the "Headline That Caught My Attention or the WTF" thread

Lock him up and throw away the key. Classic "you can't fix stupid", HTH do you think you can get away with something like this then you're pulling it off while working at a lobster dock???

Rockland man pleads guilty to making hoax distress call​

pressherald.com/2021/06/04/rockland-man-pleads-guilty-to-making-hoax-distress-call/

By Stephen BettsJune 4, 2021

PORTLAND — A 31-year-old Rockland man pleaded guilty Thursday in federal court to making a false distress call to the Coast Guard, which resulted in a large search effort.

Nathan Libby pleaded guilty June 3 in U.S. District Court in Portland to communicating a false distress call Dec. 3, 2020.

Libby faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted of the crime.

He will be sentenced after the completion of a pre-sentence investigation report by the U.S. Probation Office. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.

An affidavit filed in court by Coast Guard Investigative Service Special Agent Mark Root detailed the investigation that led to the charge against Libby.

The Coast Guard received a May Day call shortly after 6:30 a.m. Dec. 3, 2020, on VHF marine radio channel 16, The Coast Guard dispatcher spoke with a man for about one to two minutes during the time where the unidentified man said the boat he was on lost its rudder and was taking on water fast, and the pumps could not keep up with the water.

The man said there were three people aboard the boat, and they were in Spruce Head Harbor and trying to get to the Atwood float.

Marine Patrol Officer Nicholas Stillwell responded to Atwood Lobster Co.’s wharf on Spruce Head Island in South Thomaston and boarded a private vessel in an attempt to locate the boat that made the distress call. No vessel was located.

Stillwell returned to the dock and spoke to Libby, who was a dock worker at the neighboring Spruce Head Fisherman’s Co-op. Libby provided the Marine Patrol officer a list of boats that went out that morning.

The officer then spoke to someone else at the co-op and played the recording of the distress call. That person said the voice sounded like Libby. The officer went back and spoke to Libby, who said he heard the distress call. He also acknowledged the co-op office had a VHF radio, which was on channel 16.

The officer taped Libby and his voice was compared to the distress call by an associate research professor at the Language Technologies Institute School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Associate Professor Rita Singh concluded the voice on the distress call was the same as Libby’s voice, the affidavit stated.

Surveillance video showed Libby was at the co-op office the time the distress call was made. A check from a radio tower showed the call came from the direction of the co-op.

The Coast Guard sent out a vessel that searched for more than four hours, and a helicopter from Coast Guard Air Station Cape Cod spent more than five hours in the search; Maine Marine Patrol and private boats also helped in the search.

The distress call was also made less than two weeks after the Portland-based fishing boat Emmy Rose sank off the coast of Massachusetts, with four crew members aboard.
 
www.yahoo.com

Mysterious Brain Syndrome Grips Canada

MONTREAL — Forty-eight people from the same small Canadian province struck with a baffling mix of symptoms including insomnia, impaired motor function and hallucinations such as nightmarish visions of the dead. A quixotic neurologist working 12-hour days to decipher the clues. Swirling...
www.yahoo.com www.yahoo.com

MONTREAL — Forty-eight people from the same small Canadian province struck with a baffling mix of symptoms including insomnia, impaired motor function and hallucinations such as nightmarish visions of the dead.

A quixotic neurologist working 12-hour days to decipher the clues.

Swirling conspiracy theories blaming the illness on cellphone towers, fracking or even COVID-19 vaccines.

These are just some plotlines of a mystery that has stumped Canada’s medical establishment, attracted the attention of some of the world’s top neurologists and fanned fears among residents of New Brunswick, a picturesque province of about 770,000 on Canada’s Atlantic coast. In the past six years, dozens of people have fallen ill from the disease, and six people have died.

“People are alarmed,” said Yvon Godin, the mayor of Bertrand, a village in the Acadian Peninsula in northeastern New Brunswick where residents have been afflicted. “They are asking, ‘Is it environmental? Is it genetic? Is it fish or deer meat? Is it something else?’ Everyone wants answers.”
 

Mysterious black substance on Wells Beach turns out to be millions of dead bugs​

pressherald.com/2021/06/08/mysterious-black-substance-on-wells-beach-turns-out-to-be-millions-of-dead-bugs/

By Eric Russell June 8, 2021
Linda Stathoplos, a retired NOAA researcher and oceanographer, searches the base of the jetty for remnants of bugs that washed ashore on Wells Beach on Tuesday. Stathoplos used a microscope to determine that the remains of small black flies likely stained the feet on beachgoers.

Ed Smith has walked Wells Beach for years but has never seen anything like it: A mysterious black substance that settles on the sand near the shoreline and stains the feet of anyone who ventures too close.

He first noticed it Sunday night. When he went back out Monday, it was there again. He talked to about a dozen beachgoers who all said they noticed it too.

“I sat on the edge of my tub with blue Dawn (dishwashing soap) and a scrub pad, and I still couldn’t remove the stain from my feet,” Smith said.

It took a few inquiries to local and state officials, and some help from a retired scientist who lives nearby, but Smith got his answer Tuesday. It only raised more questions.


Linda Stathoplos and John Lillibridge look for remnants of bugs that washed ashore on Wells Beach. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer


The tip of a sewing pin is included for scale in this photo of an insect, at 20 times magnification, taken with a phone through a microscope. Courtesy photo by Linda Stathoplos

According to Steve Dickson, a marine geologist with Maine Geological Survey, the black substance was the collective carcasses of dead insects. Millions of them. The bugs float in the ocean but when waves wash ashore, they settle on the beach and stay there when the tide goes back out.

