The bank is not doing anything about it. (It’s) just not giving us any solutions at all.”

A Wachovia representative said it will not refund any money because it can’t verify the $1,000 in counterfeit notes were the same bills Garcia was handed by their teller.

But weeks later, Wachovia did refund $40 to another customer with a similar story, Local 6 has learned.

Garcia said Wachovia is ripping him off and has alerted the sheriff’s office, the Secret Service and the media.

“Ten (bills) in one transaction to come from one bank, that is definitely unusual,” U.S. Secret Service representative Jim Glendinning said.

“But is it possible?” Pipitone asked.

“Remotely, yes it is,” Glendinning said.

Glendinning said he was not surprised the Bank of America caught the counterfeits but wondered how a Wachovia could pass the bills unless a bank employee was in on it, Pipitone reported.

…

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt is scheduled to hear FEMA’s bid to be dismissed from a series of consolidated cases filed against the federal government and the companies that supplied FEMA with tens of thousands of trailers after Katrina and then Rita in 2005.

Lawyers for Gulf Coast storm victims accuse FEMA of negligence for sheltering them in trailers with elevated levels of formaldehyde, a preservative used in construction materials that can induce breathing problems and is believed to cause cancer.

In court papers, FEMA’s lawyers told the judge the agency is entitled to immunity from such claims challenging its response to disasters such as Katrina.

The federal government’s lawyers said FEMA spent more than $2.5 billion to purchase more than 140,000 new trailers from recreational vehicle dealers and trailer manufacturers after the storms. They also said the agency relied on manufacturers to furnish the agency with a “safe, habitable, functional product.”

“It is well-established that the (government) is only liable in such situations if it supervised and directed day-to-day activities of its contractors, which did not occur in this case,” they argued in the court papers.

The government’s lawyers also wrote that a review of legislative history left “no doubt” that Congress intended to enact a broad bar against any such claims arising from disaster relief actions.

Tony Buzbee, one of the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs, said FEMA and the trailer manufacturers “worked hand in hand” after the 2005 hurricanes and should share legal liability in the cases. The lawsuits contend FEMA ignored concerns about formaldehyde levels in trailers for months after Katrina.

“FEMA is right to blame the manufacturers for the production of the toxic trailers, but the agency is not without culpability or legal liability for this debacle,” Buzbee said in a written statement Tuesday.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs want Engelhardt to certify the consolidated cases as a class action on behalf of tens of thousands of current and former trailer occupants in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. The judge hasn’t ruled on that request yet.

According to the Federal Avaiation Administration (FAA), Continental Airlines flight 458, a Boeing 737 en route to Washington, DC from Houston made a rapid decent in New Orleans when the pilot reported pressurization problems.

Reps. Ted Poe, Nick Lampson, and Henry Cuellar, Solomon P. Ortiz, John Carter, and Ciro Rodriguez were among those aboard the flight. The FAA says the plane had a safe landing in New Orleans with no injuries.

Update: Trevor Kincaid, a spokesman for Rep. Nick Lampson, tells CNN the congressmen are being rebooked on two different flights from New Orleans to Washington, D.C.

Lund and Company Invention, a toy design studio based near Chicago, makes toy rockets that are powered by burning hydrogen obtained by electrolysing water. Now the company is being funded by the US army to adapt the technology to fire bullets instead.

The US Army are interested in arming soldiers with weapons that can be switched between lethal and non-lethal modes. They asked Company Invention to make a rifle that can fire bullets at various speeds.

Sniper version

The new weapon, called the Variable Velocity Weapon System or VWS, lets the soldier to use the same rifle for crowd control and combat, by altering the muzzle velocity. It could be loaded with “rubber bullets” designed only to deliver blunt impacts on a person, full-speed lethal rounds or projectiles somewhere between the two.

Bruce Lund, the company’s CEO, says the gun works by mixing a liquid or gaseous fuel with air in a combustion chamber behind the bullet. This determines the explosive capability of the propellant and consequently the velocity of the bullet as it leaves the gun. “Projectile velocity varies from non-lethal at 10 metres, to lethal at 100 metres or more, as desired,” says Lund.

The company says that the weapon produces less heat and light than traditional guns. It can also be made lighter and could have a high power setting for long-range sniping.

Police already fire non-lethal projectiles from standard shotguns. These are known as “beanbag” rounds, bags of lead shot which will knock down a suspect at ranges of up to 10 metres. They are termed “non-lethal”, but can cause bruising or even broken ribs.
‘Handgun to Howitzer’

Lund says that the new weapon system will use different types of bullet for lethal and non-lethal use. Police forces already use separate shotguns for non-lethal loads – typically marking them with bright orange tape to prevent any confusion – so this shouldn’t be an issue.

The existing VWS design is a .50 calibre (12.7 mm) rifle weapon, but Lund says the technology can be scaled to any size, “handgun to Howitzer”.

Steve Wright, a security expert at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK warns of the potential risk of variable lethality.

“In a high-stress, high-personal-risk zone, there will be a real temptation for soldiers to turn the tuneable lethality switch up to ‘kill’ mode so that all doubt is removed.”

The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight also says prices, on a seasonally adjusted basis, fell 0.3 percent from April to May. The index is down almost 5 percent from its peak in April of last year.

OFHEO oversees the government-sponsored mortgage-finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The government index is calculated using mortgage loans bought or guaranteed by Fannie or Freddie.