Burglary Victim Steals the Show

When she went home for lunch, Gwen Kemp found an intruder in her apartment. “Maybe I’m crazy, but all I thought was, somebody’s in there taking something that belongs to me. I realize I could be dead right now because I acted on my first instinct.” She attacked, chasing the man out, over a fence, up an embankment and into a parking lot, where she jumped onto his car as he tried to drive away. “I’m going to take you for a ride,” he told her, according to police in St. Paul, Minn. “OK, let’s go,” replied the 31-year-old Kemp, a jogger who stands 5-foot-2. The car jerked and veered through the lot and then onto a street, but Kemp held on to the windshield wipers and wasn’t injured when it finally screeched to a halt. The man then abandoned the car and took off, with Kemp making one last attempt to grab his hair. She missed. A suspect was arrested walking along a nearby street. He told police that he abandoned the car because the brakes locked. But he admitted breaking into the apartment, police said. And what if she had caught him? “I would have beaten him up,” Kemp said.

--West Germany awarded its Grand Cross of Merit, one of the nation’s highest orders, to Simon Wiesenthal, the 76-year-old Nazi-hunter who runs the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna. It was the first West German medal given Wiesenthal, who is internationally known for his work in tracking down Nazi war criminals and helping Jewish families find friends and relatives lost in Adolf Hitler’s Holocaust. The West German ambassador to Austria, Hans Heinrich Noebel, presented the medal to Wiesenthal in a brief ceremony at the embassy.

--About 100 passengers were riding the train from the suburbs into downtown Philadelphia when the track lost power, interrupting their commute for an hour. But, if it had to happen, it happened in the right spot--just across the tracks from an ice cream plant. Passenger attendant Jim Esposito walked to the plant and explained that he had a trainful of stranded people. Roger Cannier, operations manager of the Breyers Ice Cream plant, donated 50 vanilla and chocolate ice cream cups and 50 ice cream bars. “Free ice cream, free ice cream,” chanted Esposito and conductor Mike LoPresti as they walked down the aisles, handing out the treats to delighted passengers. “I wish all our problems were that easy to lick,” said Joaquin Bowman, spokesman for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority.