Strange stories from around the world, some of which might be true...
- It has been a good week for Britain's zoos, with the first aardvark, named Dobby after the Harry Potter house elf, born at Chester Zoo in its 90-year history and the first anteater born at Dudley Zoo in its
85-year history. ● The Australian government has listed koalas as an endangered species across Queensland, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory because of land clearing, bushfires, disease, drought
and other factors. They were previously listed as vulnerable. ● A sociable pig that escaped from an allotment made its way to the Easington Colliery working men's club in County Durham last week where he wandered
between tables to get strokes from members, until he was finally lured outside with a bag of cheese and onion crisps. His owner promptly collected him after a Facebook appeal. ● A cat which briefly halted a
soccer match at Sheffield Wednesday's Hillsborough stadium after invading the pitch was captured and taken to a local vet to be scanned for a microchip. She was reunited with her owner who revealed that the cat had gone
missing seven months previously. ● Colombian power company employee Victor Hugo Lopez used a broomstick to rescue a sloth that had climbed an electrical pole and was hanging from a live line. Lopez climbed the
pole and talked to the sloth in a soothing voice until it climbed onto the broomstick as he held it out. The sloth was released unharmed back into the wild. ● A wild 14' 10"- (4.5m)-long crocodile in Indonesia
that has had a tyre stuck around its body for the last six years has finally been freed. There had been concerns that as the crocodile grew the tyre would suffocate it, but world-reknowned experts had failed to catch
it over the last few years. A local bird catcher with experience of trapping other animals set up a rope trap tied to a tree beside the river where the crocodile had been seen and baited it with dead birds. After three
weeks and several failures the crocodile was caught and the trapper was able to saw through the 1' 8"- (50cm)-diameter tyre before releasing the animal.
- Astronomers believe they have identified the first potentially life-supporting planet orbiting a white dwarf star. White dwarves are stars which have burned up their nuclear fuel and shed their outer layers, but were
not big enough to become black holes. The identified planet is reported as being 60 times closer to its sun than Earth is to ours, and is 117 light years away. ● Probably to the delight of astronomers using
terrestrial telescopes 40 of the latest batch of 49 SpaceX Starlink sattelites were destroyed by solar radiation from a geomagnetic storm before they could be moved into their orbital locations. The satellites burned
up as they fell back through the atmosphere. Starlink, whose aim is to provide satellite internet access worldwide, has become the bane of ground-based astronomers with the clusters of satellites causing streaks across
observations with a number of major observatories and organisations uniting to protest the scheme.
- A 5,000-year-old chalk sculture of a drum that was found in the grave of three children in East Yorkshire has been hailed as "the most important piece of prehistoric art" found in Britain since three
similar drums were found in North Yorkshire in 1889. It is thought that the drum sculptures were buried with the children as talismans. ● Over 18,000 pottery fragments found at Athribis, some 124 miles (200km)
north of Luxor, Egpyt, were 'ostraca', fragments of broken pottery pieces written on using reeds or hollowed sticks to hold ink. The fragments include trade records, receipts, lists of names and lines written as
punishment by naughty schoolchildren [Little Jenefra, perhaps... -Ed]. The inscriptions were in Demotic, Greek, Arabic and Egyptian hieroglyphs. ● A new team is on the way to the Antarctic to try to locate the
wreck of Sir Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance. Shackleton recorded in his log the location where the ship became stuck in ice, was punctured and eventually sunk, determined with a sextant and chronometer by
his navigator Frank Worsley, but previous attempts to locate the wreck at the given location have failed. The new team have reanalysed the chronometer type used and believe it might have been in error, suggesting that
the wreck is further east. Even if they have the right location the wreck, which is thought to be 9,840' (3,000m) below the surface, will be hard to spot. ● A new study has found that modern Europeans can trace
their origins to just three tribal groups over the last 10,000 years - hunter-gatherers, sheepherders on the Steppes and Anatolian farmers.
- After the revelation reported last issue that North Korea's missile development is funded by stolen cryptocurrency, this week it has been reported that 74% of ransomware (where a computer system is encrypted
with a promise - usually empty - of decryption upon payment of a ransom) revenue goes to criminal hackers linked to Russia. ● The Colombian military has seized a million-dollar submarine thought to be bound
for Central America. Inside was four tonnes of cocaine with a street value of more than £100m ($136m). Three Colombian nationals and an Ecuadorian wanted on drug trafficking charges in the US, were arrested.
● London's Metropolitan Police, already under fire for allegations of corruption and racism, and whose Commissioner has been forced to resign after political manoeuvring by the Mayor of London, are faced with
more embarrassment after it was reported that Julian Bennett, the Commander who wrote the force's drug strategy, faces a gross misconduct hearing over allegations that he took cannabis, LSD and magic mushrooms while
on holiday in France. ● A convicted murderer who escaped from the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility was recaptured during a police chase after the car that he had stolen ran out of fuel. ● Missouri
Governor Mike Parson has had his request to have criminal charges filed against a journalist who identified a major security flaw on the state government website thrown out by a judge. The journalist had revealed that
the full Social Security numbers of teachers and other school employees were in the site's HTML source code, unencrypted, and had given the site admins time to fix the mistake before his story was published. Because the
source code of a web site is freely viewable in most browsers (at the simplest level, by pressing CTRL-U in Firefox, for example) the judge ruled that the journalist had not done anything criminal. ● A passenger
on an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., tried to break into the cockpit and open one of the exit doors. Passengers and staff managed to subdue him, with one flight attendant hitting him on the
head with a coffee pot. The flight was diverted to Missouri. ● Airport police at Orlando International Airport were led a merry chase by a drunk woman riding a motorised suitcase after she was refused boarding
to a flight. ● An 80-year-old Chicago woman who was being held hostage in her house was rescued by police after her daughter, who lives in Seattle, noticed that she had not messaged to say that she had solved that
day's Wordle puzzle, and did not reply to other messages. Her daughter requested a wellbeing check on her mother by Chicago police. ● An emergency call handler in Durham, England, managed to save a woman in danger
3,000 miles [4,828km] away after the woman used a live chat system to report a man breaking into her house. The woman lived in Durham, Canada, but had mistakenly used the English online emergency system. The call
handler kept the chat open while her colleagues contacted the Durham Regional Police Service in Ontario. The intruder fled the house when police arrived but was arrested 30 minutes later.
