🚌 PUBLIC TRANSIT - Man hijacks Hamilton city bus full of passengers

🍁 CULTURE - Drunk BC man breaks bones after falling out of carnival ride on 9-year-old worker’s watch

🤖 AI - Man accused of sharing deepfake nudes of his wife didn’t commit a crime, says Ontario judge

Good morning.

This was the hardest issue to put together yet.

There was so much good news this week that narrowing it down to just three stories felt like a crime.

Anyway, I did.

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Enjoy today’s stories.

-Peter

⌛️ Today’s read is 4 minutes long.

A Hamilton city bus driver stepped out of his rig at around 9 PM Tuesday night to use the washroom at a terminal.

The bus, meanwhile, filled with passengers—including a 36-year-old man who took the liberty of sitting in the driver’s seat and shutting the doors.

The passengers remained surprisingly calm as he drove the bus up Hamilton Mountain, making several stops along the way while allowing passengers to board and exit freely.

He even denied a ride to someone who tried boarding with an expired pass.

“He did a great job,” Hamilton police told the CBC after they arrested the man.

Police began looking for the hijacked bus shortly after its real driver exited the terminal washroom and reported the bus missing.

The city gave police access to the bus's GPS, which a host of cruisers used to follow the rig up Hamilton Mountain with their sirens off. After about 15 minutes, they pulled the bus over and arrested the man without incident.

“We didn't want to spook him,” said police spokesman Trevor McKenna. “We didn't want to make this a tragedy.”

McKenna added that “there was not a ding on the bus,” which is extra impressive considering it was one of those long buses with an accordion-like attachment joining the first vehicle to the second.

Despite their glazing of the man in the media, police still charged him with theft and possession of stolen goods over $5,000, driving while prohibited, and obstructing police.

A 9-year-old boy was unloading passengers from a carnival ride in Port Hardy, BC, earlier this year when a drunk man fell from an open car and broke several bones, says a provincial safety regulator.

It wasn’t the boy’s first time working the Zipper—a 52-year-old ride consisting of 12 cars that spin and roll on a vertical boom. His father had been the ride’s foreman for four years.

The boy, who travels with the carnival, was apparently “really good at cracking buckets,” an industry term for loading and unloading a caged-style ride.

So everything seemed perfectly under control when his dad stepped away from the ride for a few minutes on May 31 to “wash up,” leaving the boy to crack buckets while an operator worked the ride with a button.

There was just one problem: the boy didn’t have the guts to tell a couple drunk guys that they weren’t allowed to ride.

The two men were “intoxicated but loaded onto the zipper ride multiple times before the final incident-ride and had several items with them including a bottle of alcohol,” said Technical Safety B.C. (TSBC), adding that the boy didn’t have the “experience or assertiveness necessary” to stop the drunkards, whom the boy described as “half asleep and half awake.”

The men rode the Zipper for another cycle before the boy began cracking buckets again with the help of an older carny, who was unloading another car while the boy struggled to get both drunkards off the ride.

“Only one rider stepped out,” said TSBC. “The second person was taking much longer than normal to exit the ride.”

The door on their car was still open when the older carny signalled to the operator to move the next cars into the unloading position

The car rose 6-8 feet in the air before the man toppled out. He was taken to a hospital.

After looking into the accident, investigators pointed out a few ways the carnies could have prevented this from happening.

For a start, they noted that whoever works the Zipper should feel comfortable turning away drunk riders.

A man accused of sharing deepfake nude photos of his wife without her consent did not commit a crime, says a Burlington judge.

The man allegedly shared photos with an unknown man on Snapchat in which his wife’s head was digitally manipulated onto a naked body that was not her own. He was charged with publishing, distributing, or transmitting an intimate image of a person without their consent.

However, Ontario Court Justice Brian Puddington said in his decision last month that while the man’s actions were “morally reprehensible and, frankly, obscene,” they did not amount to a crime since the photos did not meet the definition of intimate images under the Criminal Code.

The judge said two of the photos showed the man’s wife in “a state of undress,” with one depicting her in a bra and another topless.

The first picture didn’t have enough nudity to be criminal, said the judge, and the second picture also wasn’t criminal since it didn’t show the woman’s actual naked body.

“None of this is to say that creating and distributing these fake images is not morally reprehensible and, frankly, obscene,” said the judge. “It may be that Parliament will turn its mind to criminalizing this conduct in the future.”

The federal government has promised to introduce legislation cracking down on the nonconsensual sharing of deepfake nudes, but has yet to do so.

(Source: CP24)