Weird news - Penalty on man for forcing plane to dump fuel

Over the years, especially after 9/11, airlines have stopped becoming lenient on passengers who cause a ruckus on a flight. This can happen often enough when people have had too much to drink, something that causes weird behavior and which can threaten the safety of other passengers, or atleast cause them major inconveniences. In this specific case, the drunk man caused a huge ruckus on the flight and the pilot had to land back at the airport from which he had taken off, before doing that, he had to dump some of the fuel that he had loaded on the plane in order to have a safe landing (link to article):

A few preflight drinks can get expensive rather quickly. But for David Stephen Young, a round of six alcoholic beverages he drank before his flight from Calgary to London prompted a rash of unruly behavior, culminating in an abrupt turnaround, an arrest and a hefty fine of more than $16,000. Young, 44, was ordered by a judge to pay WestJet for 20,000 tons of wasted fuel the pilot dumped over Alberta to safely land the aircraft back in Calgary on Jan. 4. The fine came after he pleaded guilty last week to resisting arrest and failing to comply with safety instructions during the fight, according to USA Today.

Weird news - Buying a flat, and finding a body inside

This is truly a horrific experience. Imagine buying a house, opening it and then finding a body inside. For most people, such an experience would make them have a lot of negative thoughts about the house, with a number of house buyers would then refuse to live in such a house. And after six months of death, investigating the death would also be difficult, since even with a reduced amount of decomposition, a post-mortem would not reveal as many details given the elapsed time period. One wonders about the people who committed the murder but then were brazen enough to leave the body in a bed in a house which they then sold off; they would have known that the body would be found and eventually investigated (link to article):

The police have found a six-month-old decomposed body hidden in a box bed in a flat in Bhopal’s Bagsewania area on Sunday evening. The flat has reportedly been locked since June last year and the owners have not been seen since that time. The police is still not sure whether the recovered body is that of a man or a woman. “Everything will become clear after the post-mortem and DNA test. We are searching for the flat owners as only they will be able to reveal how the body reached here. Prima facie it appears to be a case of murder. The body had long hair, so we are suspecting it to be that of a woman,” SP South Sampat Upadhyay said. Police sources say the body had been kept on a mattress and wrapped with a cotton blanket, among other clothes inside the bed box. Even though the body appears to have been lying there for six months, it had not decomposed, instead it had become mummified.

Weird news - Stealing a giant bronze hippo

Sometimes when an item is stolen, people stop and wonder as to how it can happen. Consider a large large animal sculpture in a park, and when I say large, I mean large. This hippo sculpture, made of bronze (and hence somewhat valuable) weighted as much as 1500 pounds, so obviously it was not the work of one person. In fact, it must have required some heavy machinery to have moved the sculpture, and would have taken some time, so a bit puzzling about how no one noticed that the sculpture was being stolen (link to article):

A giant hippo is missing in England. No, it is not real, and yes, it is made of bronze. The 6.5-foot goliath statue, weighing at a whopping 1,500 pound was reported stolen on Friday, CNN reported Kent police saying in a news release. Reportedly, the hippo is believed to have been stolen when someone forced their way into Chilstone Garden Ornaments in Tunbridge Wells.

Weird news - Stealing the ATM

You would have heard of people trying to rob a bank, making many different strategies and mechanisms - in fact, movies about major bank robberies show many different weird methods of doing the same. The same extends for trying to get money when it is on the way, this includes looting cash vans and other major movements of money or precious items / jewels. However, there are so many mobile money spots that seem to be now becoming more of a target. Some scripts talk about hacking ATM's to enable them to dispense money to the attacker, but how about just taking the ATM away and retrieving the money inside it at leisure. '
In many cases, ATM's are located at remote locations with no security guards, which means that these ATM's are vulnerable to anybody wanting to pick up these ATM machines forcibly. Even with security devices and connections to police monitors, their remoteness means that there is a good chance that the attacker can pick up the ATM and be on the way before somebody can stop them (link to article):

Unidentified robbers took away at least two ATMs of Axis Bank, one containing Rs 10 lakh, in the past two days in Noida and neighbouring Hapur district. While five masked men allegedly uprooted an ATM from Rachna market on the NH-91 in Badalpur area on Thursday night, another ATM was taken away from Pilukhwa area in Hapur district on Friday night. Both the ATM booths were not guarded and their security depended on a locked shutter. According to police, at least five robbers were caught on CCTV taking away the ATM from Rachna market around 2.30 am on February 1. The machine contained nearly Rs 10 lakh. Kuldeep Singh, who owns a vehicle-repair shop adjacent to the ATM in Rachna market, said: “When we reached our shop around 8am the next day, we found a part of the machine lying there. The machine was gone and the shutter of the ATM was open.”

