Dozens of shoppers at a Lidl supermarket in Gloucestershire, UK, recently reported mysterious anomalies with their car alarms and central locking systems which left them unable to leave the parking lot.

There’s something fishy going on in the parking lot of a Lidl supermarket in Kingswood, a suburb on the eastern side of Bristol City, but nobody knows what’s causing it. Last month several articles in the media reported cases of shoppers being unable to lock and unlock their cars or disable their alarm systems, and dozens of other people shared similar experiences in the comments section and on social media. At first, most of the “victims” of this bizarre phenomenon though the batteries of their car alarm keys had died, but the symptoms persisted even after changing the batteries. Some think it might have something to do with the Internet-based traffic cameras installed in the car park, which may be blocking systems, but the supermarket chain claims that’s very unlikely.

A Lidl spokesperson told The Mirror that the internet-based cameras don’t transmit a signal that could interfere with that of an alarm key, but admitted that they have no idea what’s causing so many of them to malfunction in this particular location.

Read More »

A 19-year-old woman from the UK went from having no idea she was pregnant to giving birth to a healthy baby girl, literally overnight, after going to bed with a flat stomach and waking up with a full-on baby bump.

On the morning of July 17, 2018, 19-year-old Emmalouise Leggate got the shock of her life. She woke up with a baby where there hadn’t been one the night before. Alarmed, the teenager called her mom, who in turn contacted her grandmother Louise to see if she could make sense of the bulging belly. Louise could tell it was a baby bump the moment she saw it, so she drove Emmalouise to the hospital and had her wait in the car while she went in to find a midwife. Only by the time she came back, the teen had given birth in the backseat. She had only noticed the baby bump 45 minutes earlier.

Read More »

Two Arkansas men were arrested this week for taking turns shooting each other with a semi-automatic rifle while wearing a bulletproof vest.

50-year-old Charles Eugene Ferris was admitted to a Benton County hospital late last Sunday with a red spot on his upper chest. Doctors there notified police about the suspicious wound and in an interview with a deputy from the Benton County Sheriff’s Office, the man tried to come up with a plausible explanation. He claimed that an “asset” had paid him $200 for protection and after they met with a third individual at around 10 p.m. on Sunday, a gunfight ensued. The 50-year-old told police that he had been shot several times and returned fire before escaping in a car. Luckily, he had been wearing a bulletproof vest, but the asset brought him to the hospital anyway. Unfortunately, Ferris forgot to tell his wife his version of the story, so she spilled the beans on what really happened.

Read More »

For over a year a couple angered their neighbors by keeping around 10,000 bees in the balcony of their high-rise apartment in the Chinese city of Ningbo.

Police were recently called to a residential building in the coastal city of Ningbo after a couple living there ignored numerous complaints from their neighbors about the thousands of pet bees they kept on their balcony. About a year ago, the unnamed couple installed a small beehive in their high-rise apartment with the intention of using them for “bee sting treatment”, a form of alternative medicine believed to help alleviate the symptoms of painful conditions like rheumatoid arthritis. However, the insects kept breeding and their number swelled to around 10,000, becoming a nuisance to the other residents.

Read More »

PomPom, an adorable Pomeranian from Singapore, recently achieved celebrity status on social media thanks to the efforts of a freelance groomer who managed to turn him into a fluffy egg.

Back in January Andrea Aubrey Sim (@groomer_andrea), a freelance groomer from Singapore, posted photos and videos of one of her most ingenious projects yet, a cute Pomeranian styled to look like a giant egg. She posted the results of her labor on Instagram, but they only went viral late last month, spawning the now trending “Egg Dog” meme. In a video shot from just the right angle, Pom Pom can be seen sitting still, with his ears flat behind his head. while the groomer puts the finishing touches on her work of art – a living dog shaped like an egg.

Read More »

An Israeli woman in her 40s was recently admitted to the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv with possibly irreversible brain damage after being on a fruit juice and water diet for three weeks.

