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☆ ‘A Bit Spooky’: The New Shark Species With Bright, White Eyes
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-12 | by ( Lauren Mccarthy | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

What has long, bright white eyes, swims along the deep waters off Australia and attaches its eggs to coral? A new species of shark, called Apristurus ovicorrugatus. That led to a fact-finding mission that eventually revealed a new species of demon catshark. The name is based “on the fact that they’re deep dwelling and kind of a bit spooky,” said Helen O’Neill, a research technician and one of the paper’s authors. The sharks are bottom feeders and have elongated catlike eyes.

☆ Why Americans Are Smuggling Fruit Roll-Ups Into Israel
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-10 | by ( Lauren Mccarthy | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

But hundreds of pounds of Fruit Roll-Ups? Welcome to the age of TikTok-influenced smuggling. Because of a recipe that spread widely on the social media platform, Fruit Roll-Ups — the American-made fruit leather snack that has been passed out to children at baseball games and slumber parties since the 1980s — have become an obsession in Israel, where a shortage means smuggling in the snacks can be highly profitable. The agency has confiscated hundreds of pounds of Fruit Roll-Ups, it said — 661 pounds in one week alone. Given that one Roll-Up weighs in at 0.5 of an ounce, that makes for tens of thousands of individual packets.

Gunfire erupted at a mall north of Dallas on Saturday, sending shoppers running from stores and the police to investigate reports that people had been wounded. Jessica Pond of the Collin County Sheriff’s Office said that “there’s some possibly wounded” in the shooting at the Allen Premium Outlets in Allen, Texas, but could not provide further details. The Allen Police Department said on Twitter that law enforcement was at the mall and that an “active investigation is underway.”A video circulating on social media showed people running through a parking lot in front of a shopping center with loud popping sounds in the background.

☆ Michigan School District Bans Backpacks Over Safety Concerns
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-06 | by ( Lauren Mccarthy | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

On the back of a door in a home in Flint, Mich., there hangs a black Trailmaker backpack that belongs to Jaxon Williams, a third grader at Freeman Elementary. That’s because Jaxon and over 2,800 other students across 11 campuses in the Flint Community Schools are subject to a ban on backpacks that began this week after district officials were alarmed by threats to students’ safety. It will remain in effect at least until the end of the school year in mid-June. After the first week under the ban, Dr. Lewis and other parents in the district expressed frustration and skepticism, saying that determined students would carry weapons under their clothing. At a special meeting of the Flint Board of Education, educators voiced their growing concerns about school safety after a series of school shootings around the country, including one in Oxford, Mich., a community about 30 miles outside Flint, where a student shot and killed four classmates at a high school in 2021.

☆ Why Does This Cannibalistic Fish Keep Washing Ashore?
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-04 | by ( Lauren Mccarthy | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

For hundreds of years, a strange species of fish with long fanglike teeth that eats its own kind and spends most of its time at the bottom of the ocean has somehow found its way to the shores of the West Coast. The latest appearance by a lancetfish, as the species is known, was on a beach in Oregon, state officials said Monday, prompting more speculation about why the deep-sea creature occasionally surfaces on land. Lancetfish are obscure in part because they have no commercial appeal — meaning that they don’t taste good. The silvery and gelatinous fish have a “scientific name translates to something like scaleless lizard or scaleless dragon,” and they look the part, said Elan Portner, a scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, one place where lancetfish have been found washed ashore. Lancetfish also “migrate as far north as subarctic areas like Alaska’s Bering Sea to feed,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

☆ Freya, the Walrus Killed by Norwegian Officials, Is Immortalized as a Sculpture
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-30 | by ( Lauren Mccarthy | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

When a 1,300-pound walrus showed up in Oslo last summer, lounging on piers and eating mussels, she became a beloved local delight and an overnight international media sensation. The walrus, a rare guest for Norway’s capital, was named Freya, after the Norse goddess of love, beauty and war — all of which she inspired to varying degrees. Freya spent time in highly populated areas, where some people ignored warnings from officials to keep their distance, and would help herself onto boats, some of which she threatened to sink because of her weight. Norwegian authorities declared Freya a threat to human safety last August and killed her in a move that critics argued was too hasty. Her death divided a country that is associated with diplomacy and a love of nature.

☆ Tornado Strikes Near Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-29 | by ( Lauren Mccarthy | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

A severe storm system that spawned tornadoes tore through an area near Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., on Saturday, damaging homes and flipping cars, according to officials and witness accounts. James Ippolito, the deputy fire chief in Palm Beach Gardens, which is about a dozen miles north of West Palm Beach, said the area had been hit by a storm that left a man trapped between a boat and a concrete piling. The man had been transported to a hospital and was in stable condition, he said. The Palm Beach Gardens Police Department asked the public to avoid an area east of the Intracoastal Waterway “due to storm damage” and because roads were blocked. The village of North Palm Beach said on Twitter that police officers, fire rescue teams and staff members from the Public Works Department were checking the area “after a tornado touched down around 5:45 p.m.”

☆ Man Who Crashed Into Teens After Doorbell Prank Is Found Guilty of Murder
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-29 | by ( Lauren Mccarthy | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The boy rang the doorbell and returned to the Prius they were riding in, and the group drove off. Three boys, Daniel Hawkins, Jacob Ivascu and Drake Ruiz, were killed, the authorities said. The driver, Sergio Campusano, then 18, and two other boys, Joshua Hawkins, then 13, and Joshua Ivascu, then 14, were injured. He also testified that he had drunk 12 bottles of beer on the night of the crash, the newspaper reported. “The murder of these young men was a horrendous and senseless tragedy for our community,” Mike Hestrin, the Riverside County district attorney, said in an emailed statement.

