Shopping - how about adopting a snake

With the conflict between man and animal getting more intense as man enters more and more into the habitat of wild animals, there is greater contact with wild animals and that can literally scare people, and it is right of people to get scared when they have such encounters, since wild animals can be unpredictable and can badly injure or kill you depending on the circumstances. For example, if you come across a 12 feet long snake while searching for a shopping basket, the snake could be venomous or non-venomous, could be aggressive or could be scared of people; most people are not expert enough to figure out. The right thing to do is to call experts such as happened in this case (link to article):

A cart attendant at a Walmart outlet in Texas received a huge scare when he found a large snake in a shopping cart. The employee was collecting shopping carts from the supermarket's return area when he saw the snake. His "loud scream" drew the attention of a cop standing on the opposite side of the parking lot, the Northeast Police Department said in a Facebook post. According to the post, the snake was identified as a nonvenomous rat snake. Found entangled between two shopping carts, it was removed with the help of a man whom the police identified as a "snake charmer" - John Heckaman.

Weird news - Hiding inside small spaces in the car

The urge to migrate to a richer place is irresistible. Places that have far better economies such as the United States and Europe see migration of a large number of people from poorer places such as Mexico or Africa, or from places that are seeing turmoil such as Syria. These migrations can cause incredible tension in the places where they are heading towards, and hence this migration is attempted to be controlled through border controls and by funneling people through legal channels. However, people cannot be stopped simply through such measures and there are ongoing efforts by people to enter a country by stealth and then hope that they will not be easily deported and might finally become a citizen. People attempt crossings by boat, inside vehicles, through deserts, even though some of these can be deadly and even result in the death of those doing the migration. Consider the following case where people are attempting to hide inside a vehicle, not in the trunk, but in the dashboard area and other places - wonder how they are even fitting (link to article):

A migrant was found hiding inside the dashboard of a car on the border between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Melilla, trying to enter Europe illegally. The man, in his 20s, was one of four migrants found inside four separate vehicles within several hours on Saturday, said Spain's Civil Guard officers. Three more vehicles were stopped in Beni-Enzar, Morocco, during the weekend, the Daily Mail reported. Another stowaway was found in an engine compartment, a third under a rear seat and a fourth man in a dangerous position in a dumper truck, where they were in danger of being crushed. Two of these men had to be stabilised by doctors after they were found to be suffering from asphyxiation, disorientation and joint pain due to the conditions in which they travelled. A 15-year-old girl was also among those found.

Weird news - Dying with a stomach full of cocaine

The drug trade is a very lucrative trade, with the amount of money involved being huge. The difference in price of the drug in the drug producing regions such as Colombia, compared with the price in the developed countries is so huge that there are massive efforts made to transport this drug in large quantities to meet user demand. At the same time, there are a lot of efforts made by the enforcement agencies to stop this movement of drugs. As a part of this cat and mouse game, the drug cartels keep on thinking of new ways to move these drugs. In the past, drug supplies have been moved in through fast boats along the coastal regions, through hiding these items in regular trade, through the use of innovate methods such as small submarines, and in the below case, through using people as mules when they actually carry the drug on their persons.
This method involves taking small pouches of the drug, and ingesting it so that it can be carried in the stomach, and later excreted when their reach their destination. However, this is fraught with a high amount of risk since the stomach is full of strong acids that can dissolve items, and if the drugs are exposed in the stomach, their high concentration will be mostly fatal for the person (link to article):

A Japanese man with 246 packets of cocaine in his stomach and intestines died mid-flight on his way from Bogota to Tokyo, authorities said Monday in northern Mexico, where the plane made an emergency landing. The 42-year-old man, identified only as Udo "N," began having a seizure after traveling from the Colombian capital to Mexico City and catching a connecting flight to Japan, said the prosecutor's office for the state of Sonora. "Flight attendants noticed a person suffering convulsions, and requested permission to make an emergency landing in Hermosillo, Sonora," it said in a statement. "When the plane landed at 2:25 am on Friday, paramedics boarded it and declared Udo 'N' deceased." An autopsy found the man had swallowed 246 packets of cocaine, each measuring one by 2.5 centimeters (about one by one-third inch).