The unidentified woman, who weighed less than 40 kilograms and was in bad physical shape due to the severe salt imbalance caused by her liquid diet, had reportedly followed the advice of an unlicensed alternative therapist. While the woman’s condition has not been announced by doctors, it is believed that she is suffering from hyponatraemia, aka ‘water intoxication’. It is caused by low levels of sodium in the blood. When sodium levels in the blood become very low, water enters the brain cells and causes them to swell.

Read More »

A 40-year-old Oregon has been arrested for allegedly staging an elaborate home invasion to cover up the theft of his daughter’s Girl Scout cookie sales.

On March 6 the Forest Grove Police Department responded to a 911 call for a possible break-and-enter and assault. When officers arrived at the scene of the alleged crime, they found 40-year-old Brian Couture, the person who had made the emergency call, unresponsive. The man later told police that an unknown individual had entered his home through a sliding glass door, and despite his attempts to restrain him, the burglar managed to escape. A special K9 unit was dispatched in the neighborhood to search for the suspect, which reportedly caused panic among residents.

Read More »

Traffic police in the Chinese city of Liuzhou got the shock of their career after pulling over a motorcycle driver only to find that instead of a driver’s license he had a handwritten piece of paper with his picture glued to it.

Faking official documents is common practice all around the world, but in the vast majority of cases people actually go out of their way to make sure their forgeries look as genuine as possible. Not the protagonist of this news story, though, he just made sure to include all the necessary details on his fake driver’s license, even though all he did was scribble them on a piece of paper hoping it would be enough to fool police. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.

When police in Liuzhou pulled over a silver motorcycle for a routine check, on March 31, they didn’t expect to see the funniest driver’s license of their entire careers. The man, surnamed Tang, certainly didn’t seem nervous when the officers asked for his documents, and the driver license itself had a regular cover, so there was nothing to prepare police for what they were about to see.

Read More »

Dutch inventor and businessman Henk Hanskamp has developed an ingenious toilet that collects some of the 15 to 20 liters of urine that the average cow produces in a day.

Cows aren’t regarded as the smartest creatures in the animal kingdom, but Hanskamp claims they can be taught to use the toilet. It may sound like an April Fool’s Day joke, but Dutch agricultural machinery manufacturer Hanskamp has been working on the “Cow Toilet” for the last couple of years and according to early tests it could prove a viable solution to the world’s increasingly worrisome ammonia pollution problem. While most cows require stimulation in order to use the cow toilet, some of them have gotten so used to it that they just urinate in it naturally.

Read More »

Jo Cameron, 71-year-old woman from Scotland, is one of only two people in the world known to have a rare genetic mutation that makes them virtually immune to pain.

Interestingly, Cameron only learned about her “superpower” at age 65, when doctors found that she didn’t need any painkillers after a undergoing a serious operation on her hand. She had been warned to expect severe pain after the surgery, but she didn’t feel any at all, so her anaesthetist referred her to pain geneticists at University College London and Oxford University, where tests showed that she had a mutation in a previously unknown gene, which scientists now believe plays a major role in pain signalling, mood and memory.

The story of how Jo ended up having surgery on her hand is quite interesting. Every now and then, her hip would give way, making her walk lop-sided, but because she never reported any pain, doctors didn’t even bother doing an x-ray scan of her hip. When someone finally decided to investigate the problem more thoroughly, they discovered massive joint deterioration that for the average person would have been impossible to live with without painkillers. Cameron had her hip replaced and managed the pain with just two paracetamol tablets a day. While she was recuperating in the hospital, doctors noticed that her thumbs were deformed by osteoarthritis and scheduled her for double hand surgery, a procedure that many experts describe as excruciating. Yet Jo didn’t feel any pain at all.

Read More »

Buying a home is one of the important financial and lifestyle decisions a person can make, so knowing exactly what you’re spending your money on is kind of important. Well, a Belgian reality TV show is flipping that idea on its head by asking participants to trust a couple of experts both with their finances and choosing a house for them, without ever seeing it themselves.

