And Finally...

A 14-year-old Brazilian boy died after injecting himself with butterfly remains — with police investigating whether it was part of a twisted online challenge, according to a report.

Davi Nunes Moreira started to vomit and then developed a limp after mixing a dead butterfly in water and injecting the liquid into his leg, according to the DailyMail.

The teen told his dad he hurt himself while playing — but then confessed what really happened when he continued growing sicker and was admitted to a hospital in Planalto, the report said.

His dad also found the syringe his son had used hidden under the boy’s pillow, according to the report.

Davi was rushed to another hospital in Vitoria de Conquista, the state of Bahia’s third-largest city, on Wednesday, but succumbed to his injuries.

The mysterious death — linked to possible toxins in the butterfly mix that caused his body to shut down as he went into septic shock — is making headlines across Brazil.

...

However, authorities have not ruled out the possibility that the boy was participating in an unusual social media craze that proved fatal, the report said.

A 23-year-old Keene woman was arrested Friday, accused of serially urinating on products in local stores.

According to information from the Keene Police Department, Kelli Tedford had posted "disturbing videos" to an internet site, some of them dating back to 2021.

In a recently recorded video, "Tedford recorded herself contaminating items in a local business with her urine," states the information, identifying the business as the Monadnock Food Co-op, which sustained a financial loss in excess of $1,500 in destroyed merchandise and cleaning costs.

...

"It appears likely that similar historic incidents occurred in Keene and surrounding communities where Tedford contaminated items and/or surfaces with urine, as several videos appear to be recorded as early as 2021," states the information, which did not identify the previous locations.

A husband is said to have murdered his wife with a “big a*** knife” when she was less than enthusiastic over his Valentine’s Day plans.

Taylor Meyer, 34, had put together a Paris-themed night for his partner Deborah, buying her a new dress and having their children draw pictures of the Eiffel Tower. His attempts are said to have been borne out of suspicions she was having an affair with a co-worker.

However when he unveiled the plans she “didn’t give a s***”, according to court documents . The evening allegedly ended with her being beaten with a wine bottle and then stabbed her 40 times, as their children - all aged under five - slept upstairs in their home in Jefferson, Louisville in the US.

Law and Crime reported he told investigators: “It was the hardest I’ve ever tried. She just didn’t give a s***.” An affidavit says: “For the last two months I’ve been staying home with the kids every Saturday night while she goes and f****s whoever and lies to my face about it.

...

When she was dead he is said to have taken a picture of her body and texted it to the person she was allegedly sleeping with, adding: “Your fault.”

It started with a bizarre burning sensation in her feet. Over the next two days, the searing pain crept up her legs. Any light touch made it worse, and over-the-counter pain medicine offered no relief.

On the third day, the 30-year-old, otherwise healthy woman from New England went to an emergency department. Her exam was normal. Her blood tests and kidney function were normal. The only thing that stood out was a high number of eosinophils—white blood cells that become active with certain allergic diseases, parasitic infections, or other medical conditions, such as cancer. The woman was discharged and advised to follow up with her primary care doctor.

...

In a case report published in the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors explain how they figured out the source of her fiery symptoms—worms burrowing into her brain. By this point, she was alert but disoriented and restless. She couldn't answer questions consistently or follow commands.

The doctors at Mass General, including a neurologist specializing in infectious diseases, quickly focused their attention on the fact that the woman had recently traveled. Just four days before her feet began burning, she had returned from a three-week trip that included stops in Bangkok, Thailand; Tokyo, Japan; and Hawaii. They asked what she ate. In Thailand, she ate street foods but nothing raw. In Japan, she ate sushi several times and spent most of her time in a hotel. In Hawaii, she again ate sushi as well as salads.

...

Scanning for data on infections that can arise in the three places she visited and align with her symptoms, they came up with a list of 10 possible infectious causes: eight parasites and two fungal pathogens. They went through them one by one, crossing things off the list that didn't quite fit with everything they knew of her case. They ended with angiostrongyliasis, caused by the nematode (roundworm) Angiostrongylus cantonensis, also known as rat lungworm.

