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..According to Germany's Der Spiegel, German police shot only 85 bullets in all of 2011, a stark reminder that not every country is as gun-crazy as the U.S. of A. As Boing Boing translates, most of those shots weren't even aimed people: "49 warning shots, 36 shots on suspects. 15 persons were injured, 6 were killed."

RELATED: Germany Can't Keep Its Cute Animals Alive


Technically, about 9,000 more shots were fired at sick and dangerous animals. (Germany, why do you kill your animals?) But since we couldn't watch the end of Old Yeller, we'll look the other way on those humanitarian shootings.


Meanwhile, in the U.S., where the population is little less than four times the size of Germany's, well, we can get to 85 in just one sitting, thank you very much. 84 shots fired at one murder suspect in Harlem, another 90 shot at one fleeing unarmed man in Los Angeles. And that was just April. So we bring you Germany's shot total in case you forgot about America shoots itself in the foot with its manic love of guns.

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Join the Official Rockstar Community on Steam and Receive a Free Copy of Midnight Club 2

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Join the Official Rockstar Games Community on Steam at http://steamcommunity.com/games/rockstargames by 10 am Pacific Time on Tuesday, May 15, 2012, and receive one non-giftable copy of Midnight Club 2 in your Steam account by May 29th.

Eligibility: User must have an account with at least one successful purchase, gift or retail registration in the account. The offer is not available to users who already own Midnight Club 2.

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For drivers who don't want to commit to a new car purchase, leasing has become a popular option. But for a police department in a city with a struggling economy, running up a $65,000 bill for what amounts to renting an nine-year-old car seems like a bit of an oversight. That's just what the Detroit Police Department has been doing since 2003 when it leased a 2004 model Dodge Intrepid at the lofty price of $608 per month. The problem? They've been paying that price ever since.

The original terms of the lease stated that the car would be returned in 2005, at which point the department could choose to buy it outright to take delivery of a newer model. That trade-in never happened, and so far the city has handed out a total of over $56,000 in monthly payments. But that's not all: Because the department has gone well over the original mileage agreement, they owe nearly $10,000 in additional fees, bringing their total bill to well over $65,000. That's $65,000 for a car that could be bought new in 2003 for less than $25,000.

But that's just one vehicle, and the city is currently paying for over a hundred leased cars currently in use, and all of them are operating on expired leases. The seemingly careless spending could total several millions of dollars in the end, and the city apparently has no plans to reverse the practice.

The ridiculous waste of taxpayer money was discovered by local news station WXYZ, after they obtained the sales records through a Freedom of Information Act request. The station spoke with the president of the Detroit Police Officers Association, Joseph Duncan, who seemed just as outraged at the mismanagement as the taxpayers will be, stating "This is malfeasance. It makes no sense to me."

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Boy on a Bike Becomes Moscow's Tiananmen Image

MOSCOW - As a bloody skirmish between police and opposition activists in central Moscow was drawing to a close on Sunday a small boy on a tiny bicycle pedaled through the crowd and approached a line of hulking riot police.

He sat there for a moment, balancing on his training wheels, staring at the menacing troops who were decked out in blue camouflage uniforms and full riot gear, nightsticks at the ready.

A group of protesters who had been heckling the cops began jeering, "Here's the guy that will storm the Kremlin. Be ready boys! Here he comes!"


Julia Ioffe, the Moscow correspondent for The New Yorker and Foreign Policy magazine, happened to be standing right behind him. She whipped out her iPhone and snapped a picture which she tweeted out to her over 6,000 followers with the caption "Russia's Tianamen (sic) image."

The photo quickly ricocheted around the internet.

It was a David and Goliath moment, perhaps a metaphor for the unarmed protesters who clashed with police that day and whose movement is taking on President Vladimir Putin's formidable political system.

Tens of thousands of protesters had marched against Putin that afternoon, the day before his inauguration. They were met by row after row of police, thousands of them, who were there to make sure they stayed within the bounds of their rally permit.

When a large group tried to cross a police line towards the Kremlin, police pushed them back and tensions flared. Rocks and bottles were thrown and police responded with what many say was disproportionate force, deploying tear gas and striking people with their batons. They surged into the crowd to grab individuals and drag them by their arms, legs, and even their hair back to police vans. Many protesters were bloodied. By the end of the day more than 450 people had been arrested.

Ioffe had been there all day to cover the protest. She was in the thick of the melee and says she was struck in the leg by a rock. When police had finally cleared the square, only a handful of protesters remained behind, including the group heckling the riot police.

"Shame on you," they shouted. "What are you going to tell your grandparents who fought against the fascists? Don't you have mothers?"

Ioffe says she was walking with another journalist, Olaf Koens, who works for RTL Television in the Netherlands. They were tired and wanted to go find some dinner when they stopped to watch.

Koens spotted the boy first.

"Olaf smacked me in the arm and said look at that," she recalled later when ABC News asked about the photo. "Then I see this little bicycle weave through the crowd and stop in front of the troops. He stood there for a few minutes. I'm not sure why."

Koens says he wanted to take the picture himself, but his iPhone battery had run out an hour earlier.

"This little boy just showed up. His parents were somewhere in the crowd, there was no immediate danger, and the kid just kind of peddled (sic) up to the police, probably out of curiosity," he wrote in an email to ABC News.

Ioffe laughed at the thought that one of her pictures has gone viral and is being called iconic.

"I didn't think it would be any good. I'm a terrible photographer, especially with an iPhone," she said, adding that her family usually won't even let her take pictures on vacation.

Maybe now they will.

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