A Kansas man made international news this week after it was revealed that he asked an Iowa court to approve a trial by combat so she could meet his ex-wife and/or her attorney on the field of battle.

David Ostrom, a 40-year-old man from Paola, in Kansas, asked the Iowa District Court in Shelby County to give him 12 weeks lead time to forge his own Japanese katana and wakizashi swords, so could he meet his ex-wife and her attorney “on the field of battle where (he) will rend their souls from their corporal bodies.” Ostrom, who doesn’t have any experience in sword fighting, told reporters that even though he doesn’t anticipate a favorable response from the court, he still wants an answer to his request.

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66-year-old Benjamin Schreiber is very much alive, but hasn’t stopped him from using his death as a way of explaining that he actually served his life sentence for murder.

When Shreiber collapsed in his prison cell in 2015, doctors had to resuscitate him five times, which technically means that he died for a brief period of time before being brought to life. Three years later, the convicted murderer filed for post-conviction relief, claiming that he was being held in prison illegally. He figured that because he had briefly died in 2015, he had technically served his life sentence and should be a free man. His sentence was supposed to end when he died, right? the fact that he had been resurrected didn’t matter.

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A Texas man is wanted on a third-degree felony aggravated forgery charge after police discovered that he was trying to get a divorce from his wife without her even knowing he was divorcing her.

Paul Nixon, 51, of Harris County, in Texas, allegedly forged his wife’s signature as well as that of a public notary to make it look as if his spouse had consented to the divorce. According to court records, Nixon filed for divorce on February 15 – ironically, the day after Valentine’s Day – and a judge signed an order that made the divorce official in April. A Harris County constable told reporters that his ex-wife only learned that Nixon had divorced her in may, when she confronted him about his unusual money spending.

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A 71-year-old man in the UK reportedly spent almost 30,000 pounds ($37,000) fighting a 100-pound speeding fine over several years, but in the end sill lost the case.

Retired engineer Richard Keedwell’s troubles began in November of 2016, when during a day trip to Worcester, he was clocked by police doing 35mph in a 30mph zone. Only he didn’t agree, and recalls having his day ruined by the notice of intended prosecution (NIP) he got in the mail a few days later. He was convinced he couldn’t have been speeding, so he put down “no case to answer” on the document where he was supposed to write how he pleaded to the charges. Furthermore, he hired a video and electronics expert to prove that there must have been something wrong with the police speed camera. Little did he know this was the beginning of a long and expensive legal battle.

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With gun crime so frequent in the United States these days, even making a gun gesture with your hand can put some people on edge. A Pennsylvania man found that out the hard way after being charged with disorderly conduct for pointing a “finger gun” at another man during an argument.

The bizarre incident took place in June 2018, when, according to surveillance footage, 64-year-old Stephen Kirchner was walking with his girlfriend on a street in Manor Township, Pennsylvania. The woman reportedly had a no contact order against one of her neighbors, and when the couple walked by the neighbor’s residence, Kirchner stopped, turned around, formed a finger gun with his thumb and forefinger, pointed it at the neighbor and pulled the imaginary trigger. Little did he know that the gesture would lead to a year-long litigation.

The 64-year-old’s finger gun was apparently so disturbing to bystanders in the area that some of them actually called the police about it. To make matters worse, the neighbor he pointed he finger gun at later told police that he had felt “extremely threatened” by the gesture. Kirchner himself admitted that he knew his gesture would only inflame tensions, but he later learned that it was actually a crime.

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Cilla Carden, a vegan woman from Perth, in Australia, took her neighbors to court for “deliberately” allowing the smell of barbecued meat and fish to cross onto her property.

The frustrated vegan has been in a dispute with both her neighbors since 2017, and has taken one of them court several times, unsuccessfully. After having her case thrown out by a tribunal earlier this year, Carden recently applied to the Supreme Court of Western Australia for right of appeal, which was also rejected back in June. It doesn’t take a legal expert to figure out why, though, as the woman basically argued that one of her neighbors deliberately barbecued meat and fish in their backyard, because they knew she couldn’t stand it.

