Weird news - 60 deadly snakes found in school kitchen

People are absolutely petrified when it comes to poisonous snakes, given the high number of people who die of snake bite, and also because there is a general feeling of revulsion when it comes to snakes. And with poisonous snakes, even a small young snake is highly dangerous since the venom is developed and present in the snake.
This can get more problematic when there are young children involved, as happened in a school in the state of Maharashtra in India. A cook spotted two Russell vipers in the kitchen and on further investigation, a total of 60 of these deadly snakes were found. However, it ended well when the temptation to kill these snakes were controlled and they were caught and handed over to the forest department (link to article):

The spotting of so many snakes at one place created panic among students and staffers of the Zilla Parishad-run school located in Pangra Bokhare village of Hingoli district, about 225km from Aurangabad in the Marathwada region. A cook spotted two Russells vipers near the place where wood used for fuel was stored on Friday afternoon. When she started lifting more pieces of wood, she found another 58 snakes in the kitchen, he said. The school’s headmaster, Triyambak Bhosle, said, “All of us panicked after seeing so many snakes. Several villagers rushed to the spot with sticks and stones but we stopped them from killing the snakes.”

Weird news - Rhino poachers and death by lions

Rhinos are big wild animals, who are unfortunately endangered because of their horns, which are supposed to have medical powers, especially aphrodisiac powers and is much sought over, even though trade in the horn is illegal the world over. Poachers, because of the money power of the trade, can be more powerful than the defenders of the animals, and are not bound by the same set of laws and rules.
Over a period of time, there has been a realization that it is not in the interest of humanity to keep on destroying animal species, and there has been more efforts towards ensuring the protection of these animals, who are hunted just because of money. However, once in a while, there are a set of circumstances that protect these hapless from poachers, and even though the death of these poachers is not something to be gloated over, there is a sense of irony that these poachers came to kill wild animals and were instead killed by ultra-predators, the king of the wilderness (link to article):

At least three suspected poachers who were apparently hunting for rhinos have been mauled to death and eaten by lions on a game reserve in South Africa, the owner said on Thursday. The men entered the Sibuya Game Reserve on the southeast coast armed with a high-powered rifle and an axe in the early hours of Monday and were found dismembered the following day. "They strayed into a pride of lions -- it's a big pride so they didn't have too much time," reserve owner Nick Fox, 60, told AFP. "We're not sure how many there were -- there's not much left of them.

Weird news - Going crabbing and getting major infection

This is the kind of weird and tragic news that shakes people who believe that the environment around them is tame and most dangerous items have been controlled. It also tends to scare people (atleast a section of people would get scared enough to not go into water for fear of contracting something similar).
What happened in this case ? Well, this person went crabbing into a local river, something that is fairly common. However, soon after, the person started feeling a pain into one limb, which spread soon to the other limbs. This eventually developed into blisters all over, and when he got the infection checked out, this was apparently a bacteria that is present during summer months and can get into the body through even small cats. Health advisories can be issued but the situation is very common that it is difficult to prevent such infections from happening, even though they happen rarely (link to article):

The hospital said he developed Vibrio necrotizing fasciitis, a bacteria that lives in warm waters and can persist during the summer months. The bacteria can enter through even the smallest wound in the body. "We can only recommend that residents avoid entering brackish waters, especially if they have are immunocompromised or have open wounds or sores on their body," Hetzell highlighted. Brackish water is the combination of fresh and seawater often found in the area where rivers meet the sea. Indeed, Perez's daughter said another family member who swam in the area got skin rashes and painful swelling in one of her legs. Fortunately, she was given antibiotics right away. One of Perez' friends who went fishing in Matts Landing had a swelling as big as a baseball in one of his elbows.

Weird news: Saves the snake but wrong action almost kills him

Snakes scare a lot of people. Because of the fact that some species of snakes are very poisonous and can kill people if threatened, snakes scare people. Some species of snakes are not poisonous but can be dangerous otherwise. Large species of snakes such as pythons are very powerful, much more powerful than a single person, and can actually eat domestic animals, a goat in this case. When villagers in this remote part of India saw a large snake eating a goat, they took the right action and called a forest ranger, an expert. The expert caught the snake, but that is where the action went awry. Dealing with such a large snake means that after catching the snake, it should be quickly enclosed and taken away to be released in a forest kind of environment.
The snake is an unpredictable wild animal, and when it comes across a strange setting, it can be provoked or feel threatened and will try to defend itself. When the forest ranger kept the snake in his hand and posed for selfies with a large number of people nearby, the snake took its normal action and started to squeeze this large animal that was holding it, and if the ranger had not taken quick action and got help, he was in real danger and just managed to get off (link to article):

It may sound like a cool thing to do - a display of bravado to entertain the masses - but a selfie with a snake is always a bad idea, even if you are a trained professional, as a forest ranger in West Bengal learned on Sunday. Called in by villagers to capture a rock python killing and eating a goat, the ranger and his assistants rushed to the village in Jalpaiguri 600 km from Kolkata and collared the 30-foot snake. The normal procedure in such cases is the snake would be stuffed into a sack and carried away, to be released into the forest later. But such is the power of the selfie and such was a vanity of the forest officer, he grabbed the snake by its neck with his right hand and slung it with great flourish around his neck. And the flashbulbs popped. And selfie-takers went wild and the forest officer preened. But not for long.

