A cracking article from the Minneapolis Star has been sent in by Amusing Bunni. Her site is an unmissable mix of US politics and kittehs if you haven’t been there before!

The Minneapolis city attorney’s office has decided to pay seven zombies and their attorney $165,000.

The payout, approved by the City Council on Friday, settles a federal lawsuit the seven filed after they were arrested and jailed for two days for dressing up like zombies in downtown Minneapolis on July 22, 2006, to protest “mindless” consumerism.

When arrested at the intersection of Hennepin Avenue and 6th Street N., most of them had thick white powder and fake blood on their faces and dark makeup around their eyes. They were walking in a stiff, lurching fashion and carrying four bags of sound equipment to amplify music from an iPod when they were arrested by police who said they were carrying equipment that simulated “weapons of mass destruction.“

The police in the UK would have done the same thing of course. After all, if you can be arrested as a suspected terrorist for taking a photograph of a chip shop or for dropping cigarette ash then who knows what eeeeevil you could do in Bognor Regis High Street with an iPod and some speakers.

Maybe Tony Blair was looking in the wrong place for weapons of mass destruction. He should have tried the set of Dawn of the Dead (the musical version)…