Detective Chief Inspector Mikko Minkkinen stated that the unlicensed driver, when brought to a halt 10 minutes into his joyride, 'proudly announced that he had not made any driving errors'. It is less clear what his two passengers - one of whom the commandeerer had picked up en route - thought about the trip.
When Hammersmith's Mia Forbes Pirie and Mark Simpson reported their car stolen, the Metropolitan Police stated that they would 'probably' contact the couple if ever finding anything and that they 'might' send a squad car to the AirTag co-ordinates supplied. Upon replying that they'd therefore try to collect it themselves, they were asked to ring back if needing assistance on the scene - nine minutes away, in Chiswick, where the pair's secondary immobiliser had kicked in. Once they found the 55,000-euro Jaguar E-Pace, they anxiously remained there throughout the process of remotely proving their identity to unlock it and 'steal it back'.
Tokyo warehouse worker Yuga Matsuoka paid a 4:40am post-work visit to
the go-karting track next door, which had enraged him with the noise
from tourists' engines. Setting light to waste near the 70 parked
Mario-themed karts, he managed to damage three of them... and the
walls of his employer's premises.
Matsuoka, 28, has confessed to attempted arson, while authorities are
still investigating possible links to an English-language note found
atop one of the vehicles in May, which threatened to 'set karts aflame
if engines are turned on after tomorrow'.
At mid-day, in contrast, fire crews from south London's Mitcham, Wimbledon, Tooting, and Wallington sped to a fourth-storey flat in Mitcham to extinguish a fire and rescue the perpetrator: a tortoise that had tipped over its heat lamp in its terrarium. According to the London Fire Brigade, the blaze began when the heat lamp fell onto the enclosure's dry hay. Alongside the 'naughty tortoise', they rescued a pet dog found cowering beneath the associated maisonette's stairs.
The next item takes us from fire to water. After several months of
water-shortage complaints from museum staff at Italy's Royal Palace of
Caserta, the Italian national police have arrested the manager of
a religious organisation's agricultural land adjacent to the World
Heritage List site for 'continued theft of public water'. The
58-year-old Naples man allegedly syphoned water from the Caroline
Aqueduct through a 145-metre illegal pipeline, thus bypassing the
palace grounds' fountains, basins, and waterfall and forcing
groundskeepers to cease watering the grass.
The Carabinieri have placed him under house arrest and removed the
pipe, which they describe as having directed stolen water to six
distinct irrigation zones and a thousand-litre cistern.
Motion-detection systems at a parks and recreation building alerted the Bristol, Connecticut, police to an intruder wedged partway down the chimney after closing time. Freeing him required firefighters to dismantle portions of Rockwell Park's chimney and other structures. This led to repair costs of $5,000-10,000 and a court date. It proved far easier to retrieve the man's dog from the building's lavatory, where timer-based nightly locking had recently been deployed. Community-engagement coordinator Erica Benoit later commented: 'If he had just contacted police in the first place, we might have been able to avoid the situation.'
Although online retailer Amazon have repeatedly promised to stem the
flow of unwanted packages to her San Jose home, a California woman
![[IMG: what has greeted the family in the afternoon]](images/Boxing-ringside_seat_covers.jpg)
reports that she is still receiving product returns one year on. Each
box contains a set of Etkin-branded faux-leather seat covers that
didn't fit the customer's car and bears an address label for Chinese
seller Liusandedian's 'return center'. The woman stated that she is
not angry at the senders, who she noted 'aren't getting their money
back! and who often spend more than half the original cost on
postage.
While Amazon have, for example, recommended giving away the
garageful of packages that she was not at home to refuse, their
representatives have now responded to news coverage by arranging to
visit her home to 'pick up any packages'.
The image shown here gives an example of what has met her mother's
wheelchair at the door.
In other shipping news, the aromas wafting from boxes of chocolate cake freshly imported from Vietnam prompted Customs officials at Germany's Cologne Bonn airport to unwrap the bright red containers. Within them were not 7 kg of sponge cake but 1,500 young tarantulas, each in its own small plastic tube. Speaking for the Cologne Main Customs Office, Maja Ley reported that many of the smuggled arachnids did not survive their journey, while the remaining venomous critters have been placed in professional care. Both 'the person responsible for the package' and its intended recipient, in Sauerland, are now suspects in a criminal investigation.
Phil has called my attention to the patriotic fervour displayed by
Arthu Sahakyan, who declared that the MAGA flags will remain in place at
his Diamond Bar, California, home even though the same cannot be said
of his wife, Arpineh Masihi, who has been carted off by ICE agents.
Masihi, who has borne him four children, entered the US legally at age
3 as a refugee from Iran but was later convicted for theft. Ever
since, the family had been working within the immigration system to
bring her back into federal good graces. Sahakyan stated: 'Even
though my friends say "take the flag down - you're going through a
lot', I'm like "no; the flag stands".'
He explained that the US very much should vet Iranian nationals,
'because of the sleeper cells', and that Donald Trump, with
immigration policies designed to strengthen national security, 'is not
trying to do anything bad'.
Norway's national lottery operator has extended an apology to
Eurojackpot winners for an extensive goof: it had to tell at least
47,000 people that text messages informing of large winnings in
the Germany-based lottery displayed a currency-conversion error -
multiplication rather than division of the euro value.
While players such as Ole Fredrik Sveen, who learned that he'd won
not 1.2 million Norwegian kronor but 12.40, 'realised that it wasn't
meant to be this time either' and had 'kept our heads cool', Norsk
Tipping CEO Tonje Sagstuen received 'many messages from people who had
managed to make plans for holidays, buying an apartment, or renovating
before they realised [i.e., were told] that the amount was wrong'. He
has now resigned.
Finally, Thailand's Suriyan Buppa-art offers the world the cautionary
![[IMG: a fishy neck in one of the images posted to Facebook]](images/fishbone.jpg)
tale of wife Sang Lan's fish soup, which she had not checked for
bones. Posting photos online of a sharp white protrusion from a human
neck, he explained that she accidentally swallowed a fish bone, which
folk remedies failed to dislodge and x-rays failed to show, then put
up with the discomfort in her throat until she felt a 'pointy needle'
beneath her skin when applying a pain-relief patch prescribed after
another hospital trip. A third hospital visit yielded successful
extraction of the 2 cm bone and an at least temporary aversion to
fish.