The South American country of Uruguay is home to a unique eucalyptus plantation with a very distinct shape that can only by admired from high above.

Up until a few years ago, few people even knew that the Florida Goblet existed. It wasn’t until Google Earth became a thing that people discovered its unusual shape. To some, it looks like a goblet with a crown on top of it, while others see a chandelier, but the thing that everyone can agree on it its massive size. The plantation measures about 500 meters long by 235 wide and the lines that make up the top and bottom of the design are around 13-meters-wide. It’s so large that from the ground, you could never tell it has this peculiar shape.

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Brought into Colombia as exotic pets by the most notorious drug kingpin in human history, have been breeding at an alarming pace over the last few decades and have become a serious threat to the Colombian flora and fauna.

In the 1980s, Pablo Escobar smuggled four hippos from an American zoo into Colombia, as exotic pets. They were kept at his luxurious Hacienda Napoles, in Puerto Triunfo, Antioquia, but after the collapse of his crime empire, they were set loose into the jungle. With no natural predators, plenty of water sources and suitable climate, the hippopotamuses thrived and multiplied. The initial four water giants have now ballooned to an estimated population of over 100, which scientists say could reach over 1,400 specimens by 2039.

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An Ecuadorian TV reporter and his camera crew got the scares of their lives after being held at gunpoint by a masked robber, while doing a live piece.

On February 12, Diego Ordinola, a journalist for Ecuador’s DirecTV Sports, was reporting from outside the Isidro Romero Carbo Monumental Stadium, the home of the Barcelona SC soccer club, when a man wearing a baseball cap and face mask approached him and pulled out a gun. The masked assailant can be heard asking for the crew’s telephones, and as soon as one of them hands over their smartphone, he runs off, leaving the team in shock.

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La Casa en el Aire (literally ‘The House in the Air’ in Spanish) is a unique hostel perched on a cliff face, about 30 meters above ground, in the Colombian mountains.

Built primarily out of wood and featuring a tin roof, Casa en el Aire is attached to Cerro San Vicente, a monumental rock formation that rises up among the coffee landscape in rural Abejorral, Colombia’s Antioquia region. It is held in place by several steel wires connected to the cliff and supported by a long wooden pole also placed against the cliff. It stands about 20 meters above ground, at an altitude of about 2,500 meters above sea level. It is connected to a more stable-looking cable via a hanging bridge along the cliff face.

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The mayor of a small town in Peru managed to make international headlines after police caught him lying in a wooden casket in an attempt to fool them into thinking he was dead, after breaking curfew to go drinking long into the night.

Jaime Rolando Urbina Torres, the mayor of Tantará, a rural district in Castrovirreyna, had long been criticized by his constituents for not taking the threat of the ongoing SARS-Cov2 pandemic seriously and not taking the necessary measures to protect them, but last week the elected official really went above and beyond to show his contempt for the lockdown enforced by the Peruvian government. Last Monday Torres and several of his friends broke curfew, going out to drink late into the night. Around midnight, residents alerted by the ruckus the inebriated mayor and his friends were making called the police and the troublemakers came up with an ingenious way of avoiding arrest…

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The San Rafael Waterfall, one of Ecuador’s most popular tourist attraction has all but disappeared after a mysterious sinkhole diverted the gushing Coca River into three small streams.

As part of the Cayambe Coca National Park, in the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest, the San Rafael Waterfall reportedly attracted tens of thousands of tourists every year. That’s all in the past, though, as the impressive 150-meter-high waterfall all but stopped flowing on February 2nd, after a mysterious sinkhole formed on the river fueling it, diverting the water into three small streams. All tourism to the site has been closed and the waterfall doesn’t even show up on Ecuador’s official travel website anymore.

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A Peruvian politician recently took to social media to ask people for his car keys back, after giving them away by mistake while handing out keychains on the campaign trail.

In a video posted on his Facebook page, Jovino Huerta, a congressional candidate for the Peruvian district of Huánuco, repeatedly asked his supporters to help him retrieve the keys to his pickup truck, adding that it was a vital part of his effort to win a Congress seat as without it he can’t run a proper campaign. Huerta isn’t the first person to lose their car keys or plead with whoever found them to retrieve them, but it’s how he lost the keys that makes this story interesting…

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An Ecuadorian man was allegedly caught red handed cheating on his partner with another woman, when the half-time kiss cam showed them kissing in the stands during a soccer match.

