A family in Russia’s Barnaul region was recently taken to court by the local energy company for accumulating a debt of approximately 80,000 rubles ($1,218) in unpaid bills. In their defense, the accused claimed that it was all their cat’s fault, not theirs.

It’s one thing for kids to say “the dog ate my homework”, but you don’t often hear adults trying to lay the blame on their pets in order to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. That’s exactly what this family in Barnaul did, though, and not just anywhere, but in front of a judge. Accused of refusing to pay the local energy company around 80,000 in electrical bills, they claimed that they hadn’t actually used the electricity, but that meter had been tampered with by their mischievous cat.

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Yungar, a remote town in the Peruvian Andes, has been receiving worldwide attention in the past couple of weeks, because of the efforts of a man named Lenin to stop one of the candidates, named Hitler, from running in the upcoming municipal elections.

Hitler Alba Sánchez, also known as ‘Hitler of the Andes’ or ‘The Good Hitler’, has already served as mayor of Yungar between 2011 and 2014, and he is now trying out for a second term. However, his candidacy was challenged by a local man called Lenin Vladimir Rodríguez Valverde, who claimed that Hitler wasn’t eligible because of his previous term as mayor. The attempt to sabotage The Good Hitler’s election ultimately failed, but the bizarre coincidence of these two men’s names has become an international news topic.

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Last week, police in the Mexican resort city of Puerto Vallarta reported at least 11 cases of people completely stripped of their clothes tied to lamp posts and with the letter ‘R’ shaved on the back of their heads. So far, no one knows who orchestrated these attacks and why, as the victims all refuse to talk.

Police started receiving calls about naked men being tied to lamp posts in different areas of Puerto Vallarta last Monday. Between 9:26 PM on Monday, and 1:29 AM on Tuesday, four men were discovered in similar circumstances. They had all been stripped naked, had bruises on their buttocks like they had been repeatedly slapped, they were tied to lamp posts at various intersections across the city and they all had the letter ‘R’ shaved into the back of their heads. Authorities announced that they had started an investigation, but little did they know that these four cases was only the beginning.

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A Maine artist managed to carve a unique niche for herself by using moose droppings as the main medium for her artworks.

It’s not clear when or how Somerville resident Mary Winchenbach got the idea to use moose poop to make art, but after showing off her witty-named “Tirdy Works” at the Common Ground Fair, in Unity, Maine, people have been going crazy for them. Her official Facebook page has thousands of ‘likes’ and comments from people wanting to buy some. Her collection of Tirdy Works features clocks, figurines, jewelry, among other things, all made with genuine ‘Maine Moose Tirds’.

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A young system analyst from Brazil managed to save about half the cost of building a two storey brick house, by doing all the work himself, instead of hiring a professional construction crew. With absolutely no construction experience behind him, he turned to YouTube tutorials and advice from family and friends.

33-year-old Evandro Klimpel Balmant and his wife Ane Caroline de Jesus Balmant, 34, live in a beautiful 200 square-meter house that they built themselves, in Almirante Tamandare municipality, a metropolitan area of Curitiba, in Brazil. It took three long years to raise the house from the ground up, and they still have the upstairs to plaster, but they say it was worth the wait, especially since they manage to save around 50% what a house this size would have cost to build with a construction company.

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International media outlets have been reporting the shocking case of a dolphin, dozens of penguins and other wildlife that have been abandoned in a derelict Japanese aquarium that closed down months ago.

The operator of the Inubosaki Marine Park Aquarium in Choshi, a city in Japan’s Chiba Prefecture, closed down in January 2018, citing a steady decline in visitors following the strong earthquake and nuclear crisis of 2011. However, the marine life that used to entertain guests – including a bottlenose dolphin and dozens of humboldt penguins – has been locked inside the abandoned facility ever since and are living in improper conditions. Although someone has reportedly been feeding them regularly, animal activists claim that Honey the dolphin is showing signs of stress due to loneliness and suffered serious sunburns this summer, while the penguins are living in crumbling pens, among debris. Park representatives could not be contacted about the situation and local authorities claim that their hands are tied.

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A man named Valery recently became the star of what may very well be the most epic fail in the history of iPhone launches. After becoming the first person in a monstrously long queue to set foot inside the Apple store in Moscow to buy an iPhone XS, he left empty-handed because he couldn’t afford to buy it.

On the morning of September 28, the Apple store in Moscow finally opened its doors to the crowd of people that had been lining up outside for over 24 hours to buy the new iPhone XS and XS Max. Apple fans have been queuing up for new iPhone launches all around the world for years now, but what made this particular event special was the amount of fail involved. For one thing, the first eight people at the head of the giant queue evaporated minutes before the store opened. It turns out they had never planned on buying a phone, hoping to sell their places in line for absurd amounts of money, instead. But they were actually the smart ones, because the ninth guy planned to do the same thing, only he didn’t have the brains to bail before the doors opened.

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The Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard is mostly known as one of the few places on Earth where people are forbidden from dying, but few know that this place also has a ban on cats, with one exception, a purring feline that’s technically a fox.

Cats weren’t always banned on Svalbard. It was only during the 1990s that Norwegian authorities enforced the ban, after it was decided that they were susceptible to rabies and echinococcosis (a type of tape worm) infections from foxes and rats, which in turn posed a big risk to the human population. Interestingly, rats are not indigenous to the northern archipelago, only arriving here relatively recently on board cargo ships, but being the resourceful creatures they are, they quickly adapted to the harsh conditions. Photos taken prior to the ban on cats show that felines were once popular on Spitsbergen and the other islands that make up Svalbard, but since then, only one ginger cat has been photographed on the archipelago. Her name is Kesha and she has a rather interesting story.

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