Weird news - Airline shuts down leaving passengers in the lurch

An airline, when in operation ferries a number of people to and from different locations in a country our around the world. People book their tickets and plan their leisure time based on these to and fro journeys. So what happens when the airline suddenly comes to a halt (because of lack of money or other such reasons) ? People get really stuck, sometimes in places distant from their home cities and without a way to get back. Buying alternate tickets on other airlines can be expensive at short notices and the entire vacation can get badly ruined because of such cancellations, and lead to monetary losses as well, with the possibility of getting the money back also not possible (refer this case)  

Thousands of travelers have been left in the lurch around the world after the carrier Air Australia went into administration and grounded its fleet Friday.

"It currently appears that there are no funds available to meet operational expenses so flights will be suspended immediately," the company said in joint statement Friday with its newly appointed administrators, KordaMentha.

About 4,000 passengers in total have been left stranded in Hawaii, Thailand, Indonesia and Australia as a result of the suspension, said Michael Smith, a spokesman for KordaMentha.

Weird news - Swedish man discovered after 2 months in a snow isolated car

In many cases, people get lost in the wild outdoors without any form of support. The ability of a person to retain onto their life, even in adverse conditions continues to surprise people all the time. When somebody gets lost in the outdoor without any form of food or drink support, you would expect unfortunately for them to not survive for too much outside, so people feel very good and happy when those stories come out where somebody has survived for a long period of time in the outdoor without any form of support.
Consider the following article where this Swedish man was lost outdoors, in freezing temperatures and without any food or drink, and was then found alive. This was a remarkable story, and you need to admire the fact that the person managed to survive outside for so much time (link to article)

"We received word yesterday (Friday) that a person had been found in a snow-covered car deep in the woods, more than 1.5 kilometres (nearly a mile) from the main road," Ebbe Nyberg, a duty officer in the northern Vaesterbotten county, told AFP. 

A man on a snowscooter had noticed the top of the car on the deserted and snowfilled forest road, not far from the northern town of Umeaa, just south of the Arctic Circle, and after clearing off some of the snow had peered inside. 

"He saw movement and realised there was probably a person in there and called the police," Nyberg said, adding that rescue services and an ambulance that had been belted to drive on the snow had rushed to the scene. 

Weird news - Dog saves himself by calling the emergency number

Well, no one is going to say that the dog actually called the emergency number through the phone by intention, but it happened that way. It seems very weird when you read the news, but the actual fact is that the dog somehow got his neck entangled in the long wire of the landline telephone, and through the twisting while trying to get away from the wire, managed to press the emergency number (999) which is the emergency number of the United Kingdom.
This managed to get the emergency services to the home, but they were looking for some human who was injured or in an emergency condition, but it was a neighbor who came to the house and who managed to detect the dog in a choking condition and helped the dog get away from the wire (link to article):

The operator at the other end could only hear heavy breathing and gasping. Sensing an emergency situation, the operator alerted the police, who rushed to the empty home of driving instructor Steve Brown and daughter Lydia. The police team began searching for an aged or injured person in the house, located in South Hiendley, West Yorkshire.
It was only when a neighbour, Paul Walker, walked into the living room that George was found choking — with the phone wound tightly round his neck.

Weird - Businesses being able to know information about people before family members

A couple of years back, there was a story about how a researcher had a challenge; how to identify a person based on their search patterns. After all, what a person searches for reveals to some extent clues to a person, and putting together all the details for a person in terms of their search helped the researcher get details of the person, to the extent that the actual person was identified by the researcher.
There is a lot of hoopla about privacy details, with the amount of details being recorded by search engines, social networks such as Facebook, and online stores that are integrated with these search engines; but the normal citizen is not so worried about such details. Read the details of this story, which worried the giant store Target so much that they tried to stop the details of this story from emerging (link to article):

Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers. And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy. Target, for example, has figured out how to data-mine its way into your womb, to figure out whether you have a baby on the way long before you need to start buying diapers.
What Target discovered fairly quickly is that it creeped people out that the company knew about their pregnancies in advance.

One can be sure that it sounds creepy.

Online Privacy (Issues in the Digital Age)	Online Privacy: A Reference Handbook	Privacy Lost: How Technology Is Endangering Your Privacy

Weird news - Door to door magazine salesman exhibits shocking behavior

There is an increasing air of insecurity that shows up in today's world. Parents are more scared for their children, for the safety of the children, and so on. Gated communities keep on popping up in more cities, people are warned against strangers. Some of the common stories relate to not letting strangers into the house for any reason, with the fear that once they come into the house, some trouble could happen.
Consider the following weird story, where a door to door magazine seller came into the house and made a sales pitch which was astounding, and liable to get the seller a jail term; you would never think that a normal person would make such demands as the person was making (link to article):

The man, Jerad Michael (pictured at left), who was peddling magazine subscriptions, allegedly forced his way into a woman's home, and refused to leave unless the woman either "submitted to drug use and sexual activity" or bought what he was selling, reports TV Station WCYB in Bristol, Va.
The woman said that she bought the magazines and promptly called the police. Arnold was charged with common law robbery, and was booked under a $20,000 bond.

Weird news - The high price for 2 beers leaves a family shocked

It is a standard refrain that you should ensure that you are responsible for your own finances. Sometimes when we are in a great hurry, we can quickly close financial transactions, doing a cursory look and then proceeding. In most cases, this can be fine, but then comes the case where you need to repent later for the fast work you did in your financial transaction. Consider the following case where a family quickly did a transaction for 2 beers (or maybe 2 beer cases), and then moved on, and later got a bill for an amount they would never have expected (link to article):

The family from Indiana - who asked not to be named - were shocked when their credit card statement displayed the charge for two alcoholic beverages, which were supposed to cost $14 each but ended up being nearly $1,500 a piece.
The credit card owner explained: "We just went up there and grabbed two beers signed it, got our drinks and went on."

Weird news - woman credits her breasts with saving her life in a crash

While driving a car, there are numerous safety measures, such as the use of seat belts, as well as seat bags. The main purpose of all these safety measures is to ensure that the person in the car is not rocked when the accident happens, and stays away from deadly stuff inside the car such as the steering wheel, or the windshield.
But what happens when the air bags don't deploy ? In such cases, the chance of injury is much higher; so can you believe it when the enhanced breasts of a woman apparently saved her by keeping her ribs away from the steering wheel; after all, if you have a record-setting 38KKK bosom, then these can extend for some distance away from the body and save the ribs in the body from getting fractured (link to article):

A woman is crediting her record-setting 38KKK bosom for saving her life after she wrapped her car around a tree. Sheyla Hershey, of Houston, Tx., told Radar Online that she was driving to pick up her husband after a Super Bowl party when she lost control of her car and slammed into a tree.
She said the airbags in her Ford Mustang didn't go off — which could have meant serious injury for most people. But Hershey, who, according to her website, was named as having the largest augmented breasts by her native Brazil's equivalent of the Guiness Book of World Records, says she was saved by her silicone.