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April 2026

2 April 2026

Our first item spotlights yet another cryptocurrency-related gaffe. For a more eye-catching press release about seizing more than five million euros' worth of crypto assets from tax evaders, the South Korean police included images of the evidence. These attested that the group had followed best practice by using an offline wallet device and only a hand-written record of the mnemonic recovery phrase. Yes, the images sufficed to let an observant viewer unlock the tokens within, transfer a small amount into the wallet to cover transactions fees, and then move the Pre-Retogeum tokens elsewhere. Korea's National Tax Service are not optimistic about finding out where.

A charity-shop volunteer in Southland, New Zealand, noticed a pungent aroma emanating from the donated-items area so gave priority to the rucksack responsible. The banknotes inside, worth about 2,000 euros, weren't especially smelly, but the plastic bags of marijuana were. The police were summoned when two agitated 16-year-olds drove up to the shop to explain that they'd misplaced their bag outside while waiting for car repairs at a nearby workshop. They didn't get it back.
The cops 'de-escalate[d] the pair', arrested them, and searched the just-repaired car. They found further dope, scales, cash of suspicious origin, an air gun (adults-only in New Zealand), and a police scanner.

In 2024, Georgia's Colt Gray executed a firearm-assisted outburst that executed two teachers and two schoolmates in Georgia. Before that, Colin Gray had tried to soothe his son's mental disturbance by offering to let him visit a school therapist... and by buying him an AR-15-style rifle for Christmas to nurture their bond via hunting together. After Colt bonded with the weapon itself, which he slept with, his mother urged her (now ex-)husband to revoke Colt's access to it. She cited the 14-year-old's shrine to school shooters as one reason for concern.
A jury in Barrow County has found Colin, 55, criminally responsible for murder and guilty of cruelty to children and reckless behavior. Colt's day in court meanwhile has not yet come; he has pleaded not guilty to, in all, 55 felonies and is being tried as an adult.

Nearer the banal end of the court-of-law spectrum lies (literally) Michigan's Kimberly D. Carroll. During her virtual hearing for a civil debt claim, she turned on her video stream from what appeared to be a vehicle in motion, prompting 33rd District Court judge Michael K. McNally to exclaim 'You cannot be driving! Ma'am, what are you doing?' Her response 'I'm not driving' elicited the response 'How would you be on the [claimed] left-hand side if you’re a passenger in the front seat?', and the dialogue degenerated to Carroll arguing that she didn't have permission to show the driver on camera, offering to pull over, and insisting that 'No, I'm not [lying], sir'. The judge had the last word, with a default judgement and 'You lied to me'.

A rather more complex question came before London's Court of Appeal: a man sought to take over paternal responsibility for the baby listed on the child's birth certificate as the offspring of his identical twin. After explaining that she had had sex with the two men within four days of each other and supports the responsibility claim, the mother was told by Judge Sir Andrew McFarlane that 'DNA testing establishes [only] that the child's biological father is one of these twins', though reasonably priced tests might be able to tell beyond a 50% chance which is the father before the child reaches adulthood.
Since 'failure to prove [the paternity listed on the certificate] means that that fact is not proved [but also] does not mean that the contrary is proved', neither twin will have parental responsibility, pending further arguments.

Tennessee's 50-year-old Angela Lipps was babysitting four children at her home when US marshals hauled her away at gunpoint and jailed her to await trial for organised bank fraud committed in North Dakota. She had never visited North Dakota or travelled by aeroplane until her court date half a year later. That was also when the Fargo police recognised that an AI-based face-matching system had erred in linking her to videos of a woman using a fake military ID and in declaring her a fugitive from justice.
After her court appearance, local defence attorneys covered her food and a night in a hotel, and an area not-for-profit organisation helped her return to Tennessee. Upon her return, however, she found that her home, car, and dog had been taken away while she was in jail for six months and unable to pay bills.

