Trinidad and Tobago brings us butterfingers Batman and friends - well, a gang of robbers whose backhoe operation was directed by a caped black-clad, ski-masked figure with a tendency to trip over debris. Security-camera footage shows at least four people attempt to separate the vault from a cash machine on the smaller island, until breaking the arm of the backhoe they'd liberated from a nearby beach. When the group's efforts to heft the entire cash machine onto a small truck failed, they abandoned it on the pavement. The police continue to hunt for them and the stolen vehicle in which they fled.
When the family cat didn't return home by teatime, West Yorkshire's
Carl Crowther checked his doorbell-camera recordings: after gazing at
three-year-old rescue cat Nora for a while, an Amazon delivery driver
![[IMG: a still from the Crowther Ring camera]](images/Deliverers_keepers_losers_weepers.jpg)
had scooped her up and driven off. Commenting on the video via social
media a few days later, 41-year-old Catalin Stancu said he'd 'tried to
give the cat back but I forget the place I took it' and asked for the
family's address. In the end, police sergeant Cat Ryan's team traced
his number plate and recovered Nora. A court data followed.
Despite his insistence that 'I didn't steal it; I just took it' and
claims to have not seen Nora's collar, Stancu received an eight-week
suspended jail sentence, breaking a 13-year dry spell in a string of
convictions for 'dishonesty offences'. Outside court, he complained
that people back in Romania are taunting him over the incident. Nora,
meanwhile, reportedly is now reluctant to venture outside.
Comments on the break-up of his marriage prompted 35-year-old Daniel
Morgan to storm out of the New Inn, in the Welsh hamlet of Cefn
Rhigos. Minutes later, threats appeared online against publican
Christopher Common, who disregarded them until a bulldozer drove over
his car, through the pub's porch, and into customers' midst.
Although Morgan's father, from whose farm the bulldozer had been
stolen, didn't arrive in time to warn the Commons, he did manage to
interrupt the younger man's journey to his next target - his estranged
![[IMG: the pub porch afterward]](images/lightly_bulldozed.png)
wife's home - with a truck + trailer and, after those were bulldozed,
a digger. The latter ultimately beat the 'dozer cab into submission.
Locals have chipped in to repair the 25,000 euros' worth of damage
to the pub, and Judge Celia Hughes has handed Morgan a 40-month prison
sentence along with a 39-month driving ban, with credit for his recent
efforts to kick a cocaine and 6 pints/day drinking habit.
Various avenues exist when there isn't quite as much money as there should be. Nancy Napoles, the mayor of Tenancingo, Mexico, chose the 'fake your own kidnapping' route, in efforts to cover up embezzlement of 2.5 million euros from public coffers. Though a video shows her being forced from her car and made to pay the above-mentioned amount for freedom, a member of the public witnessed what happened prior to that. Her husband and brother-in-law, two of the pseudo-abductors, are on the run, while Napoles herself maintains that she is innocent and that the case has been 'politicised'.
Our next item, from Cambridgeshire, isn't the typical tale of a wayward child ending up in a dangerous-animal enclosure while inattentive parents don't look on. At Johnsons Zoo, a 30-year-old Norfolk man with learning difficulties was so enthusiastic about his two carers' suggestion 'Should we go to the crocodile house next?' that he decided to introduce someone else to the reptiles too. Hence, a three-year-old boy ended up on the other side of 'quite high fences', where he received critical injuries before the zoo-owner's wife could pull him free. Later, Detective Inspector Verity McCann stated that the police 'do not believe the man arrested [on suspicion of attempted murder] and the child are known to each other'.
Unmuffled backfiring reminiscent of a weed-eater drew a Flagler County, Florida, patrol officer's attention to a motorbike with neither a number plate nor lights. The ensuing action, which she deemed unworthy of the term 'pursuit' rather than 'scenic meander', nearly reached 65 km/hour at one point but hovered around 15 overall before depositing Brian Swartz, 33, on the ground. His 'rusty-parts bike' was impounded, and he was arrested, not least for operating a motor vehicle without a licence. The grounds for his 16 prior arrests since 2016 range from credit-card fraud and drugs possession to grand theft auto and possession of weapons and ammunition by a convicted felon.
Thanks, Osku, for finding two corpses for me. Marks in the dirt led sheriff's officers from a pickup truck left running in a remote Alabama dirt road to the body of strangulation victim Jessica Folds, 47. Right next to it in the woods lay the body of the truck's owner, Daniel Robbins. According to District Attorney Mike Segrest, the 44-year-old Robbins had died of a heart attack, with the likely cause being exertion in the course of efforts to dispose of the murder victim.