“This is the first time I’ve seen or heard of this in my 35 years,” Dickson said. “Normally this time of year we get calls about too much seaweed (wrack) on the beach and the swarming flies that hang around the decaying seaweed. This wasn’t that.”

Dickson said he’s still working with entomologists on figuring out what the bugs are, where they came from – and why – but he doesn’t expect it to be a recurring phenomenon. He said once the winds shift, it’s likely that whatever bug debris is left behind will wash back out to sea.


Wells Beach shows the remains of insects left by waves. The insects float in the ocean and waves coming ashore at the beaches concentrate them on a rising tide. As the tide falls, they are left in lines on the beach where the last wave washed ashore. Courtesy photo by John Lillibridge

It was Smith’s curiosity that led to the unraveling of the mystery. He took some pictures and sent them to an official at the Department of Environmental Protection out of concern the substance might be toxic. DEP officials then sent the photos around to several others, including Dickson, who was intrigued.

Once he realized the pictures were of Wells Beach, he contacted Linda Stathoplos and John Lillibridge, a married couple who live nearby and who are both retired oceanographers. They also participate in the state’s beach monitoring program.

The couple offered to go down to the beach and get a sample. Stathoplos said they had never seen anything like it either.

She even went one step further.

“I collected some of the stuff, brought it back and put them under my microscope,” she said. Retired scientists still keep their tools handy. “It was clearly little bugs.”

Stathoplos sent magnified photos to Dickson, who agreed.

After Smith was told what was covering the beach and staining his feet, he said it made sense.

“When I was walking again on Monday, I said to my friend who was with me, ‘I wonder if this is residue from flying black bugs that were all over the beach a week ago,’” he said.

Dickson said there were other reports of a similar substance at York Beach and in Ogunquit as well, but he hadn’t heard of anything anywhere else.

Emma Bouthilette, who regularly walks on Fortunes Rock Beach in Biddeford, posted a photo of Facebook this week of her blackened feet. She doesn’t know if she, too, stepped in a pile of bug carcasses or not, but said she’s always referred to the black substance as “beach tar.” What she encountered is not unusual, she said.

“I think it was from oil deposits that washed up and mixed with sand and just stuck to your feet,” she said.
Asked why the bugs might be staining people’s feet, Dickson said bugs often eat plants that have pigments. In fact, in some countries bugs are still used to dye garments.
 
Oh, must sit on hands not to comment and give me a slim chance of not burning in Hell for eternity...

Nun Stole Over $800,000 to Support Gambling Habit, Prosecutors Say

Nun Stole Over $800,000 to Support Gambling Habit, Prosecutors Say​

Sister Mary Margaret Kreuper has agreed to plead guilty to charges that she embezzled the money while she was the principal at a Catholic school in Torrance, Calif., prosecutors said.

As a Catholic nun, Sister Mary Margaret Kreuper had taken a vow of poverty.

But this week, prosecutors said Sister Mary Margaret, 79, had agreed to plead guilty to stealing more than $835,000 from a Catholic elementary school to support a gambling habit and to pay for other personal expenses.

Sister Mary Margaret was charged on Tuesday with wire fraud and money laundering while she was the principal of St. James Catholic School in Torrance, Calif., the office of the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California said in a statement. She is scheduled to appear in the Federal District Court in Los Angeles on July 1.

Sister Mary Margaret admitted to a “fraudulent scheme” in which she “lulled St. James School and the administration into believing that the school’s finances were being properly accounted for and its financial assets properly safeguarded,” prosecutors said.

She confessed to causing losses to St. James Catholic School totaling $835,339 over the course of the scheme, the statement said. She retired as the school’s principal in 2018, after 28 years in the role, it said.

According to documents accompanying the plea agreement, Sister Mary Margaret diverted school funds into the school’s convent account and its federal credit union savings account, and then used the money for “expenses that the order would not have approved, much less paid for,” including large gambling expenses at casinos in Nevada and credit card charges.

Sister Mary Margaret’s lawyers, Mark A. Byrne and Daniel V. Nixon, said she was “very remorseful.”

“As soon as she was confronted she accepted full responsibility for what she had done and she has cooperated completely with law enforcement and the Archdiocese,” they said in a statement. They added that “she has been suffering from a mental illness that clouded her judgment and caused her to do something that she otherwise would not have done.”

They said Sister Mary Margaret became a nun when she was 18, and for the next 59 years she dedicated her life to “helping others and educating children in Archdiocesan schools.”

Her religious order, Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, which according to court documents was paying for her living expenses, said in a statement on Wednesday that it would not comment until the legal process was completed.

She also admitted to falsifying monthly and annual financial reports, and to telling school employees to alter and destroy financial records during an audit, the prosecutors’ statement and court documents said.

Concern over the school’s finances started to increase as the Archdiocese of Los Angeles began to prepare for the change of leadership in 2018, the archdiocese said in a statement. A financial review showed “a substantial amount of school funds had been misappropriated for personal use by Sister Mary Margaret,” it said.

In December 2018, after a meeting with the archdiocese, the Torrance Police Department said that it was dedicating additional staffing to help examine evidence and find people who had submitted tuition checks, account payment information or cash donations.

In a statement on Tuesday about Sister Mary Margaret’s guilty plea, the archdiocese said the revelations had “shocked and saddened” the community.
 
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