At a friend's urging, Derbyshire's Tommy Lynch headed straight to hospital because his skin had turned blue overnight. Concerned medics at Queen's Hospital in Burton, Staffordshire, whisked the 42-year-old Lynch through the reception area, 'put me straight on oxygen, asking me all these questions - I had about 10 doctors all around me at one point'. Then a pre-blood-draw swab came away blue, revealing the source of his new hue: dye from bed sheets he'd just received as a gift. After a week of bath after bath at home, Lynch recounted: 'I was mortified, but they said I'd given them a good laugh. They don't usually have funny stories in A&E.'

Contamination of a different sort occurred in Fontana, California, where a syrup lorry overturned in the westbound lanes of a roadway. State transport-department crews armed with an absorbent material battled the substance in vain - it was simply too sticky. In the end, good old-fashioned water came to the rescue. After a nine-hour pause in traffic, the highway was finally reopened.

A clean-up-related caper on the other end of the country experienced complications, due to what the Marion County, Florida, sheriff's office called a 'crappy plan'. Surveillance footage shows a man attempting to drag a septic tank away from a construction site with his 2013 Toyota Corolla. Unable to cajole the tank into position atop his car, the man gave up and fled when another vehicle arrived. However, he came back the next day, this time succeeding, with the aid of a ramp and a U-Haul truck whose license plates and ID number he'd obscured with tape. A detective was able to identify him as Alfio Nocifora nonetheless, and he was taken into custody.

Kouri Richins is a Utah-based mother of three who published a children's book about grief in the wake of her husband's sudden death in 2022. She could write about her experience of several other topics also, such as how to forge documents for multiple life-insurance policies not long before the insured dies from a fentanyl-laced drink.
A recently-concluded court case, in which the jury took three hours to find her guilty of murder, revealed also that she'd used trial and error to learn the correct dose for poisoning one's cuckolded spouse: Among the 40 witnesses was her housekeeper, who testified that Richins had asked her for 'something stronger' than the usual pain pills to help 'an investor Richins knew'. A bite from the Valentine's Day sandwich Richins handed her husband a few days later left him breaking out in hives and reaching for his son's EpiPen. He died in March.

I'll go ahead and include this one, which I mislaid in October: The California Highway Patrol states that shrapnel from munitions that 'detonated overhead prematurely' during celebrations to mark 250 years of the US Marine Corps struck and damaged vehicles on Interstate 5. After this, two of these vehicles, which were part of Vice President JD Vance's protection force for the event, were sent to keep the road closed (Vance's communications director had initially argued that closing the relevant portion of the interstate highway for the duration of live fire over it would be merely an effort 'to oppose the training exercises that ensure our Armed Forces are the deadliest and most lethal fighting force in the world'). Meanwhile, debris falling 'like pebbles from the sky' over a wider area prompted the Marines to cancel further artillery demonstrations over the highway.

Where else can we look for heroes? How about Maryland, the home of Dayton Webber, a quadruple amputee who gained fame for competing in the nationally televised professional American Cornhole League. Perhaps not. While driving several work colleagues through the suburbs of Washington, DC, Webber got into an argument with front-seat passenger Badrick Wells. Harsh words between the two 27-year-olds apparently escalated to Webber shooting Wells twice in the head and asking the others for help in ditching the body. Refusing, they exited the vehicle, then helped set in motion a search for Webber. The body was found dumped in a garden, and Webber was found at a nearby hospital, where he'd sought treatment for an unspecified injury.

For other cheerful news, we'll be going to Brazil, where a group of eight people had nothing better to do in Rio de Janeiro than set upon a hapless capybara and begin beating the animal with sticks and iron bars. Footage from CCTV cameras shows the group, at least two of whom were minors, inflicting severe head trauma, back injuries, and other serious wounds on the 65 kg male Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris. All eight Homo sapiens have been taken into custody. The capybara's confinement, at the Wildlife Care Center of private Estacio University, is bound to be longer.

This crime too is noteworthy for its scale: a shipment of Nestle KitKat bars has been hijacked as Easter nears. A lorry bound for Poland from a production facility in central Italy has gone missing. That includes the vehicle itself and '413,793 units of [the brand's] new chocolate range', which comes to 'more than 12 tons of our chocolate'. The relevant batch codes are known, and local law-enforcement authorities are on the lookout for attempted resale.

