We begin this batch of Anna's News Clippings with a topic that is on
![[Weibo photo of a bank teller inspecting the nuked money]](images/nukage.jpg)
many people's minds (and hands and noses): the novel coronavirus. While
all of China's banks are reportedly using ultraviolet light and high
temperatures to disinfect the cash they handle, one Jiangsu Province
woman, surnamed Li, chose a do-it-yourself approach: she microwaved 3,125
yuan, worth about 400 euros. Within less than a minute, a telltale
burning aroma alerted her that she might need to pay a visit to a bank.
After an afternoon of identifying the remains, a teller gave her
fresh banknotes worth the full amount she had destroyed.
An enraged woman stormed into the banqueting hall at
Asif Rafiq Siddiqi's wedding festivities in Karachi, Pakistan. One of
the bride's relatives asked 'what's the matter?' and received the
answer from the woman, Madiha Siddiqi, that 'he is my husband, and he is
the father of this child'. Under Pakistani law, a man may wed as many
as four women but only if all his current spouses have consented.
They had not. Madiha Siddiqi revealed that she'd learnt of wife 2,
Zehra Ashraf, on account of a text message from her, and it was Ashraf
who'd alerted her to the plans for the latest marriage, his third.
At this news, wife 3's relatives responded by inflicting bruises on Mr Siddiqi
until he retreated to a nearby police station. When he emerged, they resumed
the attack, tearing his clothes and slapping him until he managed to
crawl under a bus.
The head of the Taimuriha police station, Rao Nazim, reported that
no formal complaint has yet been registered.
At a town meeting, the leaders of Croydon, New Hampshire, decided to disband the police department. Croydon, with a population of 764 as of the last census, had for 20 years had a police force and prosecutor team consisting solely of Richard Lee, who was present at the meeting. Told to immediately surrender his badges, uniform, and cruiser keys, Lee began stripping off his uniform, explaining to a befuddled selectman that 'you said immediately; this is immediately'. Clad in only his boots, his underwear, and a hat, he headed out into the snow for a long walk home. Someone did ring Lee's wife, who collected him by car along the way.
A man in Canada didn't have a wife present to help him escape the
cold. People he'd met at a Saskatoon bar regretted inviting him home,
and they asked him to leave. After kicking him out, they warned the police that he had become
belligerent and needed to be forced outside while clad only in his
underwear.
Cold, the man smashed a nearby building's basement window
and crawled inside. The resident later reported that the man was
'falling all over the place' as he donned her bright orange drapes in
the style of a robe and stumbled back outside. Police officers found
the 22-year-old man nearby, and he was treated for cuts before being charged
with 'break and enter, as well as mischief'.
The school nurse at Texas's Post Elementary School rang
mother Kiana Randolph to report that her 11-year-old son, Kamauri
Williamson, had been injured in an altercation at lunch. Rushing to the school,
Randolph found a helicopter whisking the boy away for medical care.
She soon heard the reason for his injury: a teacher was convinced that
the boy had stolen a box of juice.
In footage from surveillance cameras, the teacher accosts the boy,
grabbing his hooded sweatshirt such that 'he's basically being
choked', in the words of Randolph. She expressed shock at the
man banging her son's head on a desk strongly enough that he would need
emergency care. The school has placed the teacher on
administrative leave and initiated an investigation.
Another person setting a sterling example is Pennsylvania mother
Rachel Martin, who at least dropped off her nine-year-old daughter at
a child-minder's home before completing her heroin overdose. Noticing that
the autistic girl was wearing no socks, shoes, or outerwear, despite single-digit temperatures,
the child-minder rang the police, who found Martin still at the home,
slumped over in her idling car. She too had an unusual choice of attire: a
Cookie Monster costume.
Emergency crews treated Martin, who will face endangerment charges,
while the girl was placed in a grandmother's custody.
Our next story is about another chemically enhanced driver:
intoxicated Austin, Texas, man Paul Garcia, who
struck a man who was crossing the street with a shopping trolley.
The vehicle's speed was such that the shopping trolley bent the 5
cm steel post that it hit, while the pedestrian crashed through Garcia's
windscreen pretty much head-first and died. Unfazed, the 24-year-old
Garcia drove on, leaving pieces of car and human behind him.