Last Saturday, Barcelona of Guayaquil, Ecuador’s very own Barcelona soccer club, made its traditional yearly presentation during a friendly match against rivals Delfin, one of last season’s revelations. It was a good game, but it was surprisingly overshadowed by something that occurred during the half-time break. The kiss-cam showed a young couple making out in the stands, but things got weird when the man saw himself on one of the jumbo screens. He immediately removed his arm from around the young lady, his smile went away instantly, and the two just started looking in opposite directions, like they didn’t know each other.

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When it comes to backing out of a wedding, faking your own kidnapping sounds like overkill, but that didn’t stop a Colombian man from using this technique to avoid attending his own wedding.

The unnamed 55-year-old man, from the Colombian town of Pitalito was scheduled to marry his fiancee, a local woman, in front of family and friends last weekend. As the big day grew closer, the man started getting cold feet and confessed to some of his closest buddies that he planned to break the engagement and pull out of the wedding. Only he didn’t know how to go about it, so his good friends came up with the idea of faking a kidnapping. What they didn’t plan for was for authorities to launch a full scale operation involving the police and the army.

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A newly-inaugurated synthetic soccer pitch in Bogota, Colombia, has been attracting a lot of attention on social media due to a couple of permanent “players” – two trees growing in front of each goal.

Back in 2017 the District Institute of Recreation and Sports (IDRD) commissioned engineering and architecture studies for the adaptation and improvement of Parque Japon, a park in northern Bogota, the capital of Bogota. Everything was going according to plan until locals in the area surrounding the park learned that authorities planned to remove or relocate some of the trees in the park to make room for a synthetic soccer and volleyball field. The people took the IDRD to court and in January of this year they won, which technically meant that the trees could not be touched by authorities. However, that didn’t stop contractors from moving forward with the soccer field…

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The mother of a 17-year-old Colombian girl diagnosed with a very rare condition known as “Sleeping Beauty” syndrome has appealed to authorities for help as she is struggling to look after her.

Sharik Tovar, a 17-year-old girl from the Colombian town of Acacías, has been suffering from Kleine-Levin syndrome ever since she was two. The ultra-rare condition – only 40 cases have been reported worldwide – is characterized by recurrent episodes of excessive sleep as well as cognitive and behavioral changes. In Sharik’s case, hypersomnia episodes can last up to two months, during which time her mother, Marleny, has two liquefy her food and feed her every few hours. To make matters worse, after these long bouts of hypersomnia, the 17-year-old suffers from temporary or permanent memory loss.

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In an age when tech companies are encouraging consumers to constantly buy newer, more-expensive gadgets, one Peruvian company has just a launched a sustainable wooden laptop designed to last at least 10 to 15 years.

In an attempt to bring new and affordable technology to the most remote areas of Peru, the Carrascos —a family made up of computer specialists and marketing experts – created the Wawalaptop, an SBC (Single Board Computer) with a wooden casing that can easily be taken apart for repairs and upgrading. The 0.1-inch (25.65-centimeter) laptop is lightweigh, ultra-portable and very affordable. A Wawalaptop costs 799 Peruvian Sol ($235), and an upgrade, which basically means a better circuit board, can be bought with about $35 on the free market.

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A Bolivian petty thief recently made international news headlines after it was reported that he managed to escape from jail by squeezing through the bars of his jail cell.

Jorge Mantilla, aka “Coco”, was originally arrested by police in La Paz last week, after a CCTV video showing him breaking into a residence in the Bolivian capital was posted on social media. Coco was known as “the thief of Villa Fatima” after the area he usually operated in, and was carrying a variety of tools to help him break into houses when the police apprehended him. He was charged with burglary and taken to a local jail to await sentencing. However, he didn’t spend much time there as last Saturday he managed to escape his jail cell by squeezing through the metal bars when the guards weren’t looking.

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Sheila, a Golden retriever mix from Buenos Aires, Argentina, has melted the hearts of millions around South America after it was reported that she has been patiently waiting outside a local police station ever since her owner was arrested there, over a year ago.

The loyal dog reportedly showed up outside the police station in 25 de Mayo, a small town in Argentina’s Buenos Aires province, soon after her owner was brought in on charges of assault, last year. Staff there believe that she must have followed the patrol her owner was in, but one thing is for sure, once she arrived, she never left. It didn’t take long for the officers to notice her presence, and some of them started bringing her food to gain her trust. Sheila was cautious at first, but today she depends on the policemen for sustenance, sleeps inside the station at night, and sometimes accompanies her carers on patrols. But she always comes back to the station to wait for her master.

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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…