Weird news - Cryptocurrency CEO dies without sharing password

The wonders of modern technology can sometimes make things pretty difficult. Modern privacy is built on using cryptology, with its system of private and public keys (and other key mechanisms). The more recent development of cryptocurrencies use encryption as their basis, which makes storing of these keys the 'key' to everything. There have been many cases in the past where hackers have managed to get the key and stolen the money held in cryptocurrency wallets, with no recourse to the people who owned the money held in these wallets.
This is a different kind of problem, but one that can also suddenly arise, with the problem of knowledge being held only by one person, who suddenly dies, not having transferred the knowledge to anybody and leaving the cryptocurrency money locked up (link to article):

This is a story worthy of a film script -- which will doubtless be realized. A 30-year old CEO of a Canadian cryptocurrency firm reportedly died in India from complications from Crohn's disease (an intestinal inflammation disorder) taking with him passwords that has locked up $190 million in investor cryptocurrency. Top security experts have been unable to unlock the encrypted password throwing his clients into a tizzy. The saga, just unfolding in the western media, goes back to December when Gerald Cotten, 30-year old founder of QuadrigaCX, died due to complications with Crohn’s disease, according to the company and Cotten’s wife, Jennifer Robertson. Cotten died “while traveling in India, where he was opening an orphanage to provide a home and safe refuge for children in need,” the company's social media page said.

Weird news - Hole under the road for bank robbery

Robberies can take some weird forms. When you read about the various forms and types taken by robberies in the past, you can come across some weird examples where people have tried all sort of things - in home robberies, people have tried to come in through chimneys and even large pipes, for banks and vaults, robbers have tried to dig in through tunnels so that they can get inside undetected. Sometimes, these attempts have been stopped in the nick of time, through security measures meant to protect against thefts. However, there are other times when these attempts have been discovered by accident and thefts avoided, such as this case where road workers were attempting to fix a sinkhole under a road and found that somebody was building a tunnel to a bank (link to article):

Road workers in Florida sent out to repair a sinkhole got a surprise this week when they discovered it was caused by a tunnel leading to a nearby bank. The FBI posted pictures of the narrow underground tunnel leading to a branch of Chase Bank in Pembroke Pines, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of Miami. Police and the FBI were called in Tuesday night after the road workers realized that a manhole-sized hole in the road was caused by a tunnel.

Weird news - Not a ghost in the closet

When you are living alone in an apartment, and you find that your clothing has been disturbed, it can feel real creepy, like somebody has come into your house and touched your things. But when you find strange hand prints in the bathroom, and they are not yours, scripts from horror movies would come into the mind, as if there is a ghost in the house (even if you do not believe in ghosts). But whether you have a ghost in the house, or when you suddenly find movement coming from a closet and a man's voice from inside, it can be equally scary. In today's world, the threat of a strange man in the house when you are all alone can be equally scary - the horrors of a slasher or a murderer or a rapist all come to mind.
It takes a lot of courage to handle such a situation, and this girl managed to handle this weird situation well enough, managing to get the man out of her apartment (link to article):

Maddie, a student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, who identified herself only by her first name, explained to WFMY-TV that her clothing had mysteriously disappeared in the past. Moreover, the junior told other local news outlets this week she had previously noticed handprints on the bathroom walls. They weren't hers. On Saturday, Greensboro police say, Maddie confronted her "ghost" after hearing something rattling in her closet. "Who's in there?" she recalled asking in the interview with WFMY. As she pressed against the closet door, she realized a spirit wasn't responsible for the sounds. "Oh, my name's Drew," a man's voice replied.

Weird news - Pilots shut down wrong engine

The safety of an aircraft when it is flying is controlled through a series of checklists and procedures, and if pilots deviate from that, it can have deadly consequences. These procedures also typically handle what to do when the plane goes through some disaster, such as a storm or lightning strike, or a bird hit. Normally you would not expect a bird hit to impact a plane significantly, but the plane moves at very high speed, and because of the speed, a bird hit on the engine can significantly damage the engine and cause fire in the engine or it to shut down.

So, if a bird hit happens on the engine, depending on the severity of the strike, the pilots may shut down the engine. There are multiple engines on a plane, so the plane can still work on the other engine(s); however, what happens if a bird strike happens and the pilots shut down the working engine by mistake and leave the bird hit engine on. It can become very critical, threatening the passengers, and the capability of the pilots can be questioned (link to article):

The pilots of a GoAir flight going from Delhi to Mumbai shut down the wrong engine after a bird-strike incident on June 21, 2017, the aviation regulator Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) said in a report. While engine number 2 of the flight was affected due to the bird-strike, the pilots of the GoAir plane decided to shut down engine number 1, the report said. Once the aircraft stopped climbing at an altitude of 3,330 feet, the pilots "realised their mistake", and consequently started engine 1 and brought back the plane to Delhi airport, said the report dated November 5, 2018. "(The) incident was caused by incorrect identification of engine affected with high vibration followed by non-adherence to recommended procedures, lack of situational awareness, poor cockpit resource management and poor handling of aircraft during emergency subsequent to bird strike," it said.