Let's begin in a sovereign state of confusion, for which we can thank
TikTok 'influencer' Brittney Dzialo, who visited a ticket agent for a
new flight after she and a friend missed their plane from Rome to
France. Once aboard, the two US women noticed that they were headed
for Tunis, not 'to Nice'. This revelation might have been aided by
the headrest covers emblazoned with 'Tunisia'.
Dzialo later reported that 'they are making us pay for a new flight',
'everyone is rude', and it had taken 'hours' for an airline worker to
find a flight out of Tunisia. Though 'my bestie chat' helped with the
process, it apparently couldn't overcome the punctuality issues that
had sparked the incident in the first place: Dzialo said that the pair
had to ask the captain to 'hold the plane' as they ran for the gate.
Two people who connected via a dating app decided to meet in an Aventura, Florida, hotel room. One of them was a foot model who sells her used trainers online. The other was Elmoncy Sercle, 28, who allegedly began the first date by asking to sniff her feet and purchase her shoes. When she expressed openness to only the second of these requests and cited a $1,000 price tag, he sprinted for the car park. Chasing him on the assumption that he'd stolen something from her, she ended up with arm and chest bruises allegedly inflicted by his SUV. The police caught up with him only after he attempted to book a room at the hotel again.
Roughly 60 years ago, South Korea's Choi Mal-ja was handed a 10-month
jail term for grievous bodily harm: while pinned roughly to the ground
during a sexual attack in Gimhae, the then-teenager bit off roughly
1.5 cm of her assailant's tongue. He received a suspended six-month
sentence for 'trespassing and intimidation', and he kept demanding
compensation for his injury, at one point doing so behind a knife at
her home.
Choi, now 79, says that she 'could not let this case go', though
she'd been warned that 'it would be like throwing eggs at a rock'.
Lower courts found no evidence of meeting the self-defence threshold,
but a Supreme Court ruling last year finally led to a court in Busan
revisiting her conviction. Prosecutors began their statement by
apologising to her and requesting that the conviction be overturned.
The US Naval Academy takes things seriously. Therefore, it went into
lockdown in response to a threat posted on an online chat platform.
As loudspeakers blared garbled alerts, misinformation ran rampant,
including reports of an active shooter and of an assailant in a police
uniform. These led a student armed with a parade rifle to whack a
responding cop in the head. Law enforcement responded by shooting the
student in the arm. Both suffered non-life-threatening injuries, and
plenty of others suffered frayed nerves.
As for the threatening post, it came from the computer of 'dismissed
midshipman' Jackson Fleming, 23, who was in another part of the
country at the time.
The FBI routinely conducts controlled burns of drug evidence at
external facilities, according to its Montana spokesperson Sandra
Barker. Fourteen Yellowstone Valley Animal Shelter workers learned
that their site was among these only after the smoke cloud from a kilo
of seized methamphetamine landed them in a Billings hospital for
oxygen-chamber treatment. City administrators explained that the fan
used by the not-for-profit to provide positive pressure during
processing of euthanised animals 'wasn't readily available'.
At least for the duration of contamination assessment and clean-up,
the shelter's 75 cats and dogs have been relocated, and four litters
of heavily exposed kittens are under close watch. Hearing of this
when he arrived to donate dog food, Jay Ettlemen expressed locals'
concerns thus: 'Why the hell are they destroying drugs inside the city
limits? There's so many other places, in the middle of nowhere.'
Animals elsewhere have had somewhat better luck.
A resident of Plattsburgh, New York, tried to return $93 in unwanted
products to pet-food company Chewy. Deciding to save FedEx workers
the effort of collecting the box left for them on the porch, a local
raccoon tore it open and enjoyed a feast. The resident's security
camera captured this, plus the animal returning on subsequent night to
check the outbound-mail bin for other goodies. Meanwhile, Chewy
issued a full refund.
Our next item tells of another patient animal – and a patient
human.
First responders who forced entry to a burning home in Aurora,
Illinois, found no humans inside to save, only a dog behind a gate.
That canine refused to let anyone grab its collar; instead, it ran
toward the blazing back of the building to direct the officer to its
lead. Body-camera footage shows the dog lying on the floor to wait
for it to be attached as the smoke grew thicker. Once the lead was
clipped in place, the dog rushed outside ahead of the officer.
For a different flavour of animal/human encounter, we head to New York, where two Cornell University undergraduates holding valid hunting licences killed a 55-kilo black bear and dragged its carcass into their dormitory's communal kitchen – several counties away from where the animal died – for skinning and butchering. Although someone lodged a complaint with the police, no charges were filed.
I have one more animal-death story for you.
