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.

Weird news - Pakistani children paralyzed at night

Whenever we think that we have learned a lot about our body and what could be impacting it, we come up with something new that tells us that there is a lot to learn about maladies and the functioning of the human body. So, for example, we have learnt how to dramatically extend the life duration for somebody afflicted with AIDS or with many different types of cancers.
What happens when somebody gets afflicted with a malady for which doctors are not able to provide any help. Family members are clueless about what to do, and depending on the society they are based in, they may try to get faith help or help from outside the medical system. This happened to a couple of boys in Pakistan, who were getting called 'solar' kids because they were active during the day but went into a sort of paralytic state when the sun went down (link to article):

The ‘solar kids’ who are being treated for an illness which leaves them paralysed by sunset each day might be suffering from a neuro transmitter deficiency, said vice chancellor of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (Pims) Dr Javed Akram, who also chaired a meeting of a medical board called to discuss the children’s case. “In simple words, neuro transmitters in the brain have been disturbed. A similar case was reported in Japan and was named JPA, but that disease occurs in both male and female children. However, our experiences in Pakistan indicate that this case only occurs in male children and we are considering giving the disease a new name,” he added.

Weird news - Solar power plant zaps birds

Solar power plants are growing in number all over the world, and are seen as an important component of the renewable energy matrix, necessary if we are to move away from coal and nuclear fired plants and onto clean energy. However, as somebody who has experienced hot summers know, the energy of the sun can be quite harsh and impact the human body (heat waves are known for killing people who are not prepared to face the heat).
However, an example in London shows the world the problems that such solar energy can also cause. A new skyscraper over there is constructed in such a way that at specific times of the day, it can act as a concave lens and focus light onto the road and people on the road, burning the tarmac and injuring people. An even greater example is this massive solar power station in the desert near Las Vegas, an advanced type that depends on a number of mirrors focusing their reflected sunlight onto a central tower where the temperature gets very high, in order to boil water and run turbines.
However, one problem is that no one told birds that they should not go near. Birds and insects that get near the tower face incredible heat and literally burn in a flash, dropping from the sky. This impacts a large number of birds, and the solar energy company is doing their bit to stop this from happening without impeding their work, and so far, it does not seem to be working (article):

A macabre fireworks show unfolds each day along I-15 west of Las Vegas, as birds fly into concentrated beams of sunlight and are instantly incinerated, leaving wisps of white smoke against the blue desert sky. Workers at the Ivanpah Solar Plant have a name for the spectacle: "Streamers." And the image-conscious owners of the 390-megawatt plant say they are trying everything they can think of to stop the slaughter. Federal biologists say about 6,000 birds die from collisions or immolation annually while chasing flying insects around the facility's three 40-story towers, which catch sunlight from five square miles of garage-door-size mirrors to drive the plant's power-producing turbines.

Weird news - Keeping a crocodile in the basement

People have a fascination with wild animals, especially those who can pose a risk to the life of human beings, there is a certain kind of fatalistic attraction to such kind of animals. So you find people rearing snakes (even large ones such as Burmese pythons which can be incredibly powerful), or even large cats such lions or tigers or leopards (although the number of these have reduced significantly with more laws against domestic possession of such animals). However, once in a while you find stories of people who keep dangerous animals at home, even though it is totally prohibited in most countries.
In this case, when police officers were looking for a person who was suspected of illegal arms trafficking and searched his home, they found, surprisingly a large crocodile in the basement. Such a crocodile can be very unpredictable and dangerous, not only for the owner but for others in the vicinity as well (link to article):

Pictures released by police showed the animal sitting in the dark, in a shallow muddy pool. Daytime temperatures in Saint Petersburg hovered around minus seven degrees Celsius (19 Fahrenheit), far below the preferred climate for the species. Pictures released by police showed the animal sitting in the dark, in a shallow muddy pool. Daytime temperatures in Saint Petersburg hovered around minus seven degrees Celsius (19 Fahrenheit), far below the preferred climate for the species.