A group of squatters who illegally took over a house on the outskirts of a village in Spain’s Burgos Province has installed an alarm system to prevent others from breaking into their illegally occupied home.

The people of San Miguel de Pedroso, a neighborhood in the village of Beldorado, are on high alert because of squatters who not only took over an unoccupied house in their community but also installed an alarm system there to prevent others from breaking in like they did. According to some local residents, “they have placed a sign belonging to the company that installed the alarm in the building” to prevent what happened to the owner of that house from happening to them. Some locals suspect that the squatters had been eyeing the property for some time, and after learning that no one had lived there for about two decades, they decided to move in. Now people are afraid that their houses could be at risk of being illegally occupied by strangers.

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A 47-year-old woman from Western France has been speaking with a distinctively English accent ever since she had her tonsils removed 14 years ago.

Laetitia, a cashier from Montval-sur-Loir, in France’s Sarthe Department, doesn’t speak English. She only knows some basic words that she learned in school decades ago, but hearing her speak in her native tongue would have you believe she was born in England. For 14 years, Laetitia has been speaking with an English accent that makes most people think she is Anglo-Saxon. But the truth is much stranger – the 47-year-old woman has been stuck with her English accent ever since she woke up from a tonsil removal surgery. Her children had gone through the same procedure before, and they talked in a nasal voice, but it went away after a few days, so she wasn’t too worried in the beginning, but as the weeks passed, her weird accent remained just as strong.

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A UK woman whose co-workers compared her to Darth Vader after taking an online personality test on her behalf has been awarded £30,000 in damages.

Darth Vader is an iconic villain, and being compared to him by workmates is apparently insulting and traumatic enough to warrant compensation. At least that was the decision of a UK court in the case of an NHS blood donation worker who claimed that the association with the Star Wars character caused her to feel unpopular at work and ultimately quit her job. The judge concluded that being told she has the same personality type as the infamous sci-fi villain was a workplace “detriment”,(a negative experience) that required compensation.

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A 24-year-old mother from Helsingborg, Sweden, was recently convicted of harassment after cracking an egg on her daughter’s forehead for a TikTok video.

In 2023, a controversial trend went viral on TikTok – parents all over the world started filming themselves pranking their small children by cracking eggs on their foreheads. Many saw this as harmless fun, even though in certain cases, the kids hardly ever joined their parents in laughter. But one particular case in Sweden recently made national news headlines after a young mother was convicted of harassment for humiliating her daughter by cracking an egg on her forehead for the amusement of her viewers. The 24-year-old woman insisted that it was just a silly prank and that everyone was doing it on TikTok at the time, but that wasn’t enough to impress the judge.

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A 42-year-old Spanish man has been unable to ingest any food or liquids for three weeks after taking a simple sip of bottled sparkling water at a restaurant.

Pablo González, a 42-year-old businessman from Salvaterra de Miño, Spain, has been hospitalized in the city of Vigo since April 12, when he suffered a bizarre accident that has yet to be explained. After eating at a tapas-style restaurant with some friends, González ordered a bottle of sparkling mineral water along with a glass of ice and a slice of lemon. The water was a well-known brand, and the glass bottle looked properly sealed, from what he can recall, but what he can remember clearly is the burning sensation in his mouth mere seconds after taking his first sip of it.

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The 25,000 residents of Lice, a town in Turkey’s Diyarbakır province, involuntarily got high after police burned tens of tons of seized cannabis in the town center.

On April 18, Turkish authorities conducted an operation to burn over 20 tons of confiscated cannabis in Lice, which caused the air in the settlement to become thick with weed smoke. For at least five days, people couldn’t leave their windows open and avoided going out, for fear of becoming intoxicated and experiencing symptoms like dizziness, nausea, and hallucinations. The destroyed cannabis, valued at 10 billion Turkish Lira ($261,433,808), weighed 20 tons 766 kilos 679 grams and had been seized from all over Diyarbakır province during 2023 and 2024.

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A UK man has been given a suspended prison sentence after admitting to setting fire to his own home twice in one night just so he could see firefighters in action.

Arsonists are obsessed with fire, but 26-year-old James Brown, from Northumberland, in the UK, has been described as having an obsession and a fascination with firefighters rather than fires. In an ideal world, he would be a firefighter himself, but things didn’t work out that way, so he just settled for admiring firefighters from a distance and calling the fire department incessantly. When that wasn’t enough anymore, he moved on to setting his own house on fire just to see the firefighters in action.

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A 31-year-old Russian man was recently convicted to 4.4 years in a penal colony for promising to urinate on a symbol of the Russian military in a comment he posted on social media.

The incident that led to the conviction of 31-year-old Alexander Panasenko occurred in May of 2024, when the Kremerovo native took to social media to taunt Russian authorities. Commenting on a VKontakte post that reminded everyone that the Russian State Duma had voted into law fines and even imprisonment for damaging the St. George ribbon, Panasenko wrote “I bought it, and I’ll piss on it. And I don’t care who gets offended by it.” The comment didn’t sit too well with Kremerovo police, and the offender was quickly arrested and charged with desecrating the symbol of Russia’s military glory. A Kremerovo Regional Court recently sentenced Panasenko to four years and four months in a penal colony and banned him from posting anything on the internet for three years.

