Weird news - 31 February as per the Government

Sometimes a Government or an official may act in such a way that it all seems funny. Especially when it comes to regular action by a Government where it can seem that the Governments are bloated messes, just sucking in the money of regular tax payers and not providing the required quality of services in turn. Consider the following case, which was a regular government action of extending a passport, which botched it up. This was the Pakistani Government consulate in Dubai, which broke the calendar and extended the passport to Feb 31, a date which can never exist (link to article):

An official at the Pakistani consulate in Dubai extended the date of a passport till February 31 without realising that the second month of the year has 28 days (February 29 is leap day). And the Internet just can't get over it. The photo shows that the passport was granted an extension on January 31.

Weird news - Breaking the car window to rescue a mannequin

Sometimes things appear funny in retrospect. After all, if you consider the current case, where the police got a report about a woman frozen inside a car, the natural move would be to get her out of the car and then get the proper medical aid. There is very little to fault the actions of the police in this regard. In normal times, it might be easy for a skilled police personnel to be able to distinguish between a crude mannequin and a person, but when you take into account an emergency situation, a life like mannequin wearing an oxygen mask, it would have been difficult to do so. And so it happened in this case where the car was broken into, and then to everyone's surprise, the mannequin was detected rather than a person who needed emergency medical care (link to article):

The Times Union of Albany reports that a caller told police there was an elderly woman "frozen to death" in a parked car. Officers rushed to the scene and found what appeared to be a woman sitting in a car's front passenger seat wearing an oxygen mask. A sergeant busted a rear window, opened the door and discovered that the woman was a realistic mannequin. The car owner arrived and said he uses the dummy for his job selling medical training aids.

Weird news - Cockroach up the nose and into the skull

It is the stuff of horror movies, where an insect or a giant invasion of insects, or an 'alien' in space gets inside the human body (or in movies such as the 'Mummy' where an Egyptian insect gets inside the skin and cause huge damage); but it apparently happens from time to time. So, for example, doctors have had to do delicate extractions of insects and small creatures from inside the nostrils or the ears where these creatures have climbed inside (typically when the subjects have been sleeping). Now, inside, these creatures are still alive, and movie, giving rise to dreadful feelings in the patient; and it is only in hospital that such conditions are medically cured and the invading insect or creature is removed.
Consider the following case where a cockroach climbed in through the nose, and the lady afflicted, could feel the cockroach moving inside her. She went to one hospital, referred to a second and then a third and finally when a scan was done and then an endoscopic examination, could doctors determine the source of her discomfort. There was something inside her head, and it was moving. Finally the doctors managed to fish inside her head and retrieve the insect (link to article):

She was soon referred to a second hospital, where doctors suspected she might be suffering from a nasal growth. At a third hospital, doctors recommended a scan, and told her the discomfort may be coming from "a foreign body that seemed to be mobile," The Times of India reported. Finally, in her fourth doctor visit - at Stanley Medical College Hospital - doctors used an endoscope to find the culprit: a blob with a pair of antennae. "It was a full grown cockroach," M.N. Shankar, the head of the ear, nose and throat department, told the Times of India. "It was alive. And it didn't seem to want to come out."

Weird news - Punishing a father since his son not granting divorce

It seems like a weird case. After all, in cases of a divorce, legal matters are typically between the husband and wife, and parents are mostly not included; unless there is some kind of harassment that is also part of the overall separation and divorce proceedings However this divorce proceeding in Israel is different, since the divorce law over there (which in turn is based on religious laws) ensures that the husband gets a veto over the divorce. Unless the divorce is granted by the husband, it will not happen. Over a period of time, the rabbinical courts have been granted powers to 'persuade' the husband in case he is not willing.
However, in this case, the husband was not present in Israel, instead spending time in the United States, primarily due his rich father who provides his son a stipend and a job. So when the father came to Israel for a visit, he was prevented from leaving and his passport taken away. The father is protesting about the court doing a kind of extortion attempt on him to ensure that his son comes to Israel and grants the divorce, and it would seem that the rabbinical courts have no other leverage (link to article):

According to the court documents, the wife suffered the stroke on a visit to Israel with her husband in 2005. Shortly after, the husband returned to the U.S., where he remains. His wife and their two children stayed in Israel and she became an Israeli citizen. The court says the husband has ignored her request and a court ruling for a divorce as well as another ruling demanding he pay alimony. The father is in his late 60s and according to court documents is a wealthy member of New York's Hasidic community who runs a real estate company. He was in Israel last year on a family visit when he was summoned to the court, told to hand in his and his wife's passports and barred from leaving the country. He was later sentenced to 30 days in prison for contempt of court. The rabbinical court argues that by providing his son with a job and stipend, the father is responsible for his son's intransigence. His lawyers argue he is being used as leverage to pressure his son and are appealing to the Supreme Court.

