When packing for a trip to Sydney, Australia, New York's Kingsley
Burnett, 62, did not expect snow. But that's what awaited him before
the final leg of the trip - from Billings, Montana, to Sidney,
Montana. Once he'd learnt why the air tickets had been surprisingly
inexpensive, he characterised the problem as 'the S-Y-D as opposed to
S-D-Y - somebody has to fix that'. Burnett has now rescheduled his
Australia trip for June.
The manager of the Boothill Inn, where he was staying while
awaiting a return flight, told local television station KTVQ: 'This is
the second time we've had a guest that was trying to get to Sydney,
Australia.'
Singapore's Straits Times reports on a Mr K. Kawshigan, who
threatened to sue object of his affections Nora Tan after she told him
that she viewed him as a friend only. Detecting no progress after 1.5
years of a compromise in which she attended his counselling sessions, she
severed contact. Therefore, he filed a $3 million High Court claim
for causing trauma and damaging his 'stellar reputation', and her
receipt of an expedited protection order was met with a $22,000
magistrate's court claim: by breaching an agreement to improve the
relationship, she had reduced his earning capacity as an 'active
high-capital trader by night and a busy CEO by day'.
State Courts deputy registrar Lewis Tan dismissed the latter suit,
expressing refusal to abet Kawshigan's 'calculated attempt to compel
engagement from the defendant who [...] has finally decided to stand
up to his threats'.
Back in 2015, New Jersey IT worker John Michael Musbach exchanged
sexually explicit pictures with a minor, thereby earning himself
child-pornography charges. In an effort to derail the criminal case,
Musbach visited a rather dodgy Web site, where an administrator's
response to his note beginning 'Alternatively to a gun order, I could
place a hit order' reassured him that '14 years old is acceptable'.
Later, however, he was informed that he'd need to send the
murder-for-hire site more than the budgeted $20,000 in Bitcoin, to
prevent the administrator from snitching to the authorities.
The response to his note 'Is this a joke?' came from prosecutors,
who also found that he had searched Google for 'death by chloroform',
details of child-grooming laws, and how to clear his browsing history.
In the 'daylight-harvesting' lighting system installed a decade ago to
save money at Massachusetts's Minnechaug Regional High School,
brightness levels get adjusted on the basis of data sent between
all 7,000 lights and a server. After a blackout in August 2021, the
green dream became a glaring nightmare: all the lights stayed on,
burning taxpayer money in the thousands of dollars each month 'but
not in the tens of thousands', according to the school district's
assistant finance superintendent, Aaron Osborne.
According to student journalists, software supplier 5th Light had
denied access requests amid earlier, transient corruption because the
information is proprietary, and now 5th Light no longer has the data.
Once the district tracked down the latest owner of system installer
Reflex Lighting, attempts at system patches or adding timers failed.
Multiple back orders followed. Reflex chief Paul Mustone now reports
that, while 'we made a deal with the devil by moving the factories to
China', the parts have finally arrived. He added: 'Yes, there will be
a remote override switch.' For now, teachers continue to unscrew
light bulbs for the night and before showing films.
In her review of In the Dutch Mountains, journalist Wiebke Hüster described attending said ballet as akin to being 'alternately driven mad and killed by boredom'. Its director, auteur Marco Goecke, found this a bit harsh and is alleged to have approached her during another show's interval, in order to accuse her of reducing subscriptions for the Hannover Opera House's season and to press a paper bag of dog faeces into her face. The opera house responded by suspending him for an 'impulsive reaction' that contravened its code of conduct and left the audience unsettled, Hüster stressed that he clearly had planned this response, and her employer Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that the police are investigating accordingly.
What can one do as an encore to violently murdering and dismembering someone? We could ask Wisconsin's Taylor Schabusiness, familiar from last April's Clippings - a 25-year-old woman accused of strangling her sex partner to death and strewing the body parts around his mother's home. When a judge granted her attorney two weeks for her to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, she seemed unhappy with the delay and assaulted her attorney, Quinn Jolly. Once an officer of the peace had wrestled her to the floor, the hearing could resume - this time with a delay caused by Jolly's motion to be taken off the case.
Brazilian attorney Leandro Mathias de Novaes, 40, felt safest with a handgun tucked into his waistband at all times. This preference influenced his preparations for his mother's MRI scan at Laboratorio Cura. CNN Brazil reports that magnetic forces pulled the weapon free from its hiding place and caused a round to be fired into his belly. Swift medical care did not prevent the Order of Attorneys of Brazil in Cotia from informing his gun-advocacy TikTok followers of his death two weeks later.
The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department reported on what began as a typical late-afternoon catalytic-converter theft: a saw-wielding man emerged from a vehicle idling in a Palmdale car park and crawled beneath a nearby SUV. His sawing noise awakened the SUV's driver, who placed the vehicle in reverse gear and then 'felt a bump', at which point she stopped immediately and discovered a need to summon emergency responders. While medics were providing ultimately futile ministrations, the remaining 3/4 of his gang were plucked from their vehicle and arrested.