A woman in Hudson, Florida, aggravated neighbour Craig Vogt by feeding
his pet peacocks after he'd asked her to desist. Vogt, 61, responded by
killing two of the birds, cooking them, eating them, and leaving a note
in her mailbox to warn that more of his peacocks would follow if she
persists. The note, detailing actions from throat-slitting all the
way to the frying pan, led Pasco County sheriff's officers to arrest
Vogt for aggravated animal cruelty. On the way to jail, he stated
that he'd sooner kill all his birds than let authorities remove them.
London's Metropolitan Police report that an operation involving more than 300 officers recently led to breaking up a gang suspected of smuggling more than 40,000 stolen phones to China within the last year alone. But it began with DIY recovery efforts by a single iPhone owner, one of many victims worried by officers' failure to act on user-supplied tracking details. Security staff at the device's location, a warehouse near Heathrow Airport, were eager to help, and soon a ringing box at their facility yielded a Christmas Eve bounty. Unboxing revealed 895 hapless phones ready for shipment to Hong Kong. According to the Met's Detective Inspector Mark Gavin, 28 raids prompted by this find netted at least 18 suspects and more than 2,000 further stolen devices, plus dozens of foil-wrapped phones in a car.
L![[IMG: Thievery on/of camera on Oxford Street]](images/red-handed.png)
ondon has earned such notoriety for offering easy pickings to street
thieves – who reportedly earn up to 300 pounds for each Apple handset
they pass onward – that a Saudi news crew decided to cover this unique
phenomenon at a 'phone-snatching hotspot' in August. Some of the
broadcaster's own equipment ended up getting nicked on Oxford Street.
Despite high-quality video, the perpetrator and Al Ekhbariya's kit
have not been found.
In a related story, also from back in August, an Asian man returning to a Dubai concert venue in search of his missing Samsung handset sought help from a cleaner, who reported seeing a woman scoop up a phone from below the relevant seat. So the owner filed a police report. Police investigations led the cleaner to confess that he had taken the device from where it had fallen, then placed it in his work locker – which was empty at the end of his shift. Evidence that it had been re-swiped did not dissuade a court from ordering him to pay for it and fining him.
A 73-year-old woman at New Zealand's Matiatia Ferry Terminal put her
SUV's four-wheel drive to the test, rocketing off the road and across
a footpath, narrowly past a bus and through an Auckland Transport bus
shelter, then through the terminal and off the wharf into the sea.
Bystanders threw life rings to the elderly motorist as her nosediving
vehicle began to submerge.
In return for mangled bicycles, twisted railings, and plenty of glass
shards, she received her SUV back. She also was handed an
infringement notice related to blood alcohol.
Authorities in China are rolling out a new toilet-paper system for
public conveniences. Bladder-owners at certain locations must scan a
QR code and watch an advert before squares of paper get dispensed.
Users do have the option of paying to bypass the advert or if they
need more squares. Officials have lauded this move as reducing waste,
since doling out set quantities cuts consumption. Some have responded
by carrying their own paper in case their phone battery dies.
Some tourist spots in China already use face-recognition software to
prevent any one person from receiving more than a 60 cm strip of bog
roll in a nine-minute interval. In practice, staff may intervene if
someone reports urgent circumstances such as diarrhoea.
In other dystopian news we have Kapil Raghu, whose path to US citizenship hit a bump in the road when police officers in Benton, Arkansas, pulled him over for a technical shortcoming of his food-delivery vehicle and spotted a narcotics violation – yes, they noticed a perfume bottle labelled 'Opium' in his car. Though he was released from jail upon recognition of the Yves Saint Laurent scent as a name only, it is taking longer to rectify another error: his work visa was listed as expired. He spent a month at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centre in Louisiana and still has 'deportation' status. In the words of wife Ashley Mays, this means that 'he can be immediately deported for [...] even jaywalking' and bars him from working. Raghu reports that Mays is ready to 'move to some other country, where we can live happily'.
A hiker near the summit of China's Mount Nama spotted a perfect photo opportunity on the 5,588-metre mountain's snow-covered slopes. The only thing spoiling the images he wanted members of his unlicensed climbing group to capture was his safety line, so he unclipped it. In the video they shared later, the 31-year-old man, named as Hong, stumbles on his crampons while preparing to pose, then disappears from view. Rescue crews found him lifeless about 200 metres down the mountainside.
F![[IMG:Humpty Dumpty had a great fall]](images/humpty.png)
inally, the police have asked for leads in the case of Humpty
Dumpty's forced removal from a miniature golf course in Cape May, New
Jersey. Two fence-scaling vandals were captured by multiple video
cameras as they rocked the rosy-cheeked egg statue back and forth on
its foundation until they cracked it free. Humpty was found dumped
several properties away. Ocean Putt Golf will try to put him back
together again.