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An 80-year-old woman from Yekaterinburg, Russia, can call herself lucky to be alive after falling from the window of her sixth-floor apartment and landing on top of a parked car.

The accident occurred last Thursday, as the unnamed octogenarian was cleaning the windows of her apartment. A single moment of carelessness was enough to send her tumbling down from the sixth floor onto a neighbor’s car. The shocking fall was captured by CCTV cameras and has been making the rounds on Russian social media ever since. Amazingly, mere moments after landing on the roof of the parked car, the 80-year-old woman manages to climb down and walk away, seemingly unscathed. She subsequently asked a neighbor for help and was admitted to a local hospital to ensure that she was alright.

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A Michigan teen was recently convicted to eight months in prison for reporting a false bomb threat on a cruise ship to prevent his girlfriend from going on a cruise without him.

In January 2024, a few minutes after the Carnival Sunrise cruise ship left the port of Miami, Florida, for Jamaica, Carnival Cruise Lines received a mysterious email that read: “Hey, I think someone might have a bomb on your sunrise cruise ship.”  This simple one-liner set in motion a costly security operation that involved both the US and Jamaican Coast Guard and the thorough search of the Sunshine’s more than 1,000 rooms. After several hours of delay, the Sunshine was able to continue its journey to the Caribbean, but that wasn’t the end of the story. Authorities managed to trace the email to a 19-year-old man in Michigan who later admitted to reporting the false bomb threat, claiming that he was trying to prevent his girlfriend and her family from going on the cruise without him.

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Scientists are trying to understand how a herd of goats not only survived but thrived on an isolated island in northeastern Brazil for over two centuries without any known fresh water source.

It’s not clear how exactly the goats originally wound up on Santa Bárbara, one of the five volcanic islands that make up the Abrolhos archipelago, about 70 kilometers off the coast of Bahia, but scientists believe they were brought and left there by colonizers. Livestock like goats, pigs, and poultry made for a reliable food source, but they were usually left behind when colonization failed. Their presence on Santa Bárbara Island has been documented for more than 250 years, according to historical records, which is remarkable if we take into account that the small island has no known fresh water sources. Despite this “inconvenience,” the goats thrived on the dry, windy island to the point where they had to be relocated in order to protect endemic plants and animals.

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An 80-year-old woman in Turkey risks spending over 4 years behind bars for hitting her 18-year-old granddaughter on the arm with a house slipper during an argument.

Asiye Kaytan lives with her granddaughter, Vural, in the Topraklık neighborhood of Denizli, in Southwestern Turkey. Ever since the girl’s parents split up, the 80-year-old woman has been trying to protect her, sometimes even from herself. Last year, on August 9th, after Vural came back from work, she told her grandmother that she was going out with some friends. Fearing for her safety, the old woman said she wouldn’t allow it and even locked the door to make sure Vural couldn’t go out. At one point during their argument, the young woman tried to unlock the door, and Kaytan grabbed one of her house slippers and slapped her on the arm with it. Vural instinctively retaliated by hitting her grandmother on the head with her phone. Kaytan started bleeding, and the frightened girl forgot all about partying and called an ambulance. Little did they know that what started as a family feud would eventually turn into an international news story.

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A young Chinese woman went viral on social media after showing off her unusual home – a 6-square-foot toilet at her workplace for which she pays just 50 yuan ($7).

Everyone tries to save money on rent, but how many of us would be willing to sleep in an actual toilet to do it? One young woman from Hunan, China, recently shocked the world after posting photos of her unconventional living quarters – a small, unused toilet located inside the furniture factory where she works. The 19-year-old woman explained that she comes from a poor family and couldn’t afford to pay upwards of 800 yuan ($110) for a proper home, so she asked her boss if she could live there instead. Her post went viral, but most people commented that she was only sharing photos and videos to attract attention because no one could live in such conditions. However, the woman’s boss took to social media to confirm that she was indeed sleeping in a 6-square-foot toilet at his factory.

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A 56-year-old Polish woman was arrested and charged with systematically adding toxic substances to a coworker’s drinks simply because she disliked them.

It’s unclear when the unnamed cleaning woman started poisoning her colleague, but the 51-year-old victim started feeling seriously under the weather a few months ago. At first, she thought her stomach pain was caused by stress and working too much, but as her symptoms worsened, the woman, whose name has not been revealed for privacy reasons, went to the hospital for a checkup. Doctors there told her that she showed signs of internal injuries similar to those caused by toxic substances and asked if she had been ingesting something that she wasn’t supposed to. She hadn’t, but the question reminded her of the weird taste she had felt when drinking her morning cup of tea at work.

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An Australian man is accused of breaking his country’s nuclear non-proliferation laws for ordering a sample of plutonium online in a bid to collect all the elements in the periodic table.

In August of 2023, 24-year-old Emmanuel Lidden was arrested at his parents’ house in Sidney, Australia, during a major operation that involved Australian Border Force officials, firefighters, police, and paramedics. He pleaded guilty to breaching nuclear non-proliferation laws by shipping plutonium into the country, a charge that carries a prison sentence of up to 10 years, but his lawyer is arguing that Lidden is not some maniac or mad scientist with a nefarious agenda, but rather a “science nerd” who had made it his goal to collect all the elements in the periodic table, even radioactive ones.

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