There hasn't been a teacher-sex Clippings item for a while. Perhaps Washington high-school teacher and youth-group leader Madeline Gregory was trying to rectify this when engaging in trysts with a 16-year-old student in such locations as a classroom closet, a storage locker in the gym, and the bushes outside Sprague High School. The case came to police attention for the first time just after Valentine's Day, thanks to the boy's mother investigating her son's newfound habit of frantic typing on his phone into the wee hours.
There were text-message notes such as 'I don't want to lose you' from the 29-year-old woman, who seems to have been desperate for her student of two years not to break off the relationship. She'd told him of her marital issues, threatened to kill herself if abandoned, and ordered the youth not to date anyone else in the community - which has a population below 600 (excluding sex-crime reporters).

For roughly three years, a suburban Johannesburg road has been showing the effects of multiple botched or half-hearted attempts to repair a burst water pipe. Mayoral candidate Helen Zille has now stepped in, or dog-paddled in, to draw attention to what she portrays as mismanagement by city authorities. Wearing a wetsuit, snorkeling mask, and pink-and-white swimming cap, the 75-year-old Zille paid a visit to the murky mid-road trench, where television news channels recorded her tips for 'a free and wonderful Saturday-afternoon snorkel'.

Finally, the staff of an animal shelter in Sebastian, Florida, heard about Midnite, a cat that had been handed over to be put down because of severe intestinal issues. Stepping in to take charge of the six-year-old feline, which had stopped eating, they opted for surgery in case it might help. After the operation proved to be a success, the HALO No-Kill Rescue Shelter asked online 'Ever wondered where all your hair ties disappear to?' and gave the answer that veterinarians had removed a 26-hair-tie blockage from the cat's guts.

26 April 2026

Upon finding an abandoned bag outside Mayor of London Sadiq Khan's home, a passer-by did the responsible thing and contacted the police. Within it were items for which the Metropolitan police had been (ir)responsible: an official-issue pistol and sub-machine gun, suitable ammunition, and a taser. Five officers involved in providing security for Khan have been put on desk duties for the duration of a review by the Met's Directorate of Professional Standards.

A couple in Pennsylvania rang the Uber driver who had just dropped them off, asking him to return so that they could search for jewellery that had fallen from their bag. He replied that he had to keep moving. It was not until the next morning that he found their 'bag contents' in the boot of his car - and rang the Exeter Township Police. Officer Karen Grycon secured them and reported: 'Turns out the passengers had left behind a ball python in the Uber' after attending a reptile show.

A rather different menagerie was on show at a UK home whose residents recognised that their dog situation had, in the RSPCA's words, 'rapidly grown out of control amid extenuating family circumstances'. Online reactions to the charity's rescue of more than 250 poodle-cross dogs from the premises led the RSPCA to stress that its photo of dozens of dogs in the living room had not been AI-generated or otherwise faked.
While not deeming legal charges warranted, they could not say the same about most of the 4,200 cases of 'overwhelmed' homes (with 10 or more animals at the same address) they have handled in the last year.

In other news about briefly full households, we have Louisiana's Shamar Elkins. Upset that his wife had filed for divorce, he confronted her outside, leaving her with serious gunshot wounds, then opened fire on those in the family home, proceeding to kill seven of his children (aged 1-14) plus an unrelated child. A ninth child, age 13, sustained injuries from leaping from the roof, while a wounded adult female ran to a nearby home for help. Elkins then added car-jacking to the list of charges he'd have faced if the police hadn't killed him in the ensuing chase.
Of the incident, officially termed a 'domestic disturbance' and a 'family annihilation', Shreveport city-council member Grayson Boucher lamented that 'we've more than doubled our homicide' figure 'because of one act of domestic violence'.

