Okay, I can see that maybe this could be a funny story in the local paper, but it's quite strange that it ended up as _international news_.

I think it's quirky enough to be amusing, maybe even better that it's from "another" country.

Pre internet age I worked in a store where one "unlucky" guy out of reflex asked the king of Sweden for identification when buying with a credit card (fully aware of who was in front of him, it was a toy store and the king used to shop there once a year for Christmas). A colleague told the story at dinner, the colleagues father worked at an evening news paper and wrote a small blurb about it. The following two days news papers from (literally) around the world tried to get an interview with the guy.

Anything can become international news.

It's regional "news" to me, but I have no doubt that I would not have heard of it if it had not somehow eddied it's way onto hn.

Regional media is dead, it's attention bandwidth has been taken up by spacially distributed, but otherwise super narrow opinion bubbles. And unfortunately I don't see any substitute for the kind of local information that we should have, like communal level politics. For a while it looked as if Facebook might survive filling that gap, but that's not really what happened.