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The Sixth Sense, a Russian company that allegedly specializes in extrasensory services, fortune-telling, spiritism and astrology, was recently ordered to pay damages to a client after its psychics and magicians failed to bring back his estrange wife.

The unnamed plaintiff, from the Siberian city of Omsk, was left by his wife in August of 2017. He told the court that he was devastated at the time, but found hope in a TV advert that promised to help people win back spouses and lovers, as well as remove various types of curses. With nothing else to cling on to, the desperate man immediately called the company, and was told by the manager that she could bring his wife back to him, as she possessed a certain “magic, sensory knowledge” that had helped her deal with similar cases before.

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A New York couple is suing suing the fertility clinic for mixing up the embryos used in in vitro fertilization, causing the woman to give birth to two babies that were of a different ethnicity and turned out to be related to two other couples using the clinic.

According to a federal lawsuit filed in US District Court, the unidentified plaintiffs turned to a company called CHA Fertility after having trouble conceiving naturally. They reportedly spent more than $100,000 on the in vitro fertilization services, including facility and doctors’ fees, specialist services, medication, lab expenses, travel costs, etc.. Early last year, the fertilization clinic collected sperm and eggs from the couple, who were Asian, and formed five euploid embryos, four of which were female. The first fertilization attempt did not result in a pregnancy, but in September of last year the couple were thrilled to learn that they were pregnant with twins. The only problems was that, according to a sonogram exam, both fetuses were male, even though only one of their five embryos had been deemed male, and it had not been used.

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Valerie Sanders, a 58-year-old woman from the UK, spent 17 hours in jail after being charged with “controlling behavior” after allegedly nagging her husband to clean the house instead of his car.

Valerie’s troubles with the law began in April of 2018, when during a routine check at her husband Michael’s workplace Jobcentre UK staff noticed he was in a bad mood. After asking him about it, they learned it was because his wife was constantly asking him to clean and polish the family home and complaining that he spent too much time at the gym and cleaning his car. Apparently, this qualified as “coercive or controlling behavior”, an offense punishable by law, so police turned up at the Sanders residence in Catterick, arrested Valerie and threw her in jail for 17 hours. She was charged with controlling behavior and was forced to fight a legal battle for over a year.

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A Welsh man took UK brewery BrewDog to court over a gender equality promotion that made him feel forced to identify as a woman in order to buy his favorite beer at a discounted price.

In March of 2018, Scotland-based brewery BrewDog swapped the blue label of its popular Punk IPA to a pink one and temporarily rebranded it as Pink IPA. The company described the move as an “overt parody on the failed, tone-deaf campaigns that some brands have attempted in order to attract women.” To get their point across even clearer, BrewDog decided to offer Pink IPA at a 20 percent discount to customers who identified as female for the few weeks that the beer was available. Little did they know that their sarcastic attempt at drawing attention to the gender pay gap would land them in legal trouble.

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An Argentinian local court ordered a 70-year-old man to pay his ex-wife 8 million pesos ($173,000) as compensation for 27 years of house work.

Judge Victoria Famá made the landmark ruling after taking into consideration that the elderly couple’s roles had been well-determined during their 30-year marriage, with the woman, identified only as M.L., taking care of the household, while the husband went to work. Despite holding a degree in economics, the woman put aside her professional career to raise her children and take care of the house. By the time M.L.’s husband left her, she was already 60-years-old, too old to even be considered on the job market.

“After 27 years of marriage the accused abandoned his wife when she turned 60 years old, the age at which women obtain retirement benefits, being excluded from the labour market,” Judge Famá’s ruling stated. “The economic dependence of wives on their husbands is one of the central mechanisms through which women are subordinated in society.”