Our next story involves more than 30 bodies, but the miscreant on whose premises they were found didn't kill anyone. Yorkshire funeral director Robert Bush has pleaded guilty to hoarding bodies over a span of 12+ years whilst presenting the families with purposefully mislabelled ashes of unknown origin, some of which ended up in tattoos. Bush, 48, has also admitted to keeping donations that had been earmarked for 12 charities, and his company Legacy sold upward of 170 bogus funeral plans. Also, more than 1,000 belongings intended for burial alongside the deceased - from love letters to medals - were found piled in corners or bagged with rubbish.
One of the 240 people whose victim-impact statements may feature at the trial is Tristan Essex, who recalled warning signs: 'Grandma was changed into different coffins every time we viewed her', though the initial switch from the coffin requested may have been in response to the family's complaint about a blood-spattered frill and 'black, thick mould around the inside'. Also, 'there was an awful smell in the funeral director's'. Now he knows why.

Those who found the previous item disturbing might want to skip this one. A man followed a fellow bus passenger into her home in Walsall, broke through her bathroom door, and announced 'I just want fun with you'. The soundtrack for the ensuing beating and rape was a diatribe against Muslims, her screams, and the objection 'I am not a Muslim; I am a Sikh'. He took away the 20-something victim's jewellery, mobile phone, and comfort in venturing outside without her partner.
Apprehended in Birmingham two days later, 32-year-old John Ashby initially pleaded innocent, then cited cocaine use and mental issues as excuses. Responding that these 'did not even start to explain' the offences, by a 'deeply unpleasant racist and Islamaphobe', Judge Edward Pepperall issued a life sentence (i.e., at least 14 years in prison). Calling him an extreme danger to the public, the judge also mentioned Ashby having once grabbed a woman in public because he felt 'sexually frustrated'.

A children's egg hunt on Easter Sunday turned up a bonus: one family at the privately arranged event, held at Los Angeles County's De Forest Park, discovered what seemed to be leftover Halloween decorations. When the police, summoned to verify this, eventually reached the correct location, they announced that the items were a genuine human skull and jawbone, which they took into custody for county medical examiners to investigate.

I have featured items about wrong-sperm lawsuits against fertility clinics before. Our next story ramps this up a notch, with a white Florida couple's implanted embryo emerging into the world as a girl of South Asian heritage. After genetic tests confirmed that Steven Mills and Tiffany Score's daughter, Shea, was not genetically related to either of them, IVF Life, Inc., identified the South Asian couple whose egg retrieval and embryo transfer occurred in the relevant span of time.
Stressing their 'intensely strong' bond with Shea, the couple are focused more on the fate of their unaccounted-for embryos. They want IVF Life to pay for genetic tests of all children born in the five-year window since their three embryos entered storage. The clinic, in turn, have announced plans to cease operation in May.

Maryland's Karen Jeanette Trevino might have received a brand-new roof at zero cost. A week after she appeared in large-claims court at the behest of a debt-collection firm, six Guatemalan construction workers she'd hired from a nearby town were putting the final touches on their roughly $10,000 roofing job at her Cambridge home when federal immigration agents swooped in.
Permanent US resident Bryan Polanco, who livestreamed the half hour of proceedings from the rooftop, told several people that Trevino had explicitly threatened to sicc immigration authorities on anyone returning to finish the job or collect payment. She might not have known that it is a state felony to obtain services or shirk payment for them through leverage of anyone's immigration status.
At last report, however, prosecutors had not made a decision and the open vanful of tools, shingles, and equipment was still sitting in Trevino's driveway.

The Facebook-hosted video stream of a 2023 baptism in the garden pool of Birmingham's Life Changing Ministries was cut off abruptly. This was because 61-year-old Robert Smith's life had changed in an unexpected manner: it too cut off abruptly. The institution's pastor, Cheryl Bartley, 48, is due to appear in court in two weeks' time to face a charge of gross-negligence manslaughter by drowning.

Finally, 13 April saw cadets with the Finnish Air Force's reserve-officer piloting course go on training exercises. Members of the public saw the results in the form of several phallic flight patterns. Flight data and radar-tracking sites show that at least four of the routes traced from student flights from Jyväskylä resembled a penis. Though the aerial penes varied in execution, they were convincing enough for an Air Force spokesperson to assure the newspaper Iltalehti that the pilots involved will be subject to 'disciplinary consequences'.