Weird news - Living with a needle in the ass for years

Once in a while, you will read a report about somebody having a medical examination and then having something removed from their body that was foreign to the body and yet was present there for years and years. It seems most unlikely, after all, how can something be present in the body for so many years and not come out, or not even be able to feel that foreign object in the body and so on. And yet there are cases where a person has got a bullet in their body for years and even decades and it was fine, until one day when it started causing problems and has to be removed. In this case, a person had a needle in their ass and after decades, the needle finally started causing problems and had to be removed (link to article):

Kiran Kumar, from Malayankeezhu in Kerala's Thiruvananthapuram, has been living with a sewing needle in his rear for the last 22 years. Kiran, now 34 years old, had gotten the needle pierced inside when he was in the sixth grade after he sat on it. It seems he was taken to a hospital then, but the doctors weren't able to find the needle. Nor did he undergo any further check up because there was no pain or discomfort. But two weeks ago, after 22 long years, Kiran felt immense pain in his rear and went to a private hospital for check up from where he was referred to Thiruvananthapuram medical college hospital. Doctors there found that the needle is the cause of pain and swelling and understood it was one and half inches deep inside his body. They couldn't find the exact location then.

Weird news - Person dissolves in Yellowstone hot water spring

A horrific accident, that just goes to show how dangerous it can be to take security considerations and safety rules lightly. Yellowstone National Park is very attractive for visitors because of the beauty, and because of the hot springs and geysers; but underlying all this is the fact that the park sits on top of a huge volcanic chamber, and the conditions on top are because of the magma chamber underneath. As a result, there are many different types of gases (many of them dangerous), different levels of heat in the water along with many minerals that can make contact with the water dangerous. For the safety of visitors, there are regulations about where all visitors can go, and visitors are forbidden to go outside these regions. In addition, even though it may seem attractive to enjoy bathing in these hot springs, the conditions can be dangerous and hence it is prohibited. This horrific accident shows why these regulations should be followed (link to article).
This sister faced the horror of seeing her brother fall and die in a hot spring, and the high level of minerals (corrosive) caused a quick dissolution of the body to the extent that when rescuers tried to retrieve the body later, it could not found (link to article):

Like many of the 840,000 people who visited Yellowstone in June, Colin and Sable Scott, a brother and sister from Oregon, came to marvel at the basin’s thermal features. But their visit took a turn for the horrific, as The Washington Post reported, when the pair left the protective boardwalk and hiked 225 yards into the basin. “Then, somehow, Colin Scott slipped, and as his sister watched, the 23-year-old tumbled into one of the boiling springs. Despite her immediate call for help and the prolonged search efforts by park staff, her brother was never seen again,” The Post reported in June. One of the few pieces of evidence left behind was a pair of Scott’s flip-flops.

Weird news: Killing wife and cutting into parts

Imagine the horror that some bystander feels when they see a plastic bag, maybe oozing a bit of blood, or covered with red color that looks suspiciously like blood; then the curiosity takes over and you open the plastic bag and see a body part - it could be a head or a leg or hand. The sheer horror would cause you nightmares, and you wonder how somebody could be so depraved to do something like this.
One hears of this being done by crazed multiple murderers or in the movies, or even done as part of some mob action; but that this was done by a husband who killed his wife and then cut her into multiple parts, which in turn were put into plastic bags and placed around the area for unsuspecting people to find these parts and witness horror that might give them nightmares. It also makes problems for the police staff, since they have first to identify the person who has been killed and disposed off, and then try to identify the killer. However, since in a major part of cases, it is the spouse or family member who is responsible, they found the killer as well after the conclusion of the investigation (link to article):

A murder most macabre that had terrified the residents of Rajasthan's Alwar all of last week, has finally been solved. Since Diwali last week, dismembered parts of a woman's body - burnt and put into plastic bags - were being found in different residential colonies in the city. Over four days, the police came across seven such body parts, they all had one thing in common - they had been dismembered, burnt and stuffed into bags. It all began on October 30, when in Alwar's Arya Nagar - an upper middle class neighbourhood - a bag was discovered with a woman's right foot in it. The next day, two hands in two different bags were discovered. In the seventh and the last bag, found on Wednesday, was the woman's head.