“Blind Gekocht“, or “Bought Blind” is an original reality show on Belgian-Flemish channel VIER that invites couples to entrust one of the most important decisions of their life to a couple of strangers. The concept is similar to that of popular reality TV phenomenon “Married at First Sight“, where couples, paired up by relationship experts, agree to be married the first time they meet and live as a married couple for eight weeks before deciding either to divorce or stay married. However, couples who decide to go on Bought Blind not only agree to let experts choose their house for them, but also sign a legal document giving these two complete strangers power of attorney, allowing them to sign the deed to the house on their behalf, and spend their budget as they see fit. They only get to see their new home once the deed has been signed and the redecorating has been completed, so if they don’t like it, all they can do is sell it.

Read More »

Australia’s Court of Appeal has been tasked with deciding whether farting can be considered a form of bullying, after an engineer sued his former employer for allowing a supervisor to harass him in several ways, including by farting in his presence, as part of an alleged conspiracy to end his employment.

56-year-old David Hingst sued his former employer, Construction Engineering, in 2017 , seeking damages of 1.8 million Australian dollars ($1.28 million). During the trial, Hingst, who chose to represent himself, claimed that his ex-colleague at the company, Greg Short, was a serial farter and had repeatedly bullied him by way of flatulence. The engineer told Justice Rita Zammit that Short would come in his small, windowless office and fart several times a day, which apparently caused him serious psychological stress. After hearing the testimonies of both parties, the judge ruled that this was not bullying, but “typical banter or mucking around” and dismissed the case. However, Hingst recently appealed the decision, claiming he didn’t get a fair trial.

Read More »

The Lyall’s wren was a species of small, flightless birds that once thrived on Stephens Island, in New Zealand. It’s one of the many species that have been rendered extinct by the reckless introduction of predators in their natural habitat, but what makes this bird’s story unique is that it was allegedly both discovered and wiped out by a house cat named Tibbles.

The lighthouse on Stephens Island was built in 1892, but the existence of a yet-undiscovered species of bird on this small patch of land was only reported a couple of years later, when assistant lighthouse keeper David Lyall moved in, along with a small staff and his pregnant cat, Tibbles. Lyall was a passionate naturalist and amateur ornithologist, and was looking forward to pursuing his hobbies on this previously uninhabited island, but little did he know that he would go down in history as the man who discovered the Lyall’s wren and indirectly caused its extinction, both in less than a year.

Read More »

Looking at Rosa Ferrigno’s new suit, you could swear it was knitted with regular yarn. It’s only when you touch it and hear the characteristic rustling of plastic that your realize there’s something special about it. In fact, the suit and jacket ensemble is made out of over 300 plastic grocery bags.

At age 75, Rosa Ferigno, a Sicilian immigrant from Greece, in western New York, is a very active woman. In the warmer seasons, she spends most of her days tending to a large yard complete with flower and vegetable gardens, but in the winter she likes to keep busy by working on complex knitting projects. Last year, she took on her most challenging endeavor yet, a stylish suit made out of hundreds of brown plastic grocery bags. The fruit of her labor is nothing short of awe-inspiring.

Read More »

In most places around the world, people are taught that eating raw meat is bad for them due to the high risk of contacting parasites and harmful bacteria, but in Ethiopia raw meat is a popular delicacy.

Walking through the streets of Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia, it’s not uncommon to see groups of people gathered around restaurant tables feasting on chunks of raw beef or goat meat. Although particularly popular on holidays or various celebrations, like weddings, a lot of people consume raw meat virtually every day. They will tell you that raw meat is a hearty meal that energizes them and refreshes their bodies, as for the risks associated with eating uncooked meat, which include exposure to tapeworms and dangerous bacteria like salmonella and E-coli, most just choose to ignore them.

Read More »