...

Given the alignment of symptoms and the raw seafood and salads eaten in Hawaii, the doctors gave a presumptive diagnosis of central nervous system angiostrongyliasis. The diagnosis was confirmed with a genetic test for the parasite's DNA in the patient's cerebrospinal fluid (nucleic acid amplification testing).

There are no clear treatment strategies for angiostrongyliasis, and some can recover fully without treatment after the larvae die off. In this case, the patient and her doctors decided to use a 14-day combination of the immunosuppressive steroid prednisone and the anti-parasitic drug albendazole.

Fortunately, the woman's symptoms cleared with the treatment, and she was discharged from the hospital after six days.

A bungling burglar has been jailed after he was caught out by a Home Alone-style bucket trap.

The homeowners in Northumberland had set the snare after several recent reports of attempted break-ins in the local area.

They had rigged up a string with their house at one end, and a full bucket of water at the other, and shortly before 3am on 9 November last year, burglar Paul Howell fell prey to the trap.

He had attempted to gain entry to the house, in Bondicar Terrace in Blyth, but after springing the trap he fled the scene.

The overturned bucket led to the occupants checking their CCTV footage, and days later they reported the incident to Northumbria police.

Police officers recognised prolific burglar Howell, 56, from the footage, and arrested him at his home in Disraeli Street, Blyth.

...

The court heard he had 108 previous convictions, including 25 burglaries dating back to 1986.

A 33-year-old Chinese woman, identified as Ms. A, was stunned when doctors discovered five lost contact lenses hidden behind her left eye. The unexpected event occurred while she was undergoing treatment for hemifacial atrophy at the Plastic Surgery Hospital of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing.

Ms. A initially sought medical attention to correct facial asymmetry caused by her condition, Doctors planned to perform autologous fat grafting to restore balance to her face.

However, during the procedure, they uncovered multiple contact lenses lodged in the space behind her eyeball, shocking both the patient and the medical team

For months, Ms. A had assumed that she had accidentally lost her contact lenses, little did she know that they had been trapped within the deep folds of her eye, Hemifacial atrophy, which causes the fatty tissue around the eye to shrink, had created enough space for the lenses to slide behind her eyeball unnoticed.

Doctors only discovered them when they injected fat behind her eye, which pushed the lenses out, despite wearing contacts for years, she had never experienced any discomfort or symptoms, making this case even more astonishing.

The Dallas Fort Worth International Airport says that a security notice for "Electronic Genital Verification" that has gone viral on social media is not real or an authorized notice. The notice, allegedly posted in bathrooms at the busy airport, says that genitalia "may be photographed electronically" to screen for "improper restroom access."

...

The notice reads: "Security Notice Electronic Genital Verification (EGV): Your genitalia may be photographed electronically during your use of this facility as part of the Electronic Genital Verification (EGV) pilot program at the direction of the Office of the Lieutenant Governor. In the future, EGV will help keep Texans safe while protecting your privacy by screening for potentially improper restroom access using machine vision and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in lieu of traditional genital inspections.

"At this time images collected will be used solely for model training purposes and will not be used for law enforcement or shared with other entities except as pursuant to a subpoena, court order or as otherwise compelled by legal process. Your participation in this program is voluntary."

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been speaking to people who have lost their voices. Both Joyce Esser, who lives in the UK, and Jules Rodriguez, who lives in Miami, Florida, have forms of motor neuron disease—a class of progressive disorders that result in the gradual loss of the ability to move and control muscles.

...

“To say this diagnosis has been devastating is an understatement,” says Joyce, who has bulbar MND—she can still move her limbs but struggles to speak and swallow. “Losing my voice has been a massive deal for me because it’s such a big part of who I am.”

AI is bringing back those lost voices. Both Jules and Joyce have fed an AI tool built by ElevenLabs recordings of their old voices to re-create them. Today, they can “speak” in their old voices by typing sentences into devices, selecting letters by hand or eye gaze. It’s been a remarkable and extremely emotional experience for them—both thought they’d lost their voices for good.

