A criminal gang in India has adopted an unorthodox, yet effective, method to avoid arrest: having women strip naked to distract police.

The group is a timber mafia, dedicated to illegally chopping down trees in an eastern India forest in the Jharkhand state. The women are paid to strip in front of officers who are too embarrased, or too distracted, to hunt the criminals down, allowing more than enough time for escape.

A meteor shower Sunday night resulted in frantic phone calls to police departments all over New England. Calls were made from people who mistook the bright lights of the shower for crashing planes. The lights came from the Lyrid Meteor Shower, which was scheduled to be visible to the naked eye between April 20 and April 25. Reports indicate the shower was seen as far north as Portland, Maine and far south as Long Island. "Some witnesses apparently mistook the meteor shower for a plane crashing in Connecticut," the FAA's Holly Baker said. Firefighters in Branford, Conn., responded to several reports of a possible plane crash in Long Island Sound in the Thimble Island area, but a search did not turn up anything and was called off a short while later.