Freezing to death isn't a common way of dying in police custody,
but Alabama's Anthony Don Mitchell, 33, managed it. According to a
federal charge sheet, he was locked inside the Walker County jail's
walk-in kitchen freezer for punishment and was next spotted - thanks to
security cameras - being carried out in a stiff state for 'evaluation'
at the local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
His death indirectly resulted from a concerned family member's
request that officers check on his welfare - he landed in jail for
attempted murder after firing a handgun at the responding cops.
Francisco Barajah expired in rather different circumstances. The
39-year-old Mozambican pastor had decided to emulate Jesus's 40-day fast
as described in the Bible. He lasted 25 days without food or water
before, unable to stand, he was whisked off to hospital by relatives
and Santa Trindade Evangelical Church parishioners to receive
rehydration and liquid food.
After he died, his brother contested the medical diagnosis, stating
that, while Barajah had been fasting, he simply 'suffered from low
blood pressure'.
Shortly after receiving a US social security card, in 2018, Illinois's
Jieun Kim was unable to open a Chase Bank account, as someone else had
already used her social security number to do so. She filed a report
and forgot about the matter until Robinhood suddenly closed her
trading account in 2021 and the IRS said she'd already claimed her
stimulus payments. When Chase cancelled her credit cards shortly
after that, she left a message for the person using her SSN to
contact her. The other party, California's Jieun Kim, did so, once
her own card was cancelled. Though 'our first text message didn't go
well', the two 31-year-olds 'figured out that we weren't weird people
or thieves and that we happened to share one Social Security
number'.
Chicago-area Kim's application for a new SSN yielded comments blaming
both Asian people's 'very similar names' and computer error, along
with the same old number. Meanwhile, Los Angeles Kim claims, an
officer warned her that 'talking about this [...] could result in
delaying the green-card process [from] six months to 2-3 years'.
The two women suspect that it may take longer than that just to
de-merge their income records and personal data. For instance, LA Kim
reports that she is listed as having two mothers and two fathers.
Thanks, Osku, for the tale of Connecticut lunch lady Andie Paige Rosafort, who sent a 14-year-old pupil a nudie picture of herself. Asked whether she'd sent said selfie by mistake, she followed up with another. Her persistence, which included videos of her masturbating and various requests over a span of six months, paid off: the boy left a party early to 'have sex with a woman', though ending that encounter early because he felt uncomfortable. Two days later, he told his parents about what had left him feeling 'very weird and guilty', and Rosafort has been arrested and warned not to use social media while awaiting trial.
Lucio Catarino Diaz provided several companies in Houston, Texas, with
more than simple office-cleaning services, if legal filings by more
than a dozen recipients of herpes simplex services are to be believed.
After a worker noticed that the water she kept on her desk had an odd
taste and aroma, she provided the building-management company with
CCTV footage revealing Diaz's habit of urinating into female
employees' water bottles. No changes were forthcoming, so victims
contacted the police themselves as the STD outbreak spread.
Upon his arrest, Diaz confessed. He has been charged with felonious
aggravated assault, and various managers too are under legal fire.
Our penultimate story too involves water. Two ice machines on a Boston
hospital's surgery floor were equipped with water-purification systems
that removed the nasty chlorination aroma and taste from the municipal
tap water. The chlorine's removal also encouraged a bacterial rampage
in the machines, thereby removing three post-operative patients over
the space of 18 months. A fourth vulnerable cardiac patient at Brigham
and Women's Hospital survived the Mycobacterium abscessus
infection.
Doctors combing the patients' records for commonalities turned up
little until nurses mentioned that the relevant patients seemed to
consume more ice than others had. It was not long before staff found
the biofilm within the machines, which had survived all the
manufacturer-recommended cleaning and maintenance.
How many people's input does a cheese toastie require? If you are the residents of a student flat in Avery Hill, London, the answer is 'roughly 25 firefighters'. After students placed a toaster on its side, inserted bread and cheese, and left the room, the predictable outcome left the kitchen 'gutted' and other portions of the ground floor damaged, according to a London Fire Brigade spokesperson.
Their search for fugitive Tina Hicks led sheriff's officers to a Williamsburg, Kentucky, home. They encountered a snag there, though: nobody in the home would answer their questions - until a toddler visiting at the time stood up and, placing his hands on his hips, stated that 'it is good to be honest' and 'we shouldn't lie'. He then announced that Hicks, 45, was hiding in a room adjacent to the home's bathroom. She was arrested on six warrants, old and new.
Outrage spread alongside a video in which a man licks a communal
bottle of soy sauce at a Kura Sushi 'sushi train' restaurant in
Nagoya, Japan, then smears saliva on food items passing along the
conveyor. While the man, 21-year-old Ryoga Yoshino, has been arrested
and at least one of the minors squashing sushi items alongside him has
apologised, copycat incidents have led Kura Sushi to install sensors
and cameras to catch plates being returned (for instance, with wasabi
added).
Other restaurants have opted to discontinue sushi trains entirely.
For instance, the Choushimaru chain brought its conveyors to a
halt after someone left a cigarette butt in a pot of pickled ginger.
