For the last three years, a man in India’s Madhya Pradesh state has been living a real-life daily nightmare inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Birds’. Every time he walks out of his house, he gets attacked by a murder of crows. The strange thing is the birds only target him.

Shiva Kewat, a daily wage labourer from Sumela village, says his troubles with crows began three years ago, due to a misunderstanding. One day, as he was walking on the street he noticed a crow chick stuck in iron netting, but despite his efforts to help the small bird escape, it died in his hands. Some of the rows must have seen the scene and assumed that he killed their young, because they’ve been attacking him ever since. Sometimes they come for him in groups, otherwise it’s just a single bird, but Kewat always carries a stick with him to fend off their sharp beaks and talons.

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An Italian man who went to great lengths to convince everyone that he had lost the ability to walk after being involved in a staged car accident 12 years ago was recently exposed as a fraud.

The incredible story of Roberto Guglielmi, an Italian con artist who managed to fool everyone, including doctors, neighbors and even the Pope, that he couldn’t walk began over a decade ago. In 2007, he came up with a plan to pass himself off as a disabled person and collect the pension offered by the government, but he needed an accomplice to pull it off. At the time, he had someone living in his home who was behind on rent, so he proposed to forget about the payment he was owed if his housemate would pretend to hit him with the car while he was crossing the street. The man agreed and everything went smoothly. With the help of a false medical document, Guglielmi was able to become a paraplegic, even though he could walk like a normal person.

What’s most remarkable about this tale of deception is the extreme lengths that the Florentine went to in order to deceive doctors during mandatory visits to confirm his disability. According to prosecutors, he would inject lidocaine into his legs to numb his muscles, undergo traumatic therapies and use a wheelchair whenever he left his home. For over a decade, no one suspected that he was actually a healthy person with full use of his legs.

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A group of 75 female volunteers from India’s Odisha state has spent every day of the last 20 years patrolling a 75-hectare forest to protect it from woodcutters and timber smugglers.

In 1999, the eastern state of Odisha was ravaged by a supercyclone. People lost their homes, their crops and had to go without food or clothing for several days. But many in Gundalba, a small village in the Mahanadi delta of Puri district, realized that the only reason they were still alive was thanks to a forest and mangrove area that had shielded them from the brunt of the devastation. They knew they had to protect it at all costs, but with all the men busy rebuilding the village after the supercyclone, the task of watching over the forest fell to the women. They quickly formed a vigilante group and  have been taking turns patrolling the forested area in search of timber smugglers and woodcutters for the last 20 years.

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Sanom Chantaraphirom, a 58-year-old man from Thailand who had become famous for wearing an eye-catching “Buddha armor” made up of dozens of blessed Buddha amulets to enhance his luck, recently died in a tragic car accident after leaving his house without his protective garment.

Chantaraphirom, a dedicated Buddhist, first made news headlines in Thailand two years ago, when a video of him wearing one of his several Buddha armors on the streets of his native Sawaeng Ha district, in Ang Thong Province, went viral. Reporters soon got in touch with him and learned that the man, who earned a living making errands with his rickshaw, had accumulated hundreds of blessed Buddha amulets from various temples around the country and had fashioned them into a chain mail-like armor complete with a helmet. Buddha amulets are considered tools to increase the wearer’s luck in different aspects of life, and virtually every Buddhist in Thailand owns at least one, but Sanom Chantaraphirom wore dozens of them over his clothing as a sign of his dedication to Buddhism.

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Imagine going to sleep after a day of heavy snowfall and waking up the next morning to find that all that white snow has turned black overnight. That’s exactly what the people of Kiselevsk and Prokopyevsk, two cities in Russia’s Kuzbass region experienced earlier this week.

Photos and videos recently shared on social media by worried citizens of the two Russian cities show the grim reality of living in a coal mining area – snow covered fields and streets blanketed by a thick layer of coal dust and soot that literally turns the snow from white to pitch black.

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The small town of Belushya Guba, in northern Russia, is in a state of emergency, with locals afraid to leave their houses because of dozens of polar bears roaming the streets in search of food.

Located on one of the two islands that make up the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, Belushya Guba is home to roughly 3,000 people, many of whom are terrified to leave their homes and send their kids to school, because of the dozens of bears running around in the streets and even entering buildings in search of food. While polar bear sighting aren’t exactly uncommon in the remote town, the scale of this invasion is reportedly unprecedented. Over 52 sightings have been reported in only three days, with up to 10 bears seen in the settlement at any given time.

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A Silicon Valley family was in the news recently for renting a $1,500-a-month living space for their two cats, because they didn’t get along with the dog they shared their previous home with.

David Callisch couldn’t be happier with the tenants living in the 425-square-foot studio apartment behind his house, in San Jose, California. They don’t drink, they don’t smoke and they never turn on the music too loud. That’s because Tina and Louise are two cats who live alone in the $1,500-a-month living space. Callisch planned to use it as an Airbnb, but when his friend Troy Good asked him if he could rent it from him for his daughter’s cats, he agreed. He was shocked by the request at first, but then decided he couldn’t ask for better tenants.

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Kanathip Nathip, a 53-year-old man from Phitsanulok, Thailand,  never has to worry about locking the door of his home whenever he goes out, as anyone foolish enough to try and rob it would get the surprise of a lifetime. The Thai man shares his house with a full grown crocodile that’s free to move around as he pleases and doesn’t take kindly to uninvited guests.