- The Brazilian government has reneged on promises made at the COP26 climate summit to slow deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. The area of trees cut down last month was five times greater than in January 2021.
● A sensor buoy off Vancouver Island has recorded a record-breaking rogue wave 58' (17.6m) tall. ● A drought in the northwestern Spanish region of Galicia has led to a reservoir on the border with Portugal
draining to 15% of its normal level, revealing the village of Aceredo which was submerged when the area was flooded in the 1990s to create the reservoir. Among the houses with partially-collapsed roofs are a rusted
car, stacks of bottles outside a former café and a drinking water fountain with its water still running. ● A small tsunami that swept the globe in August 2021 has been traced to five concurrent earthquakes below
the uninhabited South Sandwich Islands in the southern Atlantic.
- The Wordle game continues to make the news, not just for crime solving [see above]. After its acquisition by the New York Times players were assured that their statistics - games won, winning streaks &c -
would be retained, but for many that initially seemed to depend on the address used to go to the game. Using the old address - https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/ - seemed to keep the stats, but many players going
straight to the new one - https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle - found that their stats were reset. At the time of writing the powerlanguage address just redirects to the nytimes one. The world list also appears to
have been censored since the NYT takeover to remove some profanities, but - and most confusingly - earlier this week the game had different answers - by a single letter, but still... - depending on which address
players went to. [Here at The Irregular we are at 27 played, 93% won & 19 current/max streak. -Ed]
IN BRIEF: Parents of small children beware. There are plans for a full-length film based on the Baby Shark earworm video... ● Englishman Paul Bishop, 63, was on a night out in Benidorm in 2011,
drank too much cider and was sick in a bin, losing his false teeth in the process. Eleven years later Spanish authorities have sent them to him. They had been found in a landfill and DNA records led to him... ●
The country of Turkey is reportedly planning to rebrand itself as Türkiye. ● Northern Powergrid, which maintains electricity supplies in the northeast of England, recently mailed out compensation cheques
to customers whose power was cut off for days by Storm Arwen last November. A number of customers in Halifax and Newcastle have - thanks to a clerical error - been sent cheques made out for trillions of pounds. One that
went viral online was for £2.3tn ($3.12). ● A bored security guard at the Yeltsin Center in Yekatarinburg, Russia, has been accused of using a ballpoint pen to doodle eyes on a Soviet-era painting of three
abstract - and eyeless - figures. ● Lockheed Martin have modified a Black Hawk helicopter to be able to take off, fly itself around obstacles and land autonomously. ● Reports of a loud bang and shaking
across parts of Lancashire and Merseyside earlier this week were initially thought to be an earthquake but finally confirmed by BAE Systems as a sonic boom from one of their Typhoon aircraft. ● Mazda are having
to recall some 2014-17 cars in Washington State as a faulty component leaves their radios permanently set to the National Public Radio network, as well as disabling navigation and bluetooth. ● A group of teenagers
who fell through ice on a Missouri lake were saved by firefighters who were doing ice rescue training on the lake at the time. ● Firefighters in Somerset were called to rescue a woman from a tree after she became
stuck, having climbed it to try to catch her pet parrot that had escaped. Reports did not mention the fate of the parrot.
CORONAVIRUS ROUND-UP: New Zealand authorities dispersed several hundred ant-vaccine-mandate protesters who had camped outside the Parliament building by using the public address system to play loops of
Barry Manilow songs and "Macarena", as well as turning on the lawn sprinklers. ● An Ohio man who wanted to get in on the protests in the Canadian capital Ottawa decided to phone in a bomb threat, to
divert police from the protest. Unfortunately the 20-year-old from Akron called the authorities in Ottowa, a village in Ohio about 154 miles (248km) west of where he lived instead of Ottowa, Ontario, 545 miles
(877km) northeast... The Ohio police were reported as mulling charging him.
UPDATES: The first image from the James Webb Space Telescope has been released. The picture of 18 multiple-exposed stars is part of work to align its reflectors. The first proper image is expected in
June or July. ● Astronomer Bill Gray, who identified the rocket section heading for an impact on the Moon has corrected his initial report of its origin. Rather than part of a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster he
now says it is a Chinese rocket stage launched in 2014 for a lunar mission. It is due to hit the Moon on March 4th. ● Elon Musk has blamed the "fun police" for making Tesla recall cars to
remove the option to make fart and goat noises as pedestrian warnings. ● The Enigma 555.55 carat black diamond sold for £3.16m ($4.3m).
Little Jennifer had come home from school early. "Why are you back so soon," her mother asked her.
"Well, Mummy," Little Jennifer said, "the headmaster was teaching us a boring history lesson and I was the only one who correctly answered a question."
"Gosh, what was the question?"
Little Jennifer smiled as only she could. "It was 'Who threw that eraser?'"
