Ticket takers

President Donald Trump may be locked in a struggle of nuclear proportions with North Korea, but New York City has its own bone to pick with the Hermit Kingdom: parking tickets. According to public records, North Korea’s diplomatic mission to the United Nations owes more than $156,000 in fines on more than 1,300 parking tickets dating back two decades. A man claiming to be the secretary to North Korea’s UN mission told WNBC that the city has it all wrong. “It’s not true,” Jong Jo told WNBC. “It is false. Whenever we have a ticket, we pay.” According to the records, China owes nearly $400,000 in unpaid parking debt to the city while Russia owes just $104,231.

Long-term relationship

Jessica Gomes and Aaron Bairos were born on the same day, in the same hospital, and now they are the same flesh. Gomes and Bairos were the only two children born on April 28, 1990, at Morton Hospital in Taunton, Mass. According to the Taunton Daily Gazette, the two went to separate schools in Taunton and didn’t meet again until they took a driver’s ed class together. That’s when they discovered their identical birthdates and birthplaces. They began dating as teenagers and were married last month at Holy Family Church in East Taunton. Jessica told the Gazette that her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother were all married at the same church: “And they were all successful, healthy marriages.”

Something fishy

It didn’t rain cats and dogs in northern Mexico on Sept. 26, but it did rain fish. Officials in Tampico, a city near the Gulf coast, say a light rain that day included some small fish that also fell from the sky. Scientists say the event isn’t unprecedented, and they speculate that tornado-like waterspouts cause the phenomenon by gathering fish from a body of water and lifting them into the sky before releasing them.

Unmarked mark

A carjacker in Japan picked the wrong car to try to steal during a Sept. 25 attempted theft. Police in Numazu, Japan, say 23-year-old Ushio Sato selected an unmarked police car—with two police officers inside—for his pre-dawn heist. Realizing his mistake, Sato attempted to flee on foot, but the officers quickly caught and arrested him.

Making a point

Authorities in Singapore say a 60-year-old man went too far in trying to keep the seat beside him empty on his daily bus trips. Police accused Lim Lye Seng of booby-trapping bus seats by vertically implanting toothpicks in seats near him as many as four times this past summer. The private bus company that owned the buses on which Seng rode said re-covering the seats cost nearly $1,000. Seng pled guilty to the charges at his Sept. 27 hearing.

Viva Juana

Government officials in Spain insist Alcalá de Guadaira resident Juana Escudero is dead. Escudero tells a different story. In 2010, a clerical error led a Spanish bureaucracy to declare the 53-year-old woman dead, leaving her unable to renew her driver’s license or go to the doctor. Her daughter told her hometown newspaper, El Diario de Sevilla, that at first the family found the situation funny. Now, after seven years of failed attempts to fix the error, the family isn’t laughing. Escudero filed a petition in September to exhume a buried body the government believes to be her from a local cemetery.

Euro trash

Flush with cash, an unidentified resident of Switzerland is causing a plumbing nightmare in Geneva. City prosecutors say they are investigating four incidents in recent months in which shredded 500-euro notes (each worth $589) were found clogging toilets in three Geneva restaurants and one bank. Police say they believe the incidents are related and that the money all came from a Spanish woman who had stored tens of thousands of euros in a bank vault in Geneva. Because of the large nominal value, criminals often use 500-euro notes in enterprises that require cash.

Hanging it up

Proof that the Windows Phone is dead: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates revealed on Fox News Sunday on Sept. 24 that he recently dumped his Windows Phone for a device that runs Google’s Android software. When asked if he would own an iPhone from Microsoft rival Apple, Gates ruled that out. Microsoft quietly stopped selling the Windows Phone in July due to its unpopularity with consumers.

Breaking and imbibing

Sean Haller had two cases of beer and not a soul to drink his suds with. So, in what must have seemed like a good idea to his alcohol-soaked brain, the 39-year-old allegedly broke into a Stewartstown, Pa., home on Sept. 12 in search of drinking buddies. Instead, he found a woman home with her children who promptly called police. Officers arrested Haller and charged him with criminal trespass.