Six days after Tory Hart filed for custody of son Eli from the
six-year-old's mother, Minnesota's Julissa Thaler, she purchased a
shotgun and arranged a shooting-range visit. It wasn't long before
cops pulled over a bloody-haired Thaler, warning her that she was
driving on a tyre rim. They learned later that Eli was in the boot,
alongside the gun, which had sent an estimated nine rounds into him.
Thaler, 28, was tracked down and arrested for intentional but
'not premeditated' killing. Her father, who had backed Hart's custody
claim, reported having told the judge that 'I feared for Eli's safety'
and for her ability to care for herself, let alone a child, given her
mental-health history. A Thaler relative who had fostered Eli for
nearly a year had repeatedly warned the authorities of worries that
Thaler 'would kill Eli to prevent his father from getting custody'.
Even Eli had weighed in on the matter, by locking Thaler outside.
Tennessee's Lisa Edwards, 60, told police officers that she was having
difficulty navigating her wheelchair back up to Fort Sanders Regional
Medical Center, from which she'd been discharged. Replying that her
refusal to leave constituted criminal trespass, they asked her to
'help us help you' and began an hour-long struggle to bundle her into
a cruiser. Amid her protestations that she felt about to faint, their
point that 'you weren't having any breathing problems when you were
out here smoking' didn't prevent Edwards from going grey and passing
out in the cop car. After a traffic stop en route to a detention
centre, the officers found her dead of a stroke.
The Knoxville police assert 'no department policies or procedures
were violated', and the district attorney's office stress that the
police action did not contribute to her death of natural causes.
In![[IMG: Juanita emerging from the cooler bag]](images/Juanita.jpg)
our next item, the cause of death is less relevant. The Peruvian
police detained apparently drunken food-delivery worker Julio Cesar
Bermejo at an archaeological site in Puno and decided to look in his
big red cooler bag. Within it was the mummy that he'd brought from
his room at home to show his teenaged friends. Bermejo told officers
that his bandaged 'spiritual girlfriend' had been in his father's
family for 30 years. Said girlfriend, 'Juanita', is a
pre-Hispanic-era male who is now in the Ministry of Culture's care.
In nearly two decades of work along the Texas border, Raul Rodriguez
proudly helped deport thousands of people from the US. Then, in 2018,
federal investigators shared a photo with him, of a Mexican birth
certificate... Next came an awkward conversation in which he severed
communication with his father.
While his case for 'cancellation of removal' remains pending, he
relies on disability benefits from a head injury suffered in his years
with the Navy. His wife Anita says that 'we had never heard of a
veteran getting deported', but today, from a new perspective emerging
after his deportation flight, 'now I'm trying to bring them back'.
About halfway through their fourth competitive-league season, a pre-teen
girls' basketball team representing a school in Hoover, Alabama,
were informed that they would lose access to their practice facilities
unless paying to play in the City of Hoover boys' recreational league.
They advanced to the title match, then received another surprise: were
they to win, they would not receive the trophy. And that's why the
second-place team were handed the championship trophy.
City Administrator Allan Rice later claimed that, while 'elite'
teams, who request to join the league, are a special case, officials
would work to 'provide proper recognition to all the teams that were
successful in that tournament'. The girls ultimately received a
commemorative coin and trophy at a private ceremony that they attended
in lieu of a city council meeting.
Roughly 15 minutes after leaving a restaurant to collect his children
from school, Vancouver's Rajesh Randev received a text message asking
'Do you drive a Tesla?', and the origin of the crack in his windscreen
became less mysterious. The sender was now-carless Uber driver
Mahmoud Esaeyh, whose key card had enabled accessing medical documents
in Randev's car and, thereby, Randev's phone number.
Tesla's non-response to the men's video demonstration of the issue
left an unsettled Randev musing: 'More than $70,000 to get this car,
and my family is not feeling safe right now.'
As soon as his county-issued SUV barrelled into the back of another vehicle at nearly twice the speed limit, St. Joseph County, Michigan, sheriff Mark Lillywhite wriggled into the passenger seat and prepared his answers - 'nope' to state troopers' request for a breath test, 'I'm not sure what happened and it is what it is' as his account of events', and an unsolicited 'No, I wasn't driving'. The vehicle's logs did not back up his account, only first responder Shawn Westfall's suspicions that the 47-year-old Lillywhite's seat belts and brakes had gone unused.
Kaylie Hursthouse wanted to help lift alcoholic Jamie Boultbee from
his depression via a romantic Valentine's night away, according to her
legal counsel. Lawyer Mike Kimberley said that both were 'totally
inebriated, angry, and whatever' at Derbyshire's Moorlands Izaak
Walton, where noises from their 'rough sex' in the wee hours prompted
a police visit and led three roomfuls of guests to request refunds.
When officers arrived, Hursthouse clarified that her visible
injuries were from 'head-butting someone a few days earlier out of
anger due to her losing a child', and Hursthouse and Boultbee were
ordered to share the costs for the refunds and for damaging the
bathroom door.