29 April 2026

Let's resume where we left off: goofing around in aircraft. Investigation of a 2021 incident in which two fighter aircraft collided on their way to Daegu, South Korea, has pinpointed the cause: the pilots had been focusing more on capturing photos and videos than on details such as safety. Upon noticing the wingman taking pictures on a mobile phone, the lead jet's pilot asked a co-pilot to capture a video of the wingman, who responded with manoeuvres that created a better view and brought the two aircraft unavoidably close, with the lead aircraft's emergency descent unable to prevent a crash.
Both pilots escaped unscathed; the same could not be said of the jets, whose repair bills amounted to half a million euros. The military recouped a tenth of this by fining the wingman, who might regret having announced his intent to photographically commemorate his last flight with his unit. He now works for a commercial airline.

Responding to allegations of inappropriate relations with a married aide, Texas's Representative Tony Gonzales, 45, denounced all claims of sexual impropriety as 'blackmail'. However, she had retained the messages from him that reportedly led her to question her job's worth (since his communication dealt exclusively with her attractiveness) and led her husband to leave her. After her suicide by self-immolation brought the month-long affair to light, he told the House Ethics Committee not to worry: God had forgiven him for his 'mistake' and 'lapse in judgement'. The married father of six has since left office of his own volition, thereby retaining his pension benefits.

A 58-year-old woman who worked near sheep on a Greek island didn't worry when flies began swarming around her face during a heat wave. She grew more concerned when jaw pain a week later gave way to a persistent cough and further symptoms. Medical entomologist Ilias Kioulos explained that 'she sought medical attention after she sneezed and "worms" started coming out of her nose'. Medics proceeded to remove a colony of parasitic-fly larvae, plus a pupa, from her nasal passages. Freed of the budding sheep bot flies, she has now recovered fully.

In other animal-related news, Kaleb Mickens, a Texas 'influencer' with the moniker Cash Cartier, rang emergency dispatchers to report that his dog Soldier had rendered his girlfriend Sheila Cuevas unresponsive. Animal-control officers hauled the dog away, putting Soldier down 11 days later. They then recognised that the canine had not caused Cuevas's puncture wounds, broken ribs, drugging, or ultimate death.
In court, several female members of the multi-level marketing 'training team' via which Mickens had raked in as much as $20,000 a week described torture and other acts of what the Tarrant County district attorney called personal devastation. Mickens, 34, has been assigned 40 years in prison, alongside a few years for other assaults.

Two more people who shouldn't have anything to do with animals are a 61-year-old man and 43-year-old woman from Lititz, Pennsylvania. Seated on a bench at ZooAmerica, they noticed a 'commotion' seven metres away and looked up from their mobile phones. Bystanders were tending to minor injuries suffered by the couple's 17-month-old son. The boy had squeezed through an outer barrier, whereupon one of the three wolves in the enclosure 'instinctively and naturally grabbed onto the child's hand with its mouth', reported the Derry Township police. They reported also that the parents are to be charged with misdemeanour child endangerment.

Foul play is suspected in connection with reports of Jonathan's death at age 193. An X post purportedly from the veterinarian responsible for the care of giant Seychelles tortoise Jonathan, often described as the world's oldest living land animal, announced that he had 'passed away today peacefully' at his island home and will be 'missed more than words can say'. Later words, by the island's governor, included 'the real Joe Hollins does not have an X account' and comments that the account bearing his name is involved in a racket soliciting cryptocurrency donations.

Ultra-marathon runner and former Royal Marine David Parrish set out to raise funds for Scottish Mountain Rescue in memory of close friend Luke Ireland, a Royal Marine who died in 2014 while running in the Scottish Highlands. Setting himself the target of the fastest completion of the demanding 376-kilometre Cape Wrath trail, the 35-year-old Parrish ended up following too closely in his friend's footsteps: he was found dead in Kintail, a remote mountain area relatively close to the trail's starting point, in the north-west Highlands.