The Argentinian couple separated in 2009, and divorced two years later. Since then, the woman has experienced financial difficulties due to her inability to find a job and receiving meager retirement benefits, while her husband reportedly “lived a good life”.

“This verdict is very novel because it acknowledges that what we do in our homes is a job, care tasks are a job because they involve time, effort and skills,” Lucia Martelotte, deputy executive director of the Latin American Justice and Gender Team, said. “But this goes unseen and women do not get a salary for that.”

Judge Famá described the compensation amount as “a reasonable sum in order to balance the disparate economic situations of the spouses”. She added that the woman’s degree in economics and the age at which her husband decided to leave her were also taken into consideration.

Lawyers in Argentina have called the verdict “very novel and the amount awarded to the plaintiff “unprecedented”.

OECD data shows that women do more unpaid work at home than men in all 10 of the most developed countries in the world…

Maurice, a proud rooster from the French commune of Saint-Pierre d’Oléron, has become an overnight celebrity after triggering a controversial legal battle with his loud morning crowing.

The story of the rooster who sang to loudly has become the topic of a fired-up debate in France. A local family has been sued because Maurice, one of their roosters, crows too loudly in the morning and disturbs some of the neighbors. The bird’s owners claim that they live in a rural environment, where crowing is a part of daily life, but because of an influx of tourists and seasonal residents looking for peace and quiet, the animal’s natural instincts have become a nuisance. They’ve tried keeping Maurice in the chicken coop until 8:30 in the morning, but that’s the best they can do, they said, because Maurice is a rooster, he has to crow. Still, their neighbors didn’t find that solution satisfactory so they filed a complaint at a regional court.

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A Spanish man risks spending the next two years in prison for opening a letter addressed to his 10-year-old son and using it as evidence in a trial against the boy’s mother.

In a hearing held on Wednesday in the Spanish city of Seville, a father was accused by the prosecution of violating his child’s privacy by opening a letter addressed to him, which he was not authorized to do. The letter had been sent by the boy’s maternal aunt, and in it he was told how he should testify against his father in a 2012 domestic abuse case brought against the defendant by his own wife, the boy’s mother. The child’s aunt reportedly also insulted his father in the letter, which was then used by the defendant in court to prove that his wife’s family had coerced his son to testify against him. He was acquitted in that case, but now faces a two-year prison sentence and financial compensation for violating private correspondence.

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A Chinese man recently took a supermarket chain to court after allegedly being cheated out of 0.04 yuan ($0.008) because the checkout clerk rounded down the change he was owed.

The plaintiff, named only as Xiao, claimed that after shopping at a branch of Yonghui Superstores and offering 55 yuan ($8.16) for groceries worth 54.76 yuan ($8.12), he was given only 0.20 yuan as change instead of the 0.24 yuan he was owed. He didn’t really need the 0.04 yuan, but he considered the supermarket’s rounding off system to be cheating, so he decided to sue them and draw attention to the practice, hoping it would get fixed.

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When riding an escalator, it’s recommended that you keep a tight grip on the handrail, just to be safe. But what if you choose to disregard that advice? Well, one Canadian woman has been fighting a 10-year-long court battle for her right to ride escalators hands-free.

In 2009, Bela Kosoian was riding an escalator at a subway station in the city of Laval when a police officer told her to respect a pictogram on the escalator that said “Caution, hold the handrail”, in French. The Montreal-area woman refused to obey the officer’s command and instead started arguing with him. She ended up being detained and getting a $100 ticket for refusing to hold the rail and another $320 for failing to identify herself. She was also handcuffed and detained for 30 minutes.

Kosoian was acquitted of her “crimes” in municipal court in 2012, and then filed her own lawsuit against the city, arguing that she was not obligated to hold the escalator handrail or identify herself in front of the police officer. She has so far lost twice in Quebec courts, but refused to give up, and this Tuesday her unique case was heard by the Supreme Court of Canada.

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