But speaking through a device has limitations. It’s slow, and it doesn’t sound completely natural. And, strangely, users might be limited in what they’re allowed to say.

Joyce doesn’t use her voice clone all that often. She finds it impractical for everyday conversations. But she does like to hear her old voice and will use it on occasion. One such occasion was when she was waiting for her husband, Paul, to get ready to go out.

Joyce typed a message for her voice clone to read out: “Come on, Hunnie, get your arse in gear!!” She then added: “I’d better get my knickers on too!!!”

“The next day I got a warning from ElevenLabs that I was using inappropriate language and not to do it again!!!” Joyce told me via email (we communicated with a combination of email, speech, text-to-voice tools, and a writing board). She wasn’t sure what had been inappropriate, exactly. It’s not as though she’d used any especially vile language—just, as she puts it, “normal British banter between a couple getting ready to go out.”

Joyce assumed that one of the words she’d used had been automatically flagged up by “the prudish American computer,” and that once someone from the ElevenLabs team had assessed the warning, it would be dismissed.

“Well, apparently not, because the next day a human banned me!!!!” says Joyce. She says she felt mortified. “I’d just got my voice back and now they’d taken it away from me … and only two days after I’d done a presentation to my local MND group telling them how amazing ElevenLabs were.”

Joyce contacted ElevenLabs, who apologized and reinstated her account. But it’s still not clear why she was banned in the first place. When I first asked Sophia Noel, a company representative, about the incident, she directed me to the company’s prohibited use policy.

There are rules against threatening child safety, engaging in illegal behavior, providing medical advice, impersonating others, interfering with elections, and more. But there’s nothing specifically about inappropriate language. I asked Noel about this, and she said that Joyce’s remark was most likely interpreted as a threat.

An adventurous cat had to be collected from London Waterloo station by her owner after taking a train into the capital from Surrey.

Michael Hardy, from Weybridge, says his two-year-old cat Tilly is known for straying, having caught buses before and even climbing behind the bar of his local pub.

Even so, he was taken aback when he received a call from a ticket office worker about Tilly's 17.7-mile (28.5km) trip into the city.

Mr Hardy said: "What the hell is my cat doing in Waterloo getting on trains and going for a ride?"

A male stripper caused a stir at a Middlesbrough care home this week, when he replaced the residents' usual "knit and natter" session with a striptease.

Max Hunter was a care home manager before he became a stripper and decided to offer the elderly residents a show.

"I spoke to the gang here and the ladies said a resounding 'yes please'," said Astune Rise care home's manager Caroline Bowstead.

"I've never seen a reaction like it at any event we've done."

A video of the event shows Mr Hunter gyrating with the home's residents and stripping off his uniform down to his underwear.

The residents twirled pants and props as Mr Hunter danced in the living room of the care home, which was decked out in red shimmer curtains.

...

"Everybody was smiling and that's beautiful."

"I loved his backside," added resident Betty Hughes.

Police bodycam footage shows the moment officers used a capybara costume to carry out a drug raid in Peru's capital Lima.

The Escuadron Verde (Green Squad) police group is a specialised unit of the Peruvian National Police who often disguise their agents in fancy dress during festivities such as Valentine's Day, Halloween and Christmas.

The head of the unit, Col Pedro Rojas, has said: "On this occasion, Valentine's Day, lover's day, we sought to camouflage ourselves with the character of the capybara."

Peruvian police have previously dressed their officers up as Marvel characters Spiderman, Captain America, Thor and Black Widow to carry out a drug raid.

A humpback whale briefly swallowed a 24-year-old kayaker last Saturday during a father-son excursion out on the icy waters around Chile’s southernmost Patagonia region.

The terrifying moment, captured on camera by the kayaker’s father, showed the whale surfacing in the Strait of Magellan and gulping Adrian Simancas for a few moments before releasing him.