Weird news - Penalty on man for forcing plane to dump fuel

Over the years, especially after 9/11, airlines have stopped becoming lenient on passengers who cause a ruckus on a flight. This can happen often enough when people have had too much to drink, something that causes weird behavior and which can threaten the safety of other passengers, or atleast cause them major inconveniences. In this specific case, the drunk man caused a huge ruckus on the flight and the pilot had to land back at the airport from which he had taken off, before doing that, he had to dump some of the fuel that he had loaded on the plane in order to have a safe landing (link to article):

A few preflight drinks can get expensive rather quickly. But for David Stephen Young, a round of six alcoholic beverages he drank before his flight from Calgary to London prompted a rash of unruly behavior, culminating in an abrupt turnaround, an arrest and a hefty fine of more than $16,000. Young, 44, was ordered by a judge to pay WestJet for 20,000 tons of wasted fuel the pilot dumped over Alberta to safely land the aircraft back in Calgary on Jan. 4. The fine came after he pleaded guilty last week to resisting arrest and failing to comply with safety instructions during the fight, according to USA Today.

Weird news - Buying a flat, and finding a body inside

This is truly a horrific experience. Imagine buying a house, opening it and then finding a body inside. For most people, such an experience would make them have a lot of negative thoughts about the house, with a number of house buyers would then refuse to live in such a house. And after six months of death, investigating the death would also be difficult, since even with a reduced amount of decomposition, a post-mortem would not reveal as many details given the elapsed time period. One wonders about the people who committed the murder but then were brazen enough to leave the body in a bed in a house which they then sold off; they would have known that the body would be found and eventually investigated (link to article):

The police have found a six-month-old decomposed body hidden in a box bed in a flat in Bhopal’s Bagsewania area on Sunday evening. The flat has reportedly been locked since June last year and the owners have not been seen since that time. The police is still not sure whether the recovered body is that of a man or a woman. “Everything will become clear after the post-mortem and DNA test. We are searching for the flat owners as only they will be able to reveal how the body reached here. Prima facie it appears to be a case of murder. The body had long hair, so we are suspecting it to be that of a woman,” SP South Sampat Upadhyay said. Police sources say the body had been kept on a mattress and wrapped with a cotton blanket, among other clothes inside the bed box. Even though the body appears to have been lying there for six months, it had not decomposed, instead it had become mummified.

Weird news - Stealing a giant bronze hippo

Sometimes when an item is stolen, people stop and wonder as to how it can happen. Consider a large large animal sculpture in a park, and when I say large, I mean large. This hippo sculpture, made of bronze (and hence somewhat valuable) weighted as much as 1500 pounds, so obviously it was not the work of one person. In fact, it must have required some heavy machinery to have moved the sculpture, and would have taken some time, so a bit puzzling about how no one noticed that the sculpture was being stolen (link to article):

A giant hippo is missing in England. No, it is not real, and yes, it is made of bronze. The 6.5-foot goliath statue, weighing at a whopping 1,500 pound was reported stolen on Friday, CNN reported Kent police saying in a news release. Reportedly, the hippo is believed to have been stolen when someone forced their way into Chilstone Garden Ornaments in Tunbridge Wells.

Weird news - Stealing the ATM

You would have heard of people trying to rob a bank, making many different strategies and mechanisms - in fact, movies about major bank robberies show many different weird methods of doing the same. The same extends for trying to get money when it is on the way, this includes looting cash vans and other major movements of money or precious items / jewels. However, there are so many mobile money spots that seem to be now becoming more of a target. Some scripts talk about hacking ATM's to enable them to dispense money to the attacker, but how about just taking the ATM away and retrieving the money inside it at leisure. '
In many cases, ATM's are located at remote locations with no security guards, which means that these ATM's are vulnerable to anybody wanting to pick up these ATM machines forcibly. Even with security devices and connections to police monitors, their remoteness means that there is a good chance that the attacker can pick up the ATM and be on the way before somebody can stop them (link to article):

Unidentified robbers took away at least two ATMs of Axis Bank, one containing Rs 10 lakh, in the past two days in Noida and neighbouring Hapur district. While five masked men allegedly uprooted an ATM from Rachna market on the NH-91 in Badalpur area on Thursday night, another ATM was taken away from Pilukhwa area in Hapur district on Friday night. Both the ATM booths were not guarded and their security depended on a locked shutter. According to police, at least five robbers were caught on CCTV taking away the ATM from Rachna market around 2.30 am on February 1. The machine contained nearly Rs 10 lakh. Kuldeep Singh, who owns a vehicle-repair shop adjacent to the ATM in Rachna market, said: “When we reached our shop around 8am the next day, we found a part of the machine lying there. The machine was gone and the shutter of the ATM was open.”