Bucket list

A 19-year-old South Florida woman who fled from law enforcement in the Florida Keys on Thursday told the deputy who caught up to her that getting arrested was on her “bucket list.”

She was charged with fleeing and eluding, Monroe County Sheriff’s officials said.

Deputy spotted the woman’s vehicle driving recklessly just before 8 a.m. Thursday. He turned on his lights and siren but the car did not immediately stop.

Before she was taken to jail the woman said getting arrested had been on her bucket list since high school.

TME – Nice to see young people chasing their dreams, albeit at dangerous speeds.

Solidarity surprise

TOLLAND, Conn. (AP) — A Connecticut state trooper who is a native of Poland got quite the surprise while responding to an SUV with a flat tire Wednesday — a passenger in the vehicle happened to be former Polish President Lech Walesa.

State police said Trooper Lukasz Lipert arrived to the call in Tolland and was greeted by Walesa, who had spoken in Hartford on Tuesday as part of his U.S. tour advocating for aid for refugees who have fled Ukraine during the war with Russia.

Lipert, 35, who came to the U.S. when he was 18, told The Hartford Courant that he spoke with Walesa in Polish about their homeland and the anti-communist movement Walesa helped lead.

“It was definitely a great opportunity to meet the man who had a voice during those times,” Lipert said. “It was definitely a great experience.”

Walesa, 78, led the nationwide Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s that eventually toppled Poland’s communist leaders through an election in 1989. He received a Nobel Prize in 1983 and served as Poland’s first popularly elected president from 1990 to 1995. He is a strong critic of Poland’s current right-wing government.

A vehicle service worker changed the tire and Walesa continued on his way down I-84. One of his next stops is an event in Boston on Monday.

TME – This sounds like the set-up for a bad joke.

Make no bones about it

BERLIN (AP) — Students at a high school in the western German town of Schleiden on Wednesday buried a longtime member of their community — a classroom skeleton that had served as an educational specimen for generations of pupils.

Around 80 students, teachers and town officials took part in the ceremony at Schleiden’s Protestant cemetery, where the bones of the unknown woman were buried in a small coffin featuring symbols of all major world religions.

“We are indeed laying to rest a member of the school community to their grave,” said Pastor Oliver Joswig.

The skeleton, dubbed Anh Bian — Vietnamese for “mysterious peace” — had been in the school’s biology department since 1952.

Students had for years pushed for the woman’s remains to be buried, but plans to do so were delayed by the pandemic, German news agency dpa reported.

The school hopes eventually to learn more about the origins of the skeleton once the results of DNA samples taken from the bones are returned.

Biology lessons are now conducted using a plastic model.

TME – Apparently they’re finally learning how to avoid being in a horror movie.

Demanding baby

NEW DELHI (AP) — A retired Indian couple is suing their son and daughter-in-law, demanding that they produce a grandchild within a year or pay them 50 million rupees ($675,000).

Sanjeev Ranjan Prasad, a 61-year-old retired government officer, said it was an emotional and sensitive issue for him and his wife, Sadhana Prasad, and they cannot wait any longer. His son, a pilot, was married six years ago.

“We want a grandson or a granddaughter within a year or compensation, because I have spent my life’s earnings on my son’s education,” Prasad told reporters on Thursday.

Prasad said he spent 3.5 million rupees ($47,300) for his son’s pilot training in the United States.

“The main issue is that at this age we need a grandchild, but these people (my son and daughter-in-law) have an attitude that they don’t think about us,” Prasad said.

“We got him married in the hope we would have the pleasure of becoming grandparents. It has been six years since their marriage,” Prasad said. “It feels as if despite having everything we have nothing.”

The court accepted their petition and scheduled it for a hearing on Monday in Haridwar, a city in northern Uttarakhand state, media reports said.

The son and daughter-in-law could not be reached for comment.

Prasad said he and his wife love children.

“We are not getting love and affection from where we want it the most,” he said. “I feel very unlucky.”

TME – This seems like a perfectly healthy and not-at-all-weird relationship.