IRS threat, powder send 7 to hospital in Utah Updated 3:15 AM ET March 23, 2000 SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, (Reuters) - A coarse powder spilled from an envelope sent to the Internal Revenue Service office in Ogden, Utah Wednesday night, sending seven people to the hospital to be checked, officials said. "It just spilled out of the envelope," said Greg Chamberlain, deputy chief of the Ogden City Fire Department.

About 75 IRS employees were working in what is known as the extraction area of the Ogden office when the envelope was opened and one to two tablespoons of powder spilled onto the desk and work area.

Three employees came into contact with the substance as they tried to put the powder into a plastic container.

Chamberlain said the three who handled the substance had rashes but no one was seriously injured. Four other people also decided to go to the hospital to be checked out.

Local news stations reported that some sort of threat had been written on the envelope but this could not be confirmed. The powder had been sent in the standard IRS return envelope.

-- me (lookingup@go.com), March 23, 2000

Answers

A dad walks into a market followed by his ten-year-old son. The kid is spinning a 25 cent piece in the air and catching it between his teeth. As they walk through the market someone bumps into the boy at just the wrong moment and the coin goes straight into his mouth and lodges in is throat.

He immediately starts choking and going blue in the face and Dad starts panicking, shouting and screaming for help. A middle-aged, nondescript man in a gray suit is sitting at a coffee bar in the market reading his newspaper and sipping a cup of coffee. At the sound of the commotion, he looks up, puts his coffee cup down on the saucer, neatly folds his newspaper and places it on the counter. Then he gets up from his seat and makes his unhurried way across the market. Reaching the boy, the man carefully takes hold of the boy's testicles and squeezes gently but firmly. After a few seconds the boy convulses violently and coughs up the 25 cent piece, which the man catches in his free hand. Releasing the boy, the man hands the coin to the father and walks back to his seat in the coffee bar without saying a word. As soon as he is sure that his son has suffered no lasting ill-effects, the father rushes over to the man and starts effusively thanking him saying "I've never seen anybody do anything like that before - it was fantastic Are you a doctor?" "Oh, good heavens, no", the man replies, "I work for the IRS

-- ... (...@...com), March 24, 2000.