In the video, verified by CNN, Adrian’s father, Dell, is heard yelling to his son, who had been spat out of the whale, to “grab the boat.” Adrian then swims towards his dad’s pack raft and holds onto it as they pull away.

• Aaron Kosminski was found to be a 100% DNA match to Jack the Ripper
• Historian Russell Edwards made the discovery
• A descendant of Kosminski made the revelation possible

Historian Russell Edwards says he has identified Jack the Ripper as Aaron Kosminski through a DNA match of a shawl found at the scene of one of his murders.

Kosminski was a Polish immigrant who came to Whitechapel, England, in 1881 alongside his brother. He became a barber once in the British capitol.

Edwards told the “Today Show Australia” that he came to purchase the shawl in 2007 after it was purported to be at the scene of the murder of Catherine Eddowes.

Kosminski, who was aged 23 at the time of the murders, has long been considered a suspect. He had schizophrenia and was in a mental asylum at the time of his death in 1919.

A teen has been banned from Teesside play parks ahead of a trial for an alleged sex act involving a rocking horse and a branch.

Callum Green, 18, appeared before Teesside Magistrates' Court on Monday afternoon where he pleaded not guilty to the common law charge of outraging public decency, in a Hartlepool play area.

...

The charge reads: "You, in a public place committed an act outraging public decency by behaving in an indecent manner, namely inserting parts of a "rocking horse" inside yourself whilst masturbating, then pulled a branch off a tree and penetrated yourself."

A Sydney restaurant owner who sells gag fortune cookies has been told to censor her products after an awkward factory mix-up.

Nahji Chu, the owner of popular Vietnamese restaurant Lady Chu in Potts Point, in Sydney's inner-city, put through an order of profanity-laced fortune cookies for Valentine's Day.

She was shocked and slightly tickled to receive a response from her manufacturer who said they were no longer accepting "offensive" language after her messages were mistakenly mixed into other customer orders.

...

In an email, the manufacturer said their other customers were "quite upset" to find Chu's messages inside their custom cookies at the end of last year.

"As a result, management have decided to no longer accept customised orders with offensive or expletive words," the email read.

Chu was told she could order empty cookies from her supplier and insert the funny messages herself.

...

Some of Chu's fortune messages include, "The year of the Snake bears good fortune! Your divorce is coming soon" and "I only married you for your money you ugly c---."

In this week’s episode, I dive into a fascinating linguistic quirk of the sports world—why do so many American hockey players sound like fake Canadians?

My obsession with this topic started with research from linguist Andrew Bray. He noticed the phenomenon of “fake Canadian” accents while studying hockey lingo. While he originally set out to analyze hockey slang for its own sake (e.g. “biscuit” for puck or “celly” for celebration), he found himself asking an even bigger question: Why do American players seem to take on Canadian-esque speech?

Bray recorded his conversations with players, analyzing their vowel shifts and pronunciation. He confirmed that many American hockey players adopt features of Canadian English, but not quite enough to pass as actually Canadian. Instead, they end up in this uncanny valley: they sound just Canadian enough for other people to notice, but not enough to blend in. This could be a case of linguistic mirroring, which is when people unconsciously adjust their speech to fit into a social group. Since hockey has such a strong Canadian identity, American players may be picking up on those speech patterns as part of the sport’s culture.

Bray isn’t the only person out there studying “Hockey English.” In fact, one study suggests that even Canadian players are accused of sounding more Canadian than they’re supposed to.

A Chinese zoo has sparked a social media storm after it started selling tiger urine, claiming its “medicinal properties” could treat rheumatism.

A visitor to the Yaan Bifengxia Wildlife Zoo, situated in the southwestern Sichuan province, shared a post on social media saying the facility was selling “medicinal tiger urine” allegedly from Siberian tigers.

A 250gm-bottle of the liquid cost about 50 yuan (£5.54). According to the South China Morning Post, the zoo recommended the fluid be mixed with white wine and applied to the affected areas, along with slices of ginger. It had a “good therapeutic effect” on ailments like rheumatoid arthritis, sprains, and muscle pain, it claimed.

