When Ashley Blair boarded her flight to Portland, Oregon, she was about 38 weeks pregnant. By the time the plane landed, she was a new mom. Brielle Renee Blair was born on April 24 on a Delta Air Lines flight from Atlanta to Portland, the Associated Press reported. Two passengers, paramedics Tina Fritz and Kaarin Powell, helped deliver the baby. With limited supplies available on board, Fritz and Powell had to improvise. They gathered blankets from other passengers and even shoelaces, to tie off the umbilical cord. Blair gave three “super, really good pushes, and the baby came out really quickly,” Fritz said. “It was nice. … Baby pinked up right away. She was gorgeous. Mom was a rock star.” Personnel from Portland Airport Fire & Rescue “found the mother and baby healthy, and the new family was transported to a local hospital for observation,” Port of Portland spokesperson Molly Prescott said. [AP, 4/28/26]
Unleash the bees
- Rebecca Woods, 59, of Massachusetts, was found guilty of assault and battery after unleashing hives of bees on officers who were in the process of evicting a friend of hers, The Guardian reported on April 28. One officer had to be hospitalized and others were stung repeatedly. In addition, Woods lost about a thousand bees in the kerfuffle. Some were crushed by the hives as she tried to move them, and some were female honeybees that perished after employing their stingers. Woods’ lawyer, Mary Saldarelli, said that Woods’ own experiences with being evicted compelled her to intervene on her friend’s behalf, a cancer patient in his 80s. The man was not at home when Woods unleashed her bees, having gone to the library to try to find information about halting the eviction. Woods was sentenced to six months in jail. [The Guardian, 4/28/26]
- Meanwhile, in Arizona, two men were attacked by what sheriff’s deputies called a “moving black cloud of hundreds of thousands of angry bees,” People Magazine reported on April 29. The Greenlee County Sheriff’s Office described the men as “completely covered head to toe in bees.” Firefighters donned protective gear, but the bees still managed to sting several on their heads. No ambulances were available, so the men got a ride to the hospital in the fire truck while firefighters picked the bees off them. Officials were unable to locate a hive, and suspect the bees were part of a migrating swarm. Both men have been released from the hospital. [People, 4/29/26]
Oddly specific
A speed limit sign in Appleton, Wisconsin, is giving motorists pause. UPI reported on April 29 that the Outagamie County Recycling and Solid Waste announced their new speed limit: 17.3 miles per hour. Program Coordinator Jordan Hiller hopes the sign is just disruptive enough to make drivers slow down and be more aware of their surroundings. “Why 17.3? Because it makes you pause. It makes you look twice. And most importantly, it breaks that ‘autopilot’ feeling we can all fall into when driving familiar routes,” the recycling center said in a social media post. [UPI, 4/29/26]
Hole-y ground
Christine Keilback, 58, of Manitoba, found herself in a hole, UPI reported on April 28. No, really, an actual hole. She had just stepped out of her friends’ car when she fell feet first into a hole in the ground. Buried up to her armpits, she waved at passersby and had her friends snap photos while they waited for Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service to rescue her. “When they came around, it was quite surprising to find my head and shoulders just above the ground. The ground had just given away very fast. I have no recollection of the fall. It just happened very quickly,” Keilback said. Paramedics used a harness to pull Keilback out of the hole, and she made it out unharmed. City officials who surveyed the situation determined that the hole was not a sinkhole as suspected, but a catch basin with a missing cover. They found another coverless basin nearby as well. “I mow the lawn there,” she said of the second hole. “I mean, it could have happened [again]. Wouldn’t that have been something?” Both holes have since been covered. [UPI, 4/28/26]
Shell game
A 19-year-old Taiwanese woman attempted to board her plane in Bangkok with an unusual carry-on item: 30 Indian star tortoises, worth $9,000, strapped under her clothing. Yahoo News reported that Thai authorities grew suspicious of her movements, and a search uncovered the protected species. “The suspect had used adhesive tape to immobilize the animals, packed them into cloth bags and attached them to her body to evade detection,” Thailand’s wildlife conservation department said. The passenger was charged with illegally transporting animals and evading customs controls, and given the preponderance of wildlife smugglers who use Thailand as a transportation hub to sell endangered animals on the black market, authorities are investigating whether she could be linked to a larger smuggling ring. The tortoises are under the care of wildlife conservation officials. [Yahoo!, 4/30/26]
Crying wolf
A 40-year-old South Korean man could spend five years in prison and pay a fine of $6,700 for using AI to create an image of a wolf roaming the streets of Daejeon. A wolf named Neukgu escaped from the Daejeon Zoo in South Korea, Oddity Central reported on April 30. A South Korean man heard the news and used a prompt to create an AI-generated image of Neukgu. The fabricated image spread rapidly, and authorities closed schools and sent emergency teams to the area. Neukgu was eventually found just outside of Daejeon, but authorities believe it could have been captured much earlier had it not been for the AI shenanigans. “A single AI-manipulated image delayed the wolf’s capture by up to nine days,” they said. “The prolonged deployment of police and firefighters caused significant disruptions to their primary duty of protecting the public.” [Oddity Central, 4/30/26]
Bringing the artificial to the intelligence
It started as an experiment. Almira Osmanovic Thunstrom, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, wanted to see what language learning models would do with obvious medical misinformation, Oddity Central reported on April 29. So they made up an eye condition — bixonimania — and uploaded a couple of fake studies to a preprint server. The studies contained language that would make it obvious to human readers that the content wasn’t real. “I wanted to be really clear to any physician or any medical staff that this is a made-up condition, because no eye condition would be called mania — that’s a psychiatric term,” Osmanovic Thunstrom said. One paper acknowledges “Professor Maria Bohm at The Starfleet Academy for her kindness and generosity in contributing with her knowledge and her lab onboard the USS Enterprise,” and both studies say they are funded by the “Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation” and a “larger funding initiative from the University of Fellowship of the Ring and the Galactic Triad.” But within weeks, LLMs like Gemini and ChatGPT were referencing the imaginary ailment as if it were real. “Bixonimania is indeed an intriguing and relatively rare condition,” Microsoft’s Copilot reported, and according to Google’s Gemini, “Bixonimania is a condition caused by excessive exposure to blue light.” The team’s experiment points to the risk of depending on LLMs. “It looks funny, but hold on, we have a problem here,” Alex Ruani, a doctoral researcher in health misinformation at University College London, said. “This is a masterclass on how mis- and disinformation operates. If the scientific process itself and the systems that support that process are skilled, and they aren’t capturing and filtering out chunks like these, we’re doomed.” [Oddity Central, 4/29/26]
— distributed by Andrews McMeel Syndication
