Epidemic of bad Santas sweeps the globe

Reports of "bad Santas" wreaking havoc have been circulating around the globe, but it has been an especially un-festive season in Germany.

Alarm bells rang when a man in a Santa outfit held up a furniture store in the town of Ludwigshafen at gunpoint on Saturday and forced two cashiers to open the safe. Instead of handing out presents, he filled his sack with cash, locked the women in the safe and escaped.

He is still on the loose, but police in Tbingen, with the aid of an infrared camera and helicopter, were able to capture a bank-robbing Santa armed with a machinegun. They found him hiding in a ditch in a forest. "The machine-gun was fake," a police spokesman pointed out, noting that Santa had stuffed 500,000 into his sack in four separate bank robberies.

One Santa was stopped by police for driving at 150kph on a northern German motorway, 50kph over the speed limit. "He said he was in a rush because he still had packages to deliver," said a police spokesman.

They gave that Santa a fine and took away his licence.

Last week, a drunken, half-naked Santa disrupted a Christmas market in Dabringhausen.

Now the bah-humbug spirit seems to be spreading - in New York, one man fed up with the commercialisation of Christmas protested by setting up a ghoulish, life-sized Santa holding a severed doll's head in front of his house.

But those incidents were mild compared with what happened in Auckland, New Zealand, on Saturday, when 40 drunken Santas came to town, storming the city centre, stealing from shops and assaulting security guards, all to express dislike of Christmas becoming too commercial.

In Sweden, a Santa set a town's massive straw ram alight by shooting burning arrows into it.

And in Britain, police in Swanage, Dorset, were looking for a Santa who had repeatedly exposed himself to women.