Let's leave you beside a lake in California's Sierra Nevada mountains.
There, at a campground on a sunny Saturday afternoon, cries for help
led Fresno County sheriff's officers to a man whose sunglasses had
fallen off while he was using one of the pit toilets at Camp Edison.
Yes, he landed in the waste tank while trying to retrieve them.
Officers took this opportunity to offer another example of what not
to do: four years ago, a California woman tumbled headfirst into a
vault toilet in Olympic National Park, following her mobile phone into
the waste vault. Though the phone was able to reach 911 dispatchers
after 20 minutes of climbing failure, things do not always go so well.
13 July 2026
Our first item, in which an escaped bull interrupted an afternoon ballgame, does not come from the US. The scene into which a local farm's bovine wandered was a match at Newcastle's Burnopfield Cricket Club, where the animal proceeded to express displeasure at an umpire and charge at Burnopfield and Hetton Lyons players. The farmer's attempt to entice his bull away by bringing a cow onto the pitch failed. Some time after the match was called off, the animal was returned to its enclosure, according to Durham Constabulary.
A police patrol in Tampere, Finland, pulled over a 41-year-old
traffic-police officer for being 'clearly intoxicated'. The officer,
a senior constable responsible for safety work such as efforts to
prevent driving while drunk, blamed his 2.2 per mille blood-alcohol
content on a low-calorie diet, fasting, and dehydration. When finding
him guilty of aggravated drink-driving, the Pirkanmaa District Court
stated that, while these factors do weaken one's ability to process
alcohol, this is common knowledge.
According to the Central Finland Police, the officer has lost his
credibility in enforcing traffic rules and therefore lost his job.
A member of the public brought Turkish charity animal clinic He'Art of
Rescue a challenge: a four-month-old stray puppy that had been left
for dead on an Istanbul industrial estate by bored youths with access
to industrial glue, plus a top coat of mud. After a series of medical
baths and a complete shave, the charity could tend to the skin damage
![[IMG: Pascal after staggering from his box]](images/before.jpg)
![[IMG: a freshly shaven Pascal]](images/later.jpg)
and trauma suffered by the dog, named Pascal by founder Nur Rima Yola.
Though his broken feet will take longer to heal and he will forever be
deaf in one ear, Pascal's skittishness has given way to friendship
with another puppy. Meanwhile, the childrene are roaming free.
New York's Anthony Pranzo School called in an exterminator to tackle the varmints responsible for a foul odour that emerged during renovation work. The odour led to a chimney, where opening the ash dump revealed a shoe. Reaching in, the exterminator felt a leg and hence confirmed that the creature behind the smell was a rotting human. To identify the dead man, the Queens police are starting by checking whether all of the construction workers are accounted for.
The San Mateo, California, police received reports of two teenagers
drinking alcohol and shooting strangers with a water gun while
riding in a Waymo vehicle. Taking the two 15-year-olds into custody
involved simply instructing the driverless vehicle to deliver them to
a car park, where five officers and a dog took things from there.
The police stated that while even brandishing toy firearms, let
alone shooting projectiles at speed, can cause fear in the public,
the pair's afternoon of carousing showed 'some ingenuity' - charges of
driving while impaired 'would've made this so much worse'.
California's Shannon Miranda has asked the public to 'consider all the
facts before reaching conclusions' about the 117 dog corpses found
on the grounds of his 'no-kill' dog shelter. Investigators uncovered
mass graves in the fields around Miranda's Rescue after confirming a
700-dog mismatch between reality and the number of canines claimed to
be living there. Along with the bodies, most of which contained
bullet fragments and a microchip, the authorities found six loose
microchips and 600 collars.
According to the Humboldt County sheriff's office, 'credible
information' about fraud, felonious animal abuse, and conspiracy
exists; however, Miranda is not facing any criminal charges and
insists that overcrowding has never led him to euthanise dogs.
Our next story does feature overcrowding but with fewer victims.
While executing a search warrant in an unspecified unrelated
investigation, authorities in Hamden, Ohio, removed 16 children from
the roughly 3.5-by-3.5-metre room where their parents had kept them
confined alongside their bodily waste since moving to the village four
years earlier. Ohio attorney general Andy Wilson described the
siblings, ages 1-18, as looking 'like almost feral animals' when
rescued from the 'pure evil' of the Siders household.
