Police Pull Over Waymo to Check for Drunk Driving

in

via Futurism:

On Friday night, cops in the Bay Area city of San Bruno who were on the lookout for drunk drivers stopped a car after it made an illegal U-turn at a traffic light — only to realize there was no one in the driver’s seat. There was no smell of booze or someone slurring their words, either. It was a Waymo robotaxi blowing off traffic laws like many a human driver when it’s late out.

“No driver, no hands, no clue,” the police department wrote in a social media post about the incident, per the Chronicle’s reporting.

The self-driving cab, however, didn’t get dinged like you or us. Since there was no one operating the vehicle, the cops couldn’t issue a citation. But they did reach out to Waymo’s parent company Google to let them know about the glitch.

“Our citation books don’t have a box for ‘robot,'” the department said.

corpse pose

in

Article link is behind WaPo’s paywall, but I’ve shared it as a gift link, so it should be accessible. And what a gift it is.

... the group of seven yogis in a class held Wednesday inside a cafe in Lincolnshire, England, were finally in shavasana, a position at the end of a yoga class — sometimes called corpse pose — where people sink into a meditative state by lying on their backs.


For 30 minutes, they resembled corpses as the instructor, Millie Laws, 22, banged on a shamanic drum inside a room lit only by the golden glow of candlelight. The scene was meant to be relaxing — but for a couple walking their dog outside the building, it resembled something far more sinister.


“They reported to the police that they’d seen somebody walking around in a room lit up with candles and what looked like dead people lying all over the floor,” Laws told The Washington Post. “The couple thought it was some sort of ritual mass killing.”

hooligan gnomes

in

Police believe the heavily bearded soft toys are being left not as thoughtful if out of season gifts but by burglars who are trying to test whether homes are empty.

If the gnome is not moved, burglars work on the basis that the householder is probably not around and their home is a decent target.

The gnomes began appearing on 1 September when two men said to be carrying Royal Mail-style bags were spotted in Broughton, Flintshire. They were reportedly looking at properties and placing items into residents’ gardens, including gnomes. The sightings were flagged up on the north Wales community alert page.

“yami baito,” Pokémon edition

in

via SoraNews24:

Card shops are having to incorporate security systems on par with jewelry and antique shops to keep ahead of increasingly aggressive burglars with eyes on a mint-condition Charizard. Just this week one caper that spanned most of the country was thwarted by the Tokyo police, who arrested 35-year-old Masaki Omori of Okinawa for stealing some 1,500 cards...

It all began when Omori applied for a "yami baito" or "dark part-time job" which is a one-time, high-pay, and high-risk criminal endeavor at the request of someone, often made over social media.

The suspect flew to Ibaraki on 11 April using his own money and rented a car from there to travel to Akihabara. At about 5:00 a.m. on 12 April, Omori smashed through a window of the unoccupied store and proceeded to take about 1,500 cards worth approximately 1.15 million yen (US$8,240)...

The whole article is an insane must-read.