A Russian pensioner recently made national news headlines after stripping two tall pine trees on his neighbors’ property of all their branches and using them as supports for a wooden tree house. He never asked for permission to do this, instead taking advantage of the fact that they were away on vacation.

Irina Chukanova and her family have been living on a small plot of land near the city of Nizhny Tagil for 10 years, and they’ve never had any problems with their neighbor, Yuri Stepanov. That all changed this spring, when the pensioner started complaining about the two pine trees growing on the Chukanovs’ property, claiming that all the needles and cones ended up on his land, and he was sick of having to clean up the mess. He repeatedly asked his neighbors to cut down the trees, but they were reluctant to do so, and instead promised to come up with a solution in the fall. Only Stepanov apparently got sick of waiting, and decided to take matters into his own hands.

Read More »

A 20-year-old man from the Japanese city of Himeji has been hailed as a modern-day ninja, after managing to live unnoticed in an elderly woman’s house for half a year.

The young squatter’s incredible run came to an end earlier this week, when his 90-year-old host’s son came to visit and cook her dinner. During his time there, the man heard some strange noises coming from the second floor of the house, and walked up the stairs to investigate. When he opened the door to one of the upstairs bedrooms, he was shocked to find a young man sleeping on a futon. Instead of losing his composure and confronting the intruder, he kept his composure, simply closing the door very slowly and going back downstairs to ask his mother if she new anything about someone else living in her house. The 90-year-old woman had no idea what her son was talking about, so the man called 110 (emergency number) to report the trespassing.

Read More »