Weird news - Drugged mother takes babies to danger

Given the level of availability of drugs in our cities nowadays, you can see people doing all kinds of crazy things under the influence of these drugs. This is even more so under some modern drug concoctions, modern versions of LSD, where people see their sense of common sense go haywire, start going paranoid. Now, you would think that if somebody behaves like this, that is their person responsibility. But what do you do when the person who is doing that is a young mother, and is directly placing her young children in danger. Society typically tries to preserve the life of the children and get them away from the danger that they are in right now, even if that means keeping the children away from the mother (or the parents).
In this case, there was this young mother who was under the influence of a drug called Molly, who was so high and so paranoid that she believed that everybody was out to get her and had stepped out to a narrow balcony with a low guard rail, along with her young children, and police had the job of getting the children to safety without provoking the paranoid mom into causing danger to her children. They did manage to get it done, although it must have been terrifying for the children (link to article):

Officer Rob Addea positioned himself directly beneath the narrow, rain-slicked ledge and pleaded with the “paranoid” woman above. “Just get the kids back inside!” he implored. “Please. Please. That’s all we want you to do.” It was 4 p.m. Saturday, and police in Delray Beach, Fla., had apparently just stumbled into someone’s madness. A 23-year-old mother, who police said was agitated, deranged and high on the narcotic “Molly,” was hallucinating and becoming increasingly unstable, as the worried neighbors who called 911 could clearly see. Worst of all, she had brought her 1-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter onto the slippery ledge with her, and the toddlers were terrified.

Weird: Son died after being hit by mother's coffin

This is probably right there in the list of weird tragic deaths. The funerals in the Torajan community in northern Indonesia can be ornate, and very expensive, depending on the position of the person who dies as well as their family. These funerals can even last days with a large number of people attending, animals being killed and eaten, and more germane to the current situation, the coffins are placed on a temporary high platform, and that is where the problem occurred.
Coffins can be heavy, and with the dead weight of a body inside the coffin, it can be even more heavy, dangerously so. So when a group of people were trying to carry the coffin on a bamboo ladder to a temporary platform, some of the bamboo supports collapsed and eventually the people carrying the coffin fell down, with the coffin finally falling on a man named Samen Kondorura, who by a sense of twisted logic, was the dead lady's son, and who died due to the impact of the falling coffin (link to article):

The coffin, now vertical and supported by nothing, dropped more than 10 feet to the ground as frightened onlookers stared or screamed. At the bottom of the mass of people and bamboo and fabric was Samen Kondorura, Berta's 40-year-old son. He had been near the end of the coffin — one of the last trying to push it up into the tower. “As the mother’s coffin was being raised to the lakkian, suddenly the ladder shifted and collapsed, the coffin fell and hit the victim,” Julianto Sirait, chief police commissioner of the Tana Toraja municipality on Sulawesi, told the Guardian. Onlookers tried to dig him out of the pile, but it was too late. Samen Kondorura died on his way to the hospital, according to NDTV.

Weird news - Texas deputy removes snake from bathroom

One hears these stories from time to time and even though one feels that these stories are now becoming common place, it still feels weird. For a large snake to come out from the most personal of places, the bathroom, it still feels like a massive violation. And when you see the size of this snake, it seems even more difficult to believe that the snake could have been hidden in the bathroom, most likely it make its way out of the sewage system.
The owner of the house reported the matter to the local sheriff's house, and sure enough when the deputy reported to the house, she must have dealt with these kind of matters before, because she showed a lot of expertise in manhandling the snake and getting it out of the bathroom and releasing it into a more normal environment.
One has to give credit, especially since the snake could have been poisonous, it was not but was a protected species that in fact kills other poisonous snakes (link to article):

By the time Scotten arrived at Vielock’s ranch, the snake had made its way out of the toilet and into the bathroom vanity, according to the Bee County Sheriff’s Office. As Vielock held a flashlight over her shoulder, the deputy got down on her knees and calmly wrangled the blue indigo out of there with her bare hands. “The snake was not harmed and was released back into the brush,” the Bee County Sheriff’s Office said in a Facebook post. The deputy is pictured posing with Vielock’s son, and smiling as she holds onto the snake at both ends.