WASHINGTON D. C.—For more than a decade, the U.S. government has been waging a secretive campaign against restive local insurgents, deploying a team of highly-trained specialists with license to kill. The location: a marquee park in the U.S. capital. The target: white-tailed deer.
The rapidly multiplying deer are gobbling up the native vegetation in Rock Creek Park, a onetime stomping ground for Teddy Roosevelt that spans much of the city’s northwest. For U.S. Department of Agriculture sharpshooters, who strike at night using silenced weapons, the mission is to control the population and protect young plants from too many hungry deer.
The meat is used for Bolognese sauce and chili at a local soup kitchen. At least this effort seems to be going better than the inter-agency search for the aggro turkey.
In a unique act of diplomacy, Italy’s government has settled the restaurant bill of four Italian tourists in Albania who left without paying.
The dine and dash in the city of Berat made headlines in both countries.
The chatter prompted Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama to raise it with his Italian counterpart, Giorgia Meloni, while she was visiting the country.
She responded by telling her ambassador to “go and pay the bill for these idiots,” he told La Stampa newspaper.
Luckily for Italian taxpayers, the bill in question was only €80. Still, doesn’t a bailout only encourage this behavior? Let me know what you think of Ms. Meloni’s unexpected dine-and-dash diplomacy in the comments.
No one eats cheese bugers and leaves without paying! Photo: cheblogudo
If you are reading this blog, you are an intelligent consumer of quirky news and you probably know by now that cocaine was found at the White House over the July 4th holiday weekend. So I’ll spare you the obvious “where’s Hunter?” wisecracks, as the real story seems to be the surprising inability of anyone associated with the most secure location in the free world to ascertain where this happened and who is responsible. From Yahoo News:
There have been conflicting reports about where the cocaine was found. When the news first broke, it was alleged that the substance had been found in the White House library. Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Wednesday that it had been in a “heavily traveled” part of the West Wing. Multiple outlets reported on Thursday that it had been found near the West Executive entrance, a more secure location than previously thought.
Since Ms. Jean-Pierre appeared to suggest that tour groups may have left behind some holiday cheer, Cheblogudo must bring to bear our lived experience with White House tours. These events are carefully planned months in advance, and all participants are vetted beforehand, not to mention thoroughly searched upon entry. They are also mostly Midwestern middle-aged couples and their children, whose idea of a wild party is a night at Dave & Buster’s, not snorting lines off the Resolute desk in the Oval Office. Speaking of which, if you are curious about the history of drug use at the White House, Forbes has an edifying timeline here.
As for the recent incident, unless someone self-reports in an effort to join the ranks of Willie Nelson, Chip Carter and Snoop Dogg, it looks like we may never know who did it.
[M]ultiple reports citing unnamed sources close to the U.S. Secret Service probe of the incident suggested the suspect’s identity might not be determined over the course of the investigation.
July 4th fireworks provide a natural high. Photo: Cheblogudo 2023
Two apologetic lawyers responding to an angry judge in Manhattan federal court blamed ChatGPT Thursday for tricking them into including fictitious legal research in a court filing.
Attorneys Steven A. Schwartz and Peter LoDuca are facing possible punishment over a filing in a lawsuit against an airline that included references to past court cases that Schwartz thought were real, but were actually invented by the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot.
The judge had no patience for the lawyers’ argument that they did not expect ChatGPT to make up cases.
After the judge read aloud portions of one cited case to show how easily it was to discern that it was “gibberish,” LoDuca said: “It never dawned on me that this was a bogus case.”
In the end, the lawyers’ lawyer “told the judge that the submission ‘resulted from carelessness, not bad faith,'” which technically makes things a little better for them (though probably not in the court of public opinion). Let’s just hope this legal professional did not rely on ChatGPT to support his argument.
Several explicit sex scenes in the new book by Le Maire, the French finance minister, have given the book a flush of attention and forced the government of President Emmanuel Macron to explain how one of its most senior members has time to write novels when people are struggling with high food and energy prices.
Let’s dig in, shall we?
On page 74, Julia, one of the novel’s main characters, peels off her shirt and throws herself on the bed in front of the protagonist. The prose veers into ribald and almost clinical terminology, landing somewhere between erotica and shoptalk at a proctologists’ convention.
After Le Maire answered a question from a far-right lawmaker in one recent parliamentary debate, the lawmaker said the minister’s answer wasn’t “dilatory,” referring to a line in that sex scene that incorporates dilation. That triggered laughter on the floor.
Cost of living aside, the main problem seems to be the quality of the work, something French readers do not compromise on:
“French people can forgive a politician for writing erotic novels, but they can’t forgive a politician for writing them badly,” said Alexandre Gefen, a literary critic and research professor for CNRS, France’s national research organization.
Two top Spanish transport officials have resigned over a botched order for new commuter trains that cost nearly €260m ($275m; £230m).
The trains could not fit into non-standard tunnels in the northern regions of Asturias and Cantabria.
The head of Spain’s rail operator Renfe, Isaías Táboas, and the Secretary of State for Transport, Isabel Pardo de Vera, have now left their roles.
The mistake was caught before the trains had to go through the tunnels, but the whole fiasco still made international headlines. The BBC has the full story.
José Luis Callisaya Diaz – who is serving a 15-year sentence for homicide in Chonchocoro prison in La Paz, Bolivia – wrapped himself in sheepskin in a bid to roam free.
Diaz, nicknamed ‘El Araña’ (the spider), reportedly snuck past Chonchocoro prison security by crawling through grass in the middle of the night.
Has that moniker been updated to “La Oveja?” Let’s read on.
Guards found him in the act as he inched across the grassy field on his hands and knees and he was quickly returned to his cell.
In a bizarre set of photos, Diaz can be seen wearing the sheep wool jacket and dark trousers while appearing to trail through the grass, impersonating the farmyard animal.
As you can see from the photos, his disguise was not at all convincing. Also, prompt re-incarceration was arguably a better outcome for señor Diaz than if he’d tried to pull this stunt in New Zealand.
Aotearoa/New Zealand. Where men are men and sheep (not pictured) are nervous. Photo: Cheblogudo
Nigerian officials have seized thousands of donkey penises that were about to be exported to Hong Kong, an official said on Thursday.
Sacks of the donkey male genitals were seized at the international airport in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, Sambo Dangaladima, the Nigeria Customs Service area commander, told reporters.
The consignment was “falsely declared … as cow male genitals (but) after due examination, my export officers discovered they were donkey male genitals,” said Dangaladima.
So many questions here, none of which are asked or answered in the WaPo article. Why are donkey dongs smuggled into Hong Kong? Who are the end users? Why is it legal to export cow genitals but not donkey ones? How could the customs officials tell the difference? Let us know in the comments.
In the middle of a debate in Liechtenstein’s Landtag on Thursday afternoon, a 4.1 magnitude earthquake was felt — just as the MPs discussed whether the small European nation needs to mandate insurance in the event of quakes […]
The second, larger tremor shook the parliament building more violently, prompting the President of the Landtag, Albert Frick, to temporarily halt the session and evacuate the chamber.
Cheblogudo is unfamiliar with Liechtenstein parliamentary procedure, but it looks like the concept of introducing a floor motion to end debate was taken too literally here.
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