Yahoo! News Photos: Cycling

A car collides into cyclists participating in a race in Mexico’s northern border city of Matamoros, Sunday June 1, 2008. At least one person was killed and 14 injured when a driver slammed into a bicycle race.

In one of the most surreal sequences of events, texting the wrong “i” led to the death of two in Turkey, and the jailing of three. While “ı” and “i” are separate letters in the Turkish language, not all cell phones have the appropriate characters to display both.

So when 24-year-old Ramazan Çalçoban sent a text message to his 20-year-old wife Emine, the results were a sad mixup:

The use of “i” resulted in an SMS with a completely twisted meaning: instead of writing the word “sıkısınca” it looked like he wrote “sikisince.” Ramazan wanted to write “You change the topic every time you run out of arguments” (sounds familiar enough) but what Emine read was, “You change the topic every time they are fucking you” (sounds familiar too.)

If the two had not already been arguing, perhaps leveler heads would have prevailed. Perhaps Emine asked for clarification, or defended herself against the accusation, and maybe even laugh about it once she realized the mistake. We can all imagine acting this way in less heated situations.

But what followed is too devastating and absurd to imagine:

Emine then showed the message to her father, who—enraged—called Ramazan, accusing him of treating his daughter as a prostitute. Ramazan went to the family’s home to apologize, only to be greeted by the father, Emine, two sisters and a lot of very sharp knives.

Ramazan managed to escape with his life, but mortally wounded Emine after defending himself with a knife he pulled from his chest after being stabbed. Later, Ramazan would commit suicide in jail, confused by the unreality of the events.

Third-graders arrested in teacher attack plot:

The students apparently planned to knock the teacher unconscious with a crystal paperweight, bind her with the handcuffs and tape and then stab her with the knife.