Customers were told the concoction was safe for oral consumption but should no longer be used if they experienced any allergic reactions.

Speaking to Chinese media outlet The Paper, the zoo said the urine was collected directly from a basin the tigers urinated in but did not clarify if any disinfection procedures were followed.

A "large" sewer blockage caused by "fat, grease and rags" has forced the cancellation of a Bryan Adams concert in Australia on public health grounds.

The Grammy Award winning artist was due to perform at the RAC Arena in Perth on Sunday, but the city's water corporation said a blocked main risked backing up the venue's toilets.

Adams apologised to fans on social media -

...

Perth's water corporation said the fatberg responsible for the disruption had already "caused several wastewater overflows" on the main road near the venue and urged the public to avoid direct contact with "pooled water" in the area.

"We apologise for the inconvenience this has caused and will provide further updates as required," it said in a post on Facebook, advising of the cancellation.

Honourable mention to RTÉ for: Plumber of '69: Sewage blockage halts Bryan Adams concert

With Dry January well and truly over, the Church of England has taken the opportunity to proclaim that alcohol-free wine can’t be used for holy communion.

The Church’s governing body slapped down proposals for non-alcoholic wine and also gluten-free bread to be allowed during the ritual.

Instead, an Anglican leader insisted communion bread had to come from wheat flour and wine from the fermented juice of grapes.

Look how happy he is!

A Florida attorney Mark Roher, 52, is accused of assaulting a man with a dinner plate at a wedding reception, following a dispute over line-cutting at the Boca Lago Country Club in Boca Raton.

According to Palm Beach County Jail records, the altercation escalated from a verbal confrontation to a violent incident, resulting in Roher's arrest. The clash unfolded on January 18, with the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office detailing the events that transpired at the prime rib carving station during the wedding reception.

Roher allegedly became incensed when two young girls purportedly cut in front of him at the buffet line. Enraged by this breach of etiquette, Roher confronted the father of one of the girls, setting off a chain of events that culminated in a physical altercation.

Eye-witnesses and the victim provided their accounts of the altercation, painting a picture of escalating tensions and sudden violence. The victim recounted how Roher approached him, engaged in a heated argument, and then struck him on the head with a dinner plate without warning. The situation quickly spiraled into chaos as other wedding guests became involved in the melee.

A man who was caught with his pants down in a sauna claimed to have been 'warming up his chicken', a court has heard. Xin Zhang had been for a swim at a university leisure centre when a woman noticed him staring at her from the sauna.

The 59-year-old had shorts 'down to his knees' and was touching himself at the time, it is claimed. Prosecutors said he had become 'aroused' by the feeling of the pool jets on his bottom.

...

He said Zhang had 'done some weird stuff previously' including 'pulling his shorts down' near 'air vents at the side of the pool' but that management had said previously they 'didn't have enough evidence to pull him in and to talk to him about it.'

...

A member of management who spoke to him told the court that when he asked Zhang about what he was doing he said 'my chicken' and 'gestured with his hands.' He said he took that to mean that he was 'adjusting himself.'

Zhang, of Foundry Lane in Manchester, told police that 'chicken is what I call my genitals.' He told officers in his interview: "I was adjusting the inner layer of my shorts, because of my eczema I have them loose.'

In his basis of plea given at court, Zhang said he was 'warming' his privates as he was cold. He 'denied he was masturbating but conceded it may have looked like that for anyone watching,' the court was told.

Giving evidence himself, he said that he lay down in the sauna as he was 'cold, tired and hungry.' Speaking through a Mandarin interpreter, he claimed it was customers who set the temperature in the sauna.

He said: "I sat there for about seven or eight minutes and I still felt cold. "I realised my waistband had been tied too tight and I loosened my waistband."

He said after looking at his privates, he feared that 'there might be some kind of illness causing a problem.' "I was trying to warm it up" he said before he heard 'knocking on the windows.'