To misquote Babbage, "I cannot comprehend the confusion of mind that would bring someone to such a decision" .....

edit: oh. The guy went to court to specifically undo a ruling that was over 10 years old, that would have caused his ex-wife to owe the government a lot of "unfairly claimed" benefits. I'm less confused now.

A good rule of thumb is: if you ever see something in the media that cannot possibly be true, it really isn't true - it's just the media doing above-average fact twisting on the story.

It literally is true, though. As I said, and the paper reported: the guy was ruled dead, came before a judge and asked for the judgement to be revoked, and the judge told him "I don’t know where that leaves you, but you’re still deceased as far as the law is concerned".

The issue here was that the guy had disappeared for a long time, and been declared dead in full accordance with the law. That specific law didn't have a clause to help reverse wrongful declarations of death, so the judge had to let it stand.

The relevance of the ten year and back payments is mostly that it decreased sympathy for the guy, not that it changed the outcome.

But it actually is true in this case.

Even if actually true, the context explains the entire difference between what was said and what was expected.

Reminds me of an experiment on ants that I once heard of. Put a drop of the pheromone produced by dead ants on a live worker, and watch as the others dutifully carry her to the trash pile, despite the fact that she keeps protesting and going back to work.

I hope they washed her off afterwards. Poor little ant :-(

At least the solution was more straightforward for Ulysses.

Literally straightforward, through a dozen axe heads.