A struggling mom who wrote to President Obama about her financial hardship and received a handwritten response from him saying, “Things will get better!,” has had to sell the letter to an autograph dealer to help pay for a house.

Jennifer Cline, 28, from Monroe, Mich., wrote to Obama describing how she and her husband had lost their jobs in 2007. She wrote, “I lost my job, my health benefits and my self-worth in a matter of five days.”

Then she was diagnosed with two types of skin cancer, and she had no health insurance. She signed up for Medicaid, and treatment was successful. She went back to college after her unemployment benefit was extended. She added, “In just a couple of years we will be in a great spot.”

Obama was shown the letter by an aide on Jan. 8. He wrote back on a White House-headed card he signed: “Thanks for the very kind and inspiring letter. I know times are tough, but knowing there are folks out there like you and your husband gives me confidence that things will keep getting better!”

But things didn’t immediately improve for Cline, who’s now agreed to sell the letter to autograph dealer Gary Zimet for $7,000. He tells us, “The letter is a historical document, and it is very hard for her to part with it. It’s very timely considering the elections. But I don’t think she’s disillusioned with Obama — this is just about surviving and practicality. She is selling it to pay for a house, which I think is poetic justice.”

Zimet plans to sell it on his Web site, momentsintime.com. He noted, “Handwritten letters of any sitting president on White House letterhead are extremely rare. It is certainly worth more than I am paying for it.”

Pink-wigged transsexual Mikki Nicholson woke up the stodgy image of Scrabble yesterday when she grabbed Britain’s top game award with the word “obeisant” (we don’t know what it means either, look it up!) finally putting her over the top.

“I’m thrilled to have won and I can’t wait to celebrate,” said Nicholson, a long-time player who credited her win to her intuition and her skill with numbers. “People think Scrabble is just about words, but it’s the numbers that win the game so a sound mathematical brain is an advantage,” she told the BBC.

Other words that boosted her to victory included “inficete” and “oceanaut.”

Nicholson, who’s currently unemployed, plans to spend her $2,000 prize money on a trip to Malaysia to compete in another Scrabble tournament. Tournament organizers were apparently thrilled about her win: “Scrabble is a game for anyone to enjoy, loved by generations of families, men and women and anyone,” said a spokesman.

Meet Ola Mae Agee, perhaps the world’s oldest drug dealer.

The 87-year-old grandmother was found guilty last week of selling cocaine from the living room of her Florida home after an undercover police officer bought $20 worth of crack from her.

Agee’s arrest was not her first in Escambia County on drug charges.

She pleaded no contest in December 1996 to possession of a controlled substance with intent to sell, manufacture or deliver. She served two years of probation, which ended in July 1998 when she was 75 years old.

She also was arrested in February 1999 on two charges of possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. One charge was dropped. Agee pleaded no contest to a second charge and received two years of probation.

The State Attorney’s Office asked that Agee receive prison time in her most recent case because of her criminal history.

“There are consequences to everybody’s actions,” Brodersen said. “She has to be accountable just as everyone else who is out selling drugs in the community.”

Escambia County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Sgt. Ted Roy was not surprised at the sentence.

“Eighteen months at that age is a lot worse than a 25-year-old getting 18 months,” Roy said.

Two daring lovers topped off a night at a pizza place when it shut – by having sex unaware passers-by could see inside.

The passionate pair were so overcome by lust they forgot they could be seen through the window of the brightly-lit eatery. Laughing crowds gathered outside – with many grabbing their camera phones to take snaps.

One Manchester reveler told how he and his friends had earlier spotted the pair kissing. The witness grinned: “We just assumed it was a couple of the staff who’d got carried away. “We popped into a club, then later walked past the same restaurant. Things had hotted up.”

“The fella had his trousers round his ankles. Everyone was gobsmacked. The whole place was brightly lit and we had a great view. There was an empty bottle of wine and two glasses on a table.”

The restaurant’s spokesperson said: “We are obviously taking this seriously and looking into the matter immediately.”

A Belfast man has posted a video on YouTube with a somewhat spooky claim.

A Charlie Chaplin fan, George Clarke has spent more than a year studying a scene from the 1928 film The Circus—convinced it shows a woman holding a cell phone to her ear … meaning she must be a time traveler. In the footage, which has garnered a million and a half views to date, a woman walks across the shot holding a device to her ear and seems to be engrossed in conversation.

“I kept rewinding it and zooming in to try and work out what was going on,” says Clarke. Those who have commented have come up with all sorts of explanations, but the answer still remains a mystery.

What do you guys think it is? Watch the video here:

A scorchingly hot summer has left Russia’s vast population of bears without their traditional sources of food, leading the animals to dig up human corpses from municipal cemeteries for nourishment, the Guardian is reporting.

According to the World Wildlife Fund Russia, the bears are now focusing on graveyards because they offer a “refrigerator”-like supply of easy food. The case is reportedly similar to one that took place two years ago in the town of Kandalaksha, in the northern Karelia republic.

As Masha Vorontsova of WWF Russia told the Guardian:

“You have to remember that bears are natural scavengers. In the U.S. and Canada you can’t leave any food in tents in national parks. In Karelia, one bear learned how to [open a coffin]. He then taught the others. They are pretty quick learners. The story is horrible. Nobody wants to think about having a much loved member of their family eaten by a bear.”

More on this story here.

The Aokigahara Forest is the most popular site for suicides in Japan. After the novel Kuroi Jukai [The Black Forest, written by Seichō Matsumoto in 1960] was published, in which a young lover commits suicide in the forest, people started taking their own lives there at a rate of 50 to 100 deaths a year.

The site holds so many bodies that the Yakuza pays homeless people to sneak into the forest and rob the corpses. The authorities sweep for bodies only on an annual basis, as the forest sits at the base of Mt. Fuji and is too dense to patrol more frequently.

Read it here

A man faces criminal charges for tattooing a 16-inch semblance of a penis on his friend’s back, much to his friend’s surprise. During the tattooing, another man helped out by complimenting the victim on the great-looking art being tattooed, which was supposed to be a Yin-Yang symbol. The victim was then told to go home, avoid the sun, and not show anyone for weeks. Instead, he showed his live-in girlfriend, who filled him in on the truth.

Apparently the victim then went to the artist’s home, where they got into an altercation, and the victim got punched in the face. Police charged the tattoo artist with two counts of assault occasioning bodily harm. It could cost the victim $2,000 to have the tattoo removed, along with the misspelled phrase suggesting he’s gay

More on this story here.