On the following day, one of the children was listed as intubated
in hospital, Wilson still couldn't 'get the smell off of me', and
Elizabeth and Gary Siders along with the latter's parents were
professing innocence of all charges.
On the other side of the world, we find something that isn't quite
mistreatment of children. 'He's probably too young to understand it's
a job', Australia's Adele Aldworth said of her six-year-old son's
three-street round as an assistant to Perth's waste-management crew.
She explains that Thomas used to 'race outside just to look at the
trucks; then, one day, one of the garbage-truck guys handed him a bin'
to push back onto the kerb. After that, he kept hanging around in
hopes of more, so the team gained official permission for the boy to
wheel back empty bins near his home on each week's bin day. Wearing
gloves, safety glasses, a hi-vis shirt with the city logo, and 'black
shoes and black socks because that's what the other workers wear', he
handles 92 bins, under parental supervision. While neighbours cheer
him on, 'you cannot talk to him because he might miss a bin'.
Randal Vance likes sharing the magic. This 43-year-old from
Fallbrook, California, not only grows and distributes magic mushrooms
but also enlisted his 12-year-old son's help in doing so. In
addition, he dosed his nine- and 11-year-old children with the
homegrown hallucinogen in capsule form every other day, then daily.
After officers seized 92 kg of fresh psilocybin mushrooms, 24 kg
of dried ones, and eight kilos of a growth medium, plus six firearms,
Vance admitted his guilt on numerous counts. In the wake of his
arrest, his wife and a friend tried to delete drug-sales Web sites and
phone messages. They too have now entered guilty pleas.
The US recently took its turn in choking off crude-oil exports, thanks to a pickup truck. More than 20 tankers had to sit waiting for the better part of a day after the Coast Guard closed Texas's Corpus Christi ship channel - responsible for the bulk of the crude oil leaving the country and constituting its main LNG export avenue - while authorities at Port Aransas South Jetty arranged the removal of a vehicle from the water. The pickup truck had escaped its driver's control while doing doughnuts on the beach at roughly 5:30am.
After meeting a 14-year-old boy from Roșia de Secaș, Romania, on the
gaming platform Roblox, a 13-year-old Dutch girl finally felt
understood. Then her own understanding grew: to keep the sexually
explicit photos she had shared with him private, she'd have to carve
his name into her skin, write messages in her blood, and kill her pet
fish. Though she obeyed all these instructions, which he'd honed via
ChatGPT and advice from members of the Com movement, he sent the
images to her family and former classmates anyway. The situation came
to light after a leap from a viaduct left her seriously injured.
The boy, who was extradited to the Netherlands about six months
ago, has been sentenced to, in essence, time served. He will live
with his mother in Austria, where he is not to use social media until
a counsellor decides otherwise. Ordering him to pay the girl roughly
12,000 euros in all, the court stressed that his actions, caused by 'a
feeling of loneliness and the need to belong', had not provably led
her to attempt suicide. The court lacked jurisdiction to address his
crimes against a 13-year-old in the UK and two other victims.
I'll end the Clippings with more civilised characters: bears.
Our first ursine guest is a black bear that wandered into the
commissary at Alaska's Elmendorf-Richardson military base, ate a single
peach, shat on the floor, and sauntered out. After the animal emerged
from the base exchange's automatic doors, Conservation Law
Enforcement escorted it into the nearby woods.
A brown bear entering a hotel in Nagqu, Tibet didn't find as
![[IMG: the bear without a hotel key card]](images/uninvited.jpg)
inviting an environment - all the doors were locked. The bear
therefore barged into one of the rooms, where it engaged in a brief
stare-down with the two occupants before retreating into the hallway.
Brandishing a flashlight, the hotel's owner chased the bear from
the building, which is due to receive 'additional security measures
to keep bears out', according to Shanghai Daily.
In Japan, where bears have fatally mauled at least five people since April, authorities are procuring electric fences to keep their paws off public places, anti-bear sprays for community organisations, and audio-based deterrents for schools. However, the latest bear-linked injury, in Nagoya, was caused not by the animals themselves but by 22-year-old Vietnamese national Huynh Nhat Duy, who has apologised for inadvertently triggering a cannister of bear spray at a post office in the city centre. The capsaicin-based aerosol left eight people ill, with five needing hospital treatment.