Nathip got the crocodile 20 years ago, as a pet for his two children. He had taken them to a crocodile farm in Nakorn Sawan and they loved the reptiles so much that he ended up buying not one but two of them. At first both Thong (Gold) and Ngern (Silver) lived in the family home, but as time went by, it became clear that Ngern wasn’t meant to be a house pet, so they built a small pond in the yard and moved him there. Thong, on the other hand, seemed much more comfortable in the house, so he’s been living there for the past two decades. Even though Nathip’s two sons have grown up and moved out of the house, the 53-year-old still has Thong, who he considers his third son.

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At just 12-years-old, Leonardo Nicanor Quinteros is still in secondary school, but he already runs his own free private school to help other children, and even some adults, with their studies.

Leonardo loves to study, but he also wants to transfer his passion for education to his peers. After seeing some of his colleagues struggling to keep up at school, and other children spending too much time playing on the streets and completely neglecting their studies, he decided to do something about it. Last year, he told his grandmother, Ramona, that he wanted to operate his own school and asked her to help him build it next to her house, in the Argentinian town of Las Piedritas, near San Juan. She obliged, and today’s Nico’s free private school caters to nearly 40 young students. The 12-year-old acts both as teacher and principal and is proud that his initiative has already made a big difference for many of the children attending there.

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Dozens of families in and around the city of Cairns, in Australia, have been forced to temporarily abandon their homes after flying foxes started dropping dead on their properties due to the unbearable heat.

Cairns residents started reporting massive numbers of spectacled flying foxes dropping out of trees on Monday, when temperatures in Australia’s Queensland region rose to above 40 degrees Celsius. According to animal experts, the nocturnal mammals cannot sustain an internal temperature of over 40 degrees, and with no way to cool off, their organs start to shut down and they eventually die. Wildlife rescuers have been working around the clock, using using spray bottles and drippers too cool off and hydrate the helpless creatures, but there’s only so much they can do. The flying fox colonies in the Cairns area have already sustained heavy losses and the number of fatalities is expected to rise for as long as the heatwave continues. But apart from the environmental issues, the massive number of dead bats rotting away so close to people’s houses has now become a become a serious public health issue as well.

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A 29-year-old American man decided to leave the United States behind and move to a remote jungle village in India so he wouldn’t have to constantly worry about paying back his student loan.

Like many other Americans, Chad Haag had to rely on a student loan to pay for his college education, but he struggled to find a college-level job after graduating, and going back school to pursue a master’s degree in comparative literature didn’t really help in that regard. His first job had him unloading trucks and constructing toy rockets on a factory assembly line, then he worked as an adjunct professor, but with only one class assigned per semester, he could barely make a living, let alone pay back his $20,000 student loan. At one point, struggling to pay the $300 monthly instalments became too stressful, so he just packed his bags, said goodbye to his life in the US and moved to a small village in India.

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They say no good deed goes unpunished, and this kindhearted North-Carolina woman who took in dozens of abandoned pets as Hurricane Florence ravaged the US state is a prime example of that. She was arrested and is now facing several misdemeanor charges for practicing veterinary medicine without a license.

As Hurricane Florence was getting ready to make landfall in North Caroline, Tammie Hedges decided to turn a warehouse she had been remodeling into a shelter for pets. Pets came from the streets, where they were picked up by volunteers, but also from their owners, who had to evacuate but couldn’t take their animals with them. All in all, she sheltered 27 pets – 17 cats and 10 dogs – during the storm, and also administered some medical treatments to ensure their well-being. But whereas most people considered her actions an act of kindness to animals, local authorities saw them as a violation of the law and charged her with several misdemeanors.

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Australian food scientists are scratching their heads about an orange that turned bright purple just hours after being sliced open. The bizarrely-colored fruit has been collected as forensic evidence but so far no one can explain what caused the coloring.

The mysterious orange was purchased last week by Neti Moffitt, a resident of Brisbane, from a fruit and vegetable market. She planned to use it as a snack for her two-year-old son and claims that the fruit looked and smelled normal. It was only after leaving a piece of it out overnight that she noticed the bright purple coloring spreading on the orange pulp. After searching online for answers, Moffitt stumbled on a 2015 article that mentioned a similar case, where someone had bought an orange from a fruit market only to see it turn purple hours after being cut.

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Eva N., from the Slovakian town of Štúrovo, was recently arrested after defying the Supreme Court’s decision to stop playing a four-minute aria from Giuseppe Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’ on loop every day from early in the morning until late at night.

It’s safe to say that Eva N.’s neighbors on Kossuth Street, in Štúrovo, know Verid’s La Traviata by heart. After all they’ve been forced to listen to it for 16 years, ever since the woman started playing it from loudspeakers on her balconies almost non-stop during the day. They’ve been trying to get her to stop for years, appealing to both local police and the justice system, but Eva just defied everyone and kept turning on Placido Domingo’s interpretation of La Traviata every morning at around 6 am, and only turned it off at around 10 at night. Luckily, after over a decade and a half of audio torture, Slovakia’s Supreme Court recently upheld the decision of a lower court that required Eva N. to stop playing her music at loud volume. She ignored the ruling as she did the previous ones, only this time, she got arrested.

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Javier Lara, a 48-year-old Honduran man who was evicted from his home on charges of domestic violence, has been sleeping on the side of the road, outside a police station, for two week, in protest of what he calls an abuse against him.

The retired police officer told reporters that his wife had filed a complaint of domestic violence against him and that a judge ruled that he be evicted from his house in San Francisco de la Paz, in Olancho, without even hearing his side of the story. Military police just came to his house and told him to pack up and leave. Lara maintains that not only did he never hit his wife, but also never insulted her and always tried to treat her like a lady. Despite all this, the judge sided with her without even questioning him, so he’s been sleeping on a makeshift bed on the side of the road, opposite the local police station, in protest.

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