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We haven't had dildoes in here for a while, so I'll introduce Canada's Grace Bennett, co-founder of online 'sexual wellness shop' Bonjibon. The US government has asked her to stop shipping Bonjibon products to Defense Department personnel in Bahrain, where items such as butt plugs and mini vibrators are 'posing an immediate danger to life or limb or an immediate and substantial danger to property'. Two sex toys have been returned to the shop accordingly, and Bennett has reimbursed the service members who ordered them.
She suggests that, while 'we don't judge', the issue might lie more with 'a military person in a foreign country ordering butt plugs and having no understanding that those items are illegal in the country that they're in' than with her shipping these via the Army-managed worldwide mail system for military personnel, which does not reveal the destination, concluding 'This sounds like a you problem'.

When emergency-room medics at France's Rangueil Hospital identified the cause of a 23-year-old Toulouse man's late-night severe rectal pain, they suspended surgery and began assembling a multidisciplinary medical and military team to extract the cause of his complaint: an artillery shell from the First World War. Some hours later, the man was sent on his way and the 20 cm shell was taken into evidence. France's Judicial Support Group has 'opened proceedings for possession of Category A ammunition', according to the newspaper Dépêche.

The next Clipping offers slightly different echoes of times gone by, thanks to a man caught mid-grave-robbery. Cops nabbed Pennsylvania's Jonathan Gerlach at historic Mount Moriah Cemetery after reports of skulls and infants' bones being sold via Facebook led them to 100+ sets of human remains, some more than 200 years old, not resting in peace in his basement and storage locker.
According to Delaware County District Attorney Tanner Rouse, it could take forensics experts considerable time to identify the recovered remains and notify the families affected, since 'detectives have discovered an awful lot of bones at this point'.

Finland gives us the story of a Helsinki-area woman whose Christmas Eve gift to herself backfired. At the Stockmann department store, Henrika Mercadante shelled out 26 euros for a bottle of premium body mist. It turned out to be leaky, so she returned it. She then noticed that, rather than issue a refund, the clerk had charged her 10,467.50, the price of a 'unit' of bottles.
Despite assurances that the matter would be rectified over the holidays, the charge was still in place each time she checked. Just prior to New Year's, her bank cards were blocked, so Stockmann staff handed her a gift card and cash for groceries. The charge was finally reversed on 3 January, after she'd had to cancel a family trip.

A 13-year-old boy named Austin did some swimming after his family went kayaking near Australia's tourist destination Quindalup. As soon as he reached shore, he rang the emergency services to report that 'my family is out at sea'. Austin, whose mother had asked him to fetch help, later recounted that, after two hours of alternating among various swimming strokes, he'd found his life jacket to be slowing his progress, so he ditched it for the remaining two hours of his ordeal.
Marine-rescue volunteer Paul Bresland credits Austin's 'superhuman' efforts with saving the teen's mother and two younger siblings, who were found clinging to a paddle-board on the open sea.

Banging on the door of the fire station in Gold Bar, Washington, alerted first responders to three barely-breathing puppies on their doorstep. Administering oxygen, CPR, and naloxone anti-opioid-overdose nasal spray, firefighters saved the puppies from what they concluded were effects of airborne fentanyl powder. Tracking down the couple who had dropped off the puppies led the emergency services to three more ailing canines, which the pair claimed to have been dog-sitting.
All six puppies were soon in recovery at Everett Animal Shelter, from which some might get adopted by fire-station staff after mandatory quarantine. An animal-cruelty investigation is under way.

Australia offers a bit more of a menagerie, thanks to a 39-year-old Collombatti man who was managing a bevy of reptiles at his home - 38 snakes, a 1.2-metre crocodile, and 19 lizards - along with three hedgehogs and nine cats. The plant kingdom too was represented, by an alleged cannabis farm, guarded by 28 dogs.
Detective Brad Adby, of the New South Wales Raptor Squad, said 'it's not every day we enter a premises and there's a saltwater crocodile in the bedroom'. He summed up thus: 'The scene was chaotic.'

And Derbyshire brings us llamas. This might come as a surprise to some. It did for a man who was trying to evade the police at dusk after being fingered for stealing several packets of tobacco from a woman in South Normanton. Climbing over a gate to Heidi Price and Graham Oliver's fields, the 30-something man was immediately surrounded by eight llamas. Heidi recounts: 'Once they realised that he was something which shouldn't be in the field, they started releasing this warning cry, which [...] sounds like old men laughing'. Citizen's arrest by an octet of camelids left the man 'petrified, literally to the point of tears', and the county police were able to take things from there.