The NL Times brings us the harrowing tale of a a Dutch man who put a low-cost tattoo machine from AliExpress to extensive use, branding his former girlfriend, 52, with more than 250 renderings of his name (Hans), his initials, and claims of owning her. Though fixated on branding portions of her body that he perceived to be the focus of other men's physical attention, he ended up covering more than 90% of her skin with ink over several years. Andy Han, with the organisation Spijt van Tattoo, or Tattoo Regret, expressed disappointment that the authorities had found it difficult to prove her lack of consent. Stating that she had acquiesced only from a position of drug- and alcohol-dependence amid 'stalking, threatening, and intimidation', he argued that 'any reasonable person knows someone wouldn't voluntarily get tattoos near the eye, on the nose, or on the ear'. On the positive side, he reported solid progress with removing the 'sign of control and possession', thanks largely to donations from the public.

Cruise passenger Diana Sanders asked personnel aboard the Carnival Radiance to help her figure out how she'd wound up unconscious, bruised, and concussed at the foot of a staircase in a crew-only portion of the ship, but the CCTV footage in question had vanished. The 45-year-old nurse received answers in federal court in Miami: she'd been served at least 14 shots of tequila over nine hours long past the point of 'swaying, stammering, slurring her speech, [...] acting belligerent'. She fell shortly after leaving one of the bars that her attorney, Spencer Aronfeld, alleged are deliberately crammed into 'every nook and cranny of the ship' for maximal profit.
'Passengers have a responsibility to drink responsibly, but cruise lines also have a responsibility to serve responsibly', he contended. The jury agreed, finding Carnival 60% responsible for the brain and other injuries Sanders suffered. They awarded her $250,000 more than the $50,000 requested.

Harvey Marcelin is an octogenarian who created multiple Facebook accounts carrying the profile photo of one Susan Leyden, an unfortunate woman who'd visited his flat to see a friend and never left. Prosecutors allege that Marcelin, 87, bludgeoned Susan Leyden to death, placed some parts of her body in plastic bags, and abandoned her torso - in her own wheeled luggage - on a Brooklyn street near his home. When arrested, Marcelin was in the clothes he'd worn when buying the saws used in the dismemberment, with the corresponding Home Depot receipt still in the pocket.
His attorney paints the murder as the work of the homeless woman who told prosecutors what she'd seen when showing up to feed her crack and heroin habit with Marcelin.
A judge had ruled that knowing Marcelin's history could prejudice the jury at his trial. In 1963, he shot, cornered, and then killed his girlfriend. In 1985, a year after his release on lifetime parole, he stabbed a new girlfriend to death in their flat. And in 2019, he told a parole board 'I give you my word, I will never re-offend'.

Our next story too features a beating that escalated, but the similarities pretty much end there. A resident of a block of flats in Geiselhöring expressed annoyance at a neighbour for pounding meat for schnitzels too loudly. A literal slap in the face from the annoyed 61-year-old prompted the amateur chef to summon the police. He asked them to settle the dispute, but they merely took statements about the assault and separated the two neighbours.

For fairness and balance, I ought to showcase a positivish side of taking advice from AI. An Indian man has described gaining handsomely from Google assistant Gemini's recommendation to target conservatives as a MAGA 'influencer'. He boasts of having made enough money to complete medical school by posing as an attractive blonde woman, yclept Emily Hart, to trick 10,000-plus 'super dumb' Republicans into paying for AI-generated images of Hart nude, clad in US-flag bikinis, etc. and following his daily 'pro-Christian, pro-Second-Amendment, pro-life, anti-abortion, anti-woke, and anti-immigration' posts.
He put 30-50 minutes a day into his fake influencer, and 'the algorithm loved it'. Since people able to influence his medical career and immigration status might not, he remains unidentified.
While Democrats proved less likely to fall for 'AI slop', he claims that they still helped fuel his success, via their outrage.

I'll wind things up with a cat that became wound up. Called into action for a rescue operation, the Overland Park, Kansas, police found a feline that had sought to evade its annual veterinary appointment by retreating into the inner workings of a mechanical recliner, then become stuck. Saw-wielding firefighters and animal-control officers ended up resolving matters by cutting through the chair. The cat came out of the encounter in better shape and is in good health, as confirmed by the vet.

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