A little under a kilometre down the road, Garcia parked at the South
Austin Beer Garden, leaving the corpse waiting in the passenger's seat.
Bar staff didn't let the barefoot motorist enter, and the police soon
arrived to collect him. He faces a selection of charges.
Florida's Sarah Boone says that the events in our next story were all
part of a game of drunken hide-and-seek... Thinking it would be amusing - at least to her
- she zipped boyfriend Jorge Torres, Jr, inside a piece of luggage,
and then she headed upstairs and fell asleep. Awakened by her phone
ringing in the morning, she headed downstairs, then rang the emergency services, who confirmed that
Torres had expired in the suitcase.
Orange County Sheriff's Office staff stated that the 42-year-old
Boone's statements have been 'inconsistent', and they report that mobile-phone
footage reveals that Torres screamed for help from within the
suitcase while she laughs. In one exchange recorded, Torres shouts 'I can't
fucking breathe, seriously'. Boone's response that 'yeah,
that's what you do when you choke me' received the reply 'oh, that's
what I feel like when you cheat on me'.
John Matthew Chapman, 40, drove a woman he mainly knew online from her
home in Pennsylvania to Nevada for what he described as a holiday and potential home
purchase in Las Vegas. He also took her for a bondage-themed photo shoot in the Nevada desert. This is where
someone stopping to urinate found her corpse tied to a sign post the
next month.
The victim, 33-year-old Jaime Feden, was considered a Jane Doe until
one of her friends requested a check on her welfare. Chapman was easy to find: he had been living
in Feden's home, from which he'd been posting Facebook messages from her
account. He has admitted to using his 'kill kit' to suffocate her, and a
court case is under way.
N![[Aleksandra posing with her new look]](images/once_you_go_black.jpg)
ext, we have the vanity-induced travails of Poland's
Aleksandra Sadowska, a 22-year-old model from Wroclaw who sought to
replicate rap artist Popek's white eyeballs in her own head. The
procedure was performed by a Warsaw tattooist named by Polish media as Piotr A.,
whose speciality is ear piercings. Afterward, he told her that the 'normal' pain
she was experiencing would subside after a while. Instead, she went blind in one eye,
and military-hospital medics who worked to stabilise her eye pressure
and reduce the pain informed her that the mascara used had permanently damaged the remaining eye
also.
The dye used was intended only for tattooing the
skin, and Piotr A. now faces up to three years in prison for
unintentionally exposing someone to severe disability. He maintains
that he is innocent, and he continues his work at the salon he co-owns.
Court proceedings continue.
The person poked in the next story was a somewhat less willing
participant. At a supermarket in Anne Arundel, Maryland, a man jostled hapless shopper
Katie Peters and applied a syringe to one of her buttocks. Her
startled reaction to the cigarette-burn-like sensation prompted the man
to state 'I know it feels like a bee sting, doesn't it?'. After
leaving, she discovered the inflamed puncture to her skin and started feeling
'really bad' pain. Investigating, the county police department identified the
substance in the syringe as semen.
Thanks to security footage, a suspect has been identified too: Thomas Byron Stemen, who was found in
possession of several syringes of this nature. Although two people at
the supermarket narrowly escaped his 'very aggressive and very
deliberate' stabbing attempts, detectives believe there are other
victims and have asked them to step forward.
This year's Mardi Gras festivities have produced at least 43 injuries.
That's the count from the day's event on the outskirts of San Juan de la Vega, Mexico,
where participants attach a mix of sulphur and potassium chlorate to
the end of a sledgehammer, which they then strike against rail beams. Some
people were hurt upon being sent flying backward, and at least one
person was stretchered away with a damaged leg.
There were more than 100 police officers in attendance at the
six-hour Exploding Hammers Festival, along with ambulance crews. This event
pays homage to hammer bombs whose origins are now lost to history and
allegedly to John the Baptist. However, one man in attendance opined that
participants today 'don't have an idea who the saint is' and that 'it's
been going wrong for more than a decade now'. Another said: 'If in the beginning we
had small, thumb-sized packs that only caused a bang and a bit of
smoke, today it's all about who has the bigger bomb attached to their
sledgehammer.'
