Susan Sinnwell removed her grandparents' heirloom wedding rings before getting x-rayed at Iowa's Grundy County Memorial Hospital. The following day, she remembered having done so and that a crumpled-up serviette she'd thrown away from her handbag 'sounded funny when it hit the garbage' at the hospital. So she contacted them. Maintenance staff using metal detectors fruitlessly sifted through the 50 to 60 sacks of recent days' compacted waste. Then, imaging manager Craig Buskohl set up a mobile x-ray unit in the ambulance garage. The rings showed up after roughly 35 images and 45 minutes of scans. He called the endeavour 'really rewarding', with one reward arriving in the form of Sinnwell's effusive praise for the hospital.
At the payment window of the Grand Island, Nebraska, McDonald's drive-through, local man Michael Dickinson hadn't pulled close enough to pay easily. He was, however, near enough that stretching through his car window left him pinned between the fast-food outlet and his door frame in what Police Division Chief Dean Elliot later termed a freak accident. A McDonald's employee who tried to free Dickinson via the passenger door suffered injuries and proved unable to prevent the 69-year-old's fatal squishing.
A 15-year-old Bradenton, Florida, girl saw someone wearing a surgical
mask drive away from her home in a silver Honda Odyssey minivan,
shortly before she found her 54-year-old father shot in the abdomen.
He died, but not before identifying suspects as requested: 'possibly my
ex-wife'. When cops then visited the woman in question, Susan Erica
Avalon, 51, they interrupted her cleaning of the interior of her silver
Honda Odyssey to ask whether they could speak with her about her ex.
Her response 'Which one?' led them to send officers to the residence
of Avalon's other former husband. Sure enough, someone had broken in
via the back door there and left him with fatal gunshot wounds.
Sheriff Rick Wells quoted her current boyfriend as saying she'd
showered fully clothed when returning home earlier in the day and that
she'd been worried about not having paid child support on time.
The main ingredients in our next item are two grieving families and
two labels prepared by morgue staff at Glasgow's Queen Elizabeth
University Hospital. An undertaker who was given the wrong body
became aware of 'human error' after cremating it. The ashes have
since been conveyed to the relevant relatives, while the handling of
the body intended for cremation remains unclear. At least one hospital
worker has been suspended at least for the duration of
investigations.
The incident came to light a few days after the announcement of a
court date for a nurse at the hospital who delivered a fatal dose of a
drug meant for another patient.
The next story is about Michigan's Timesha Beauchamp, who began
struggling to breathe one day in August 2000. Paramedics summoned by
her family attempted to resuscitate her, then consulted a doctor, who
pronounced her dead over the phone. When undertakers unzipped her
body bag later in the day, the 20-year-old woman opened her eyes and
gasped for air. Though she was rushed to hospital, assistance came
too late, and she died two months later.
In response to a gross-negligence lawsuit by the Beauchamp family,
the City of Southfield asserted governmental immunity. After appeals,
they have now agreed to a $3.25 million settlement and 'recognize that
no resolution can undo the profound tragedy [...] that arose in the
complex world of a global pandemic'.
On Christmas, Cody Wayne Adams was minding his own business in the
back yard of his Comanche, Oklahoma, home when an elderly woman a few
blocks away said 'ouch' before passing away mid-conversation. The two
events were connected: Adams, 33, had been practising with his
gift-to-self Glock .45 handgun, two magazines of ammunition, and a Red
Bull can, and a bullet entered the old lady's chest as she was sitting
on a porch half a kilometre away with a baby in her lap.
The police made the connection after ascertaining that all but one
residence within firing range of the shooting had 'suitable shooting
backstops or firing locations'. Adams, who began to cry when a deputy
informed him of the link, faces a charge of first-degree manslaughter.
Officials at Benito Juarez International Airport reported via social media on domestic aviation authorities' impending investigation of a 19 December 'incident' aboard an aeroplane scheduled to fly to Cancún. This involved a disgruntled Mexican pilot announcing to several dozen passengers that 'this plane isn't leaving until they pay us what they owe us'. While explaining that he and compatriots had not received the last five months of pay, he added that 'I feel bad for you, because you don't deserve this'. The captain was detained, and the passengers were booked onto another flight.
A story brought to us by the Los Angeles Police Department might add further to the creepiness associated with 'robotaxis'. Upon opening the boot of a Waymo taxi she'd ordered for her young daughter near MacArthur Park, a woman found it already full: there was a man inside. He claimed that 'the people' had put him in the back of the vehicle, though Waymo referred to video evidence that he'd hopped in after the previous passenger failed to close the boot. Still, LAPD officers reported finding no evidence of a crime. Waymo gave the mother and daughter credit for a new journey.
After praising artificial-intelligence-based tool Draft One for saving
him 6–8 hours of report-drafting time per week, Police Sergeant Rick
Keel stated that Heber City, Utah, law enforcement has also 'learned
the importance of correcting [...] AI-generated reports' created by
combining large language models with image analysis. This discovery
came about after the department had to explain an official statement
that a cop had transformed into a frog: 'The body cam software and the
AI report writing software picked up on the [audio from a] movie that
was playing in the background', Disney's
The department has not stated whether it plans to start indicating
which parts of its reports come from AI vs. officers. It did state
that Draft One performs better than the tool it had tried earlier.
Let's end with another AI item, from the Netherlands, where a couple
asked a friend to officiate at their wedding. That friend consulted
ChatGPT for assistance in drafting lighthearted yet endearing vows.
Hence, the two promised to 'laugh together, grow together, and love
each other, no matter what' but did not declare intent to honour all
the legal obligations linked to marriage under the Dutch Civil Code.
Therefore, a judge in Zwolle has ruled that they did not actually
tie the knot. While their vows called them 'a crazy couple', the pair
argued that it is hardly crazy to expect the official at a civil
ceremony to point out such omissions. They added that they would be
emotionally harmed by the date change associated with their marriage
certificate getting declared 'erroneously recorded'. However, unlike
the AI agent, the court stressed that it must not ignore the law.
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