☆ Ticketmaster Finds Itself in a Royal Mess Over Coronation Concert
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-29 | by ( Lauren Mccarthy | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

At five minutes past noon on Tuesday, Ticketmaster sent Joe Holmes and many others in Britain an email: “Congratulations, you have been successful in the ballot” for two tickets to King Charles’s coronation concert. Mr. Holmes, a student in his final year at the University of Essex, saw it immediately while checking his email and rushed to click the link to claim his tickets to the concert, an official coronation event that will take place a day after King Charles III is crowned — only to be met with a message saying that none were available. He was one of dozens of people who believed they had secured entry to the concert before being quickly let down once they tried to collect tickets. Many Twitter users posted screenshots of the same “congratulations” email Mr. Holmes received this week and expressed frustration about the confusing messaging; one user called the email “disgraceful” and said Ticketmaster had a “total shambles of a system.”It was “immediate excitement and then immediate disappointment,” Mr. Holmes said on Friday. He had already sent a screenshot of the email to his sister in celebration and believed his next step would be to book a train to the event.

☆ It’s OK to Be Single, the Church of England Says: So Was Jesus
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-27 | by ( Lauren Mccarthy | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Single people should be valued as much as married couples and people in relationships, according to a new report released by the Church of England on Wednesday that laid out recommendations to support a diverse, evolving society. In the report, “Love Matters,” the archbishops of Canterbury and York said that “single people must be valued at the heart of our society” and noted that Jesus was single. “Jesus’ own singleness should ensure that the Church of England celebrates singleness,” the report noted, reaffirming a traditional understanding that Jesus never married. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York — the Most Rev. Stephen Cottrell — established a commission in March 2021 to examine relationships and family, after recognizing that “family life in the 21st century is fluid and diverse.” The commission’s report laid out five priorities for supporting families and households.

☆ Michigan Students Sue School District Over ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ Ban
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-26 | by ( Lauren Mccarthy | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

A mother of two students in Howard City, Mich., filed a lawsuit claiming the public school district violated her sons’ First Amendment rights by asking them to remove sweatshirts with the slogan “Let’s go Brandon” on them. The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday against the Michigan Tri County Area Schools district, an assistant principal and a teacher, claims that their school censored her sons’ “peaceful, non-disruptive politics” by having them take off the sweatshirts, causing them “to suffer irreparable injury.”The phrase “Let’s go Brandon,” born of a viral NASCAR race moment in October 2021, is understood to be code for swearing at President Biden, the lawsuit confirms.The slogan conveys the same opposition as saying a four-letter expletive and then “Joe Biden,” just “sanitized to express the sentiment without using profanity or vulgarity,” the suit said. In February of 2022, the mother’s sixth-grade son wore a “Let’s go Brandon” sweatshirt to Tri County Middle School. The assistant principal at the school stopped him in the hallway and asked him to take it off, according to the lawsuit, telling him the slogan was equivalent to “the F-word.” He took it off because he feared getting in trouble.

☆ A Fake Craigslist Ad Costs a New Hampshire Man His Right to Vote
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-26 | by ( Lauren Mccarthy | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

On the day of a special election in New Hampshire in April 2021, Michael Drouin posted a fake advertisement on Craigslist offering a free trailer and listed the phone number of Bill Boyd, a candidate for a state House seat. Mr. Drouin was indicted in November 2022 on a felony charge of interference with election communications. On Monday, Mr. Drouin, 30, of Merrimack, N.H., pleaded guilty to the reduced charge of creating a false document, an election law offense, admitting that he knowingly interfered with Mr. Boyd’s ability to use his cellphone on Election Day. The charge is a misdemeanor, not a felony, but it still cost him his right to vote in the state. People who are convicted of a willful violation of the state’s election laws lose their right to vote under the New Hampshire Constitution.

☆ A Widow Said Her Husband Was Left in a Drinks Cooler After Dying on a Cruise
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-22 | by ( Lauren Mccarthy | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Having been stored at an insufficient temperature, the body had “horrifically decomposed,” the lawsuit said, preventing his family from having an open casket at his wake and funeral. For her trauma, Ms. Jones, who had been married to her husband for 55 years, and her family are seeking a jury trial and at least $1 million in damages. In a statement, Celebrity Cruises declined to comment, citing “the sensitivity of the alleged facts and out of respect for the family.”The lawsuit, which was reported by Miami New Times, said members of the ship’s crew told Ms. Jones that there was a “50/50 shot” if she got off the ship in San Juan that the coroner’s office there would take possession of her husband’s body for an autopsy before releasing it to a funeral home. She was told she would have to stay in Puerto Rico with his body and make arrangements on her own to get it, and herself, back to Florida. Assured that the Equinox was equipped to safely transport her husband’s body back to Fort Lauderdale, Ms. Jones, who was 78 at the time and suddenly traveling alone, gave the crew permission to store his body in the ship’s morgue and agreed to remain on board for the rest of the cruise, the lawsuit says.

☆ A Pink Door Is Deemed Too Bright for Edinburgh
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-19 | by ( Lauren Mccarthy | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

When Miranda Dickson returned to Edinburgh in 2021 after several years abroad, she began renovating a three-story Georgian townhouse in the Scottish city’s New Town district. Ms. Dickson painted the front door pink. In early 2022, the new paint job was brought to the attention of the City of Edinburgh Council, which asked her to repaint the door white. Ms. Dickson was issued an enforcement notice ordering her to “remove the unauthorized bright pink paint” from the door and “to restore the previous colour scheme.” Failure to comply, it said, could lead to a fine of up to 20,000 pounds, or nearly $25,000. Finally, having exhausted her appeals, Ms. Dickson relented and repainted the door this week, ahead of the Thursday deadline she said that the city had given her.

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