Through a loudspeaker, Florida's Willard Harlow Moore ordered another
motorist to pull over, but the red and blue lights didn't fool Moore's
target. Said target did step out of his car but proceeded to ask
Moore whether he required police assistance. Moore tried to uphold
the ruse that 'I am the police', to no avail. The other man summoned police assistance.
By the time officers arrived, the 45-year-old Moore was passed out
drunk in the driver's seat of his vehicle. He has been arrested.
Also in Florida, a woman called in contractors to renovate
the Gainesville home that had been left to her after a divorce in
1992. As soon as workers entered the building's crawlspace, they rang
911. They had been spooked by something else left behind by her
ex-husband, oral pathologist Ronald A. Baughman: six 3.8-litre
plastic jars containing several human tongues each.
Planning to return to his research on thyroid and neck
conditions, Baughman had stored the jars in a safe, (thermally) cool location.
The medical examiner's office will now figure out what to do with the
tongues.
Florida is home to the next story too, in which the police were alerted about a motorist driving recklessly while distracted... by the needle in his arm. The relevant blue Jaguar was found at a petrol station, a drugs needle was found on the driver's seat, and the two people who had been in the vehicle were found in need of arrest when returning to the car. The owner and driver, 39-year-old Thomas Henry Shayhorn, was arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia and violation of his probation terms, and Dennis Phillip Lermy, 28, was arrested for possession of fentanyl and drug paraphernalia.
Seloni Khetarpal rang the emergency services to report that her mother
had terminated her mobile-phone service. The 36-year-old Khetarpal
demanded that officers visit the Canton, Ohio, home and rectify
this disruption of service. The operator admonished her to use the 911 line only for legitimate
purposes, but estate agent Khetarpal rang again, two hours later, to
insist that her problem was of legitimate concern to law-enforcement personnel.
She was placed in jail and posted bail. She is charged with disruption of service herself
- disrupting smooth operation of the 911 service.
If you are going to urinate on the bumper of a marked police car, it might be best to make sure that no-one is looking in your direction at the time. Michigan's David Marcel-Lewis Johnson learned this the hard way in St. Petersburg, Florida. While still mid-stream, he was handcuffed and taken into custody in full view of the public along a busy row of bars and clubs. Partly because he was not the most forthcoming person during questioning, he has been charged with disorderly conduct.
Somewhat different urinary exploits were carried out by a member of the US Air Force stationed in Anchorage, Alaska. Task & Purpose reports that Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson suffered from urine in an undesirable location and determined who was responsible for 'failure to refrain from urinating in the office coffee maker'. The culprit's name was not listed, but we do know his or her new rank: Airman Basic, as low as they go. Said airman had racked up five letters of reprimand prior to this, including one for five days' absence without leave.
Finally, North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Services report on an unusual call. They were summoned to a farm near Bramham, Leeds, where free-range pigs are raised. One of the two swine in a pen ate or at least chewed into the other's pedometer, which are used for proof of the animals' free-range status. The result appears to be proof that such a device's batteries can react with some of the other contents of a pig's pen (excrement and straw) to produce fire. The fire in question eliminated 75 square metres of hay.
With the major media scrambling to keep readers and viewers updated on the pandemic's progress, I would be remiss were I not to do the same.
In response to social-media images showing a young boy apparently
sporting serious chemical burns on his arms and legs, the River Vale, New
Jersey, police paid a visit to the 7-Eleven store where the boy's
family had purchased 'spray sanitiser'. To meet coronavirus-related
demand for reasonably priced hand sanitiser amidst commercial
products' scarcity, shop-owner Manisha Bharade had opted for a
homebrew version, apparently made at the 7-Eleven.
Officers seized the remaining bottles of the concoction, but
their Lieutenant John DeVoe reports that about a dozen had already
been purchased. Bharade is being charged with endangering the welfare
of a child and engaging in deceptive business practices. Meanwhile,
hospital staff treated the 10-year-old boy's burns, and three
other children are recovering from less severe burns.