Ed Stafford, a former British Army captain and renowned adventurer recently embarked on a 60-day challenge that saw him sleeping on the streets of various cities in Britain. His experiment was meant to highlight the plight of homeless people, but he was shocked to find that begging can be more lucrative than he had ever imagined.

Stafford, who is known as the first person to walk the entire length of the Amazon river, spent 60 days sleeping on the streets of cities like London, Manchester and Glasgow, and observing the lifestyle of real homeless people for a TV documentary soon to air on Channel 4. Although the adventurer admits that he did observe drug addiction problems among the homeless and heard some truly heartbreaking stories from them, what really shocked him was  how much money some of these beggars made – up to £200 ($260) a night – and the amounts of free food they received from passers-by and volunteers.

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The owner of a clothing store in the UK is taking an unconventional approach to preventing theft. The woman, who preferred to remain anonymous, wants to hire skilled thieves to come in and steal from her store and then tell her how they did it, so she can prevent it from happening again.

The witty entrepreneur posted a job offer on Bark.com, which quickly went viral, offering thieves £50 ($64) an hour to come in and try to steal from her store, plus the chance to keep three of the things they manage to steal. Candidates would need to visit her store on a number of occasions over several weeks and then produce a report of all the things they stole and how they did it. Realizing that her job may come off as strange, the woman explained that she is simply taking a different approach to theft prevention after years of suffering significant loses during the holiday season.

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An English army captain recently smashed his way out of a barracks toilet after being stripped naked and locked in there by soldiers during a drunken prank. He is now being investigated and will most likely have to pay for the damages.

The incident took place last last week, in the barracks of an Army bomb disposal unit, at Carver Barracks in Essex, England. The unnamed captain and his soldiers started drinking last Tuesday, right after he attended a formal ceremony to mark the reformation of 49 Field Squadron. Army sources who preferred to remain anonymous claims that at one point, the captain fell asleep, and the soldiers stripped him naked and locked him in a disabled toilet, as a prank.

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62-year-old Patrick Ryan was been in and out of jail since and age 14 and had already spent 23 years behind bars by the time he turned 50. He was recently sentenced to another 18 months in jail for committing his record-breaking 668th offence.

Ryan’s criminal record is reportedly so long that police in Accrington, Lancashire, once put a note on it warning workers not to print it out as it would waste too much paper. Having racked up a whopping 469 convictions for a total of 668 offences, he is considered to be Britain’s most prolific criminal. He is also assumed to have cost taxpayers around £3 million ($3.9 million) in court visits alone. And at 62, Patrick doesn’t show any signs of changing his ways.

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A woman in Norwich, UK, was recently banned from singing and playing loud music in her apartment, after neighbors complained that her screeching sounded like “a drowning cat”.

48-year-old Heather Webb has reportedly terrorized neighbors in her apartment building with her singing for at least four years. In 2014, her neighbors filled anti-social behavior forms and sent them to the local council, but she only received a community protection warning from the police. Then, in 2016, neighbors again complained to the council about her loud, disturbing singing, but no action was taken against the woman. Finally, in December of last year, a judge issued Webb a Criminal Behavior Order which legally banned her from singing in her apartment. But she didn’t let that stop her.

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The people of Willand, a small village in Devon, UK, can say that they are literally moving up in the world. Scientists have discovered that Willand is rising by 2 cm (0.7 inches) every year, but they have no idea why.

The mysterious elevation was spotted by researchers at Geomatic Ventures Limited (GVL), an offshoot company of theUniversity of Nottingham, who have been working on the first country-wide map of land motion of Britain, by compiling satellite images from 2015 to 2017. While analyzing these images, they noticed that an elliptical area around 1.2 miles (2km) wide had been steadily rising by about 2 cm per year. This sort of phenomenon usually occurs in abandoned mines, but there was no such thing in or around Willand.

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A young bargain hunter recently managed to show just how insanely expensive train tickets in the UK can be, by buying a car, petrol, insurance and road tax for it and still spending less than the cost of just one train ticket for a 100 mile trip.

27-year-old Tom Church, from London, wanted to visit a friend an colleague in Bristol, just 100 miles away, but was put off by the high cost of a train ticket. After seeing a photo of a £218 ($311) train ticket for the same route he was interested in, posted on Reddit, Tom was both outraged and inspired to come up with a cheaper alternative. After doing some research, he figured out that it would actually be cheaper to buy a used car for the trip.

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When his father died, in 2011, Jay Wilde inherited the family cattle farm, in Ashbourne, UK. He has been constantly sending cows to the slaughterhouse ever since, but he recently decided he couldn’t do it anymore, so he gave away his heard of 59 cows to an animal sanctuary, where they will live out the rest of their natural lives in peace.

59-year-old Wilde has been a vegetarian for 25 years, so having to sell animals to be killed for meat was particularly difficult, but he had promised his father that he would take over the family farm. Having to send off the animals to the slaughterhouse after seeing them grow under his eyes and spending time with them was extremely unpleasant, and the farmer recently decided that he couldn’t bear to do it anymore.

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If you’re looking for a way to to make your property stand out on a real-estate website, dressing up as a colorful parrot and posing for photos seems to work wonders.

At least it worked for the owner of a house in Blackrod, UK, who had asked his estate agent to come up with a way of selling his home faster. Steve Laycock, of Platinum Properties, claims that he came up with the idea while talking with the unnamed property owner. “We came up with the idea as the owner asked us ‘what are you going to do to help sell the property?’ he told The Bolton News. “I said ‘are you up for a laugh? – What about a parrot in fancy dress?'”

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Andy Pope, a Police Community Support Officer for West Midlands Police, in the UK, has come to be known as memory cop, thanks to his incredible photographic memory, which has helped him successfully identify over 850 suspects in the last four years.

Every day,  PCSO Pope arrives at work half an hour early, logs on to his computer, and browses the pictures of suspects in the day’s internal police briefing. He has been doing it even since he joined the West Midlands Police, in 2008, and as his brain stores more faces year-on-year, his record of recognizing bad guys keeps getting better. His exceptional identification skills have made him somewhat of a secret weapon, and when detectives exhaust all other possible options trying to put a name to a suspect’s face, they turn to him.

 

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Matthew Brinton, a beggar in England’s Cornwall county, has earned the wrath of locals after he was spotted getting into an Audi TT in a parking lot near Bank Street. Brinton is a familiar face in the area, having begged there for several years. Footage of him getting into the $70,000 luxury car was uploaded on Facebook, and Brinton has been receiving death threats ever since.

The 35-year-old beggar, who lives with a friend, claims to have received the car as inheritance from his grandmother. He also says that the Audi has since been stolen, and he’s now fearing for his life. “I have not seen any of the social media posts because I do not have access to the internet but according to the police I’ve had lots of death threats,” he said. “People are assuming too much and I’m getting a lot of abuse. This has been going on for years.”

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