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August 2022


16 August 2022

Heedless of a warning light indicating high water, a motorist in Tainan City, Taiwan, ended up trapped in an underpass after heavy rains. Once his stalled sedan was freed by five police officers checking on the flash flood's aftermath, the man, identifying himself as a Mr Huang, offered the excuse of not being local. A routine check revealed a Changhua District Court warrant for Huang's arrest. However, Huang's photo ID didn't match the face of the driver, actually a Mr Yen. Yen ultimately confessed to not knowing that his friend Huang too is a wanted man.

Police officers responding to reports of a shooting at a Dallas, Texas, flat followed a trail of blood into the street. At the other end of the trail was a car containing a man and a woman, both with gunshot wounds. A preliminary investigation revealed that the two shared more than the car: after shooting the woman in the neck, 26-year-old Byron Redmon ended up with the ricocheting cartridge lodged in his own leg.
Redmon died under medics' care, while the woman was released from hospital on the same day.

A Texas police squad intervened in a Ranger College cheerleading squad dispute during which several girls fled to a locked room while agitated fellow cheerleader Averie Chanel Medlock choked another member of the team. Later explaining on Facebook that the chokee had called Medlock 'a MAN with a PENIS and and [said that] that guy shouldn't be on the team', Medlock characterised the victim as 'scared because I took [sic] up for myself'.
Characterising the late-night physical confrontation as a joke has not prevented Medlock from being expelled from cheerleading camp or receiving a criminal-law citation for assault.

After a helicopter ride during a birthday trip to Greece, Britain's Jack Fenton was perhaps tired of anti-selfie sentiments in Athens. While onlookers shouted at the 22-year-old PE coach not to run back from the airport lounge to the rear of the Bell 407 chopper, he was struck by the rear rotor and killed instantly.
One of his friends on the flight, Jack Stanton-Gleaves, has stated that 'no instructions were given', that Fenton was not 'on his phone' at the time, and that no-one prevented Fenton from returning to the craft. Hence, the pilot and two ground technicians have been arrested.

A building manager in Seattle rang the police to report an absent resident's girlfriend banging on doors and releasing three pit bulls from an unlocked flat. The police found the dogs back where they belonged so left. Minutes later, though, they escaped, wounding the manager, whereupon the 37-year-old girlfriend took them outside. Hearing screams from people who were holding their own dogs above their head while being attacked, the manager arrived, with a warning gunshot. Two more rounds followed, one hitting the girlfriend's collarbone. He dialled 911 once again.
After receiving medical attention, the woman told officers that she'd entered the neighbour's flat to release the dogs and had stolen several items. As for the manager, his headaches include possible charges of reckless endangerment, evicting the dog-owner, and the woman resuming her banging on doors.

Receiving several reports of unconventional driving on the interstate highway, Florida state troopers found a lorry-driver on the scene who filled them in: she had seen a woman passing out behind the wheel of a golf cart and guided the drunken driver, later identified as 58-year-old Diane Hawk, from the road. Renewed attempts to drive on the busy roadway led the lorry-driver to confiscate the keys.
Law-enforcement officers reported that Hawk, whose bag contained a bottle of Jack Daniel's Tennessee Fire, remonstrated with them that it's legal to drive a golf cart on I-95 'because she saw it on the news'. She was arrested anyway.

The man who recently sparked a 25-hectare wildfire in Utah has been arrested on charges of reckless burning and committing drugs offences. Commenting on the culprit's ill-advised use of a cigarette lighter amid drought conditions, Utah County sheriff's officer Spencer Cannon said: 'Not sure exactly why he felt the need to have to burn the spider, but, you know, all the regret in the world doesn't change the outcome.'

James Howells binned a hard drive. Roughly a decade hence, he has assembled a team to comb a landfill in Newport, Wales, for the disk, from the early years of Bitcoin's development. The 37-year-old IT engineer has assembled a team to comb thousands of tons of compacted rubbish to find his roughly 8,000 wayward Bitcoins. As the city council remains worried about ecological and logistics issues, Howells has offered to put some of the proceeds from recovering the discarded $235 million in cryptocurrency toward 'a power-generation facility, maybe a couple of wind turbines [for] a community-owned mining facility'.

Festival worker Janya B. Williams wanted to leave work early. The 18-year-old security guard figured that she could achieve this by sending a supervisor this text message: 'Mass shooting at 4 pm location Lollapalooza. We have 150 targets.' Asked for clarification, Williams stated that her sister had seen a Facebook post about a mass-shooting threat. Allegedly, she then created a bogus Facebook account in order to provide the requested screenshot. Alerted, the Chicago police and FBI Counterterrorism Task Force quickly tied the IP addresses together, and Williams now faces charges of felonious false claims of terrorism.

Brazil's Genevieve Boghici, the 82-year-old widow of art collector Jean Boghici, was worried about her daughter's impending death, thanks to a supposed 'psychic' approaching her with dire prophecies featuring specific personal information. That was in 2020. In the following months, the daughter, 48-year-old Sabine Coll Boghici, took her to visit several other psychics too, who needed money for spiritual treatment and who warned her that paintings in her home were 'cursed with something negative, with negative energy that needed to be prayed over', according to Gilberto Ribeiro of the Rio de Janeiro police.
As Genevieve grew more sceptical than distraught, she was prevented from leaving her home, and she sought police help. That was after 16 paintings had been removed. The ill-gotten gains are valued at roughly 150 million euros.
Sabine and four other people have been arrested. Two more remain at large, as do several paintings, though some works of art have been recovered from museums and from co-conspirators' under-bed stashes.

An elderly woman's funeral at California's Rolling Hills cemetery formed the backdrop for an argument between the deceased's feuding son and daughter. This escalated into what the Richmond Police Department characterised as a 'chaotic altercation' - a brawl involving 8-20 members of the family, at least some of them armed. And then the brother trying to hit his sister with a car. He struck another relative instead, along with several tombstones and his mother's casket. After the car collided with a water main, flooding the area (with at least one empty grave), he exited the car. He suffered minor injuries, from a cane-wielding family member hitting him in the head.

A surveyor picking berries in DeLand, Florida, was accosted by machete-wielding local Brandon Wright, who demanded his money, mobile phone, and clothes. The last of these demands made perfect sense, since Wright was naked. While the victim was complying, however, the 34-year-old Wright elected to walk away empty-handed: he hurled the machete, handle-first, and a handful of palmetto berries at the surveyor before driving off. Next, he visited a nearby petrol station, where he yelled at people, left, and then returned to the shop entrance. According to the Volusia, Florida, sheriff's office, he was doing push-ups there before being arrested without incident.


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