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Paris, France — From a mobile phone that fell and fell but didn’t break to a shoot ’em up granny… Your weekly roundup of offbeat stories from around the world.
Honest thief
Say what you like about Spain, it has some of the world’s most well brought up armed robbers.
A teenager who held up a filling station in Estepona on the Costa del Sol made off with 2,000 euros, but not before paying for the soft drink he also took, police said.
Phone had wi-fly
Now that’s what you call airplane mode. An iPhone that was sucked out of an Alaska Airlines flight when a panel blew out at 16,000 feet (5,000 meters) was found on the ground without a scratch.
The phone was discovered on the side of the road in Washington state three days after the near catastrophe on a Boeing 737 MAX shortly after take-off from Portland airport.
Passerby Sean Bates tweeted that the phone — which had an email of a baggage receipt on its screen — was “pretty clean, no scratches on it” after he found it “sitting under a bush”.
It still had 44 percent battery with the charger stuck in its port, though the power cable had snapped.
Someone has already contacted Bates asking for the phone back. “Unsurprisingly they were unable to provide the most basic evidence” that it was theirs, he said.
Party like it’s 1996
Hoarders, your hour — or more precisely — your year has come. Calendars from 1996 are being reused for 2024 as both are leap years that begin on a Monday.
The quirk has sparked some radical recycling on the web, chiming nicely with the current wave of 1990s nostalgia.
Prices for old 1996 calendars started soaring on Ebay last month as people began posting about how 1996 works neatly for 2024, with one TikTok clip garnering over 1.5 million views.
Even the US presidential election on November 5 falls on the same day as it did in 1996.
Prices for original 1996 calendars of Barbie, Pamela Anderson or the sitcom “Friends” can now set you back up to $150.
And the good news for extreme hoarders is dog-eared diaries from 1940 and 1968 apparently work for 2024 too.
Tough lesson
An Austrian primary school teacher is taking her bosses to court after being fired for her side hustle as an online love coach known as the “Orgasm pope”.
“I would have thought that a school board in the 21st century would be a bit more enlightened,” said the outraged teacher.
“Orgasm pope” promised her TikTok followers an “explosive sex life with multiple orgasms” if they followed her tips.
The 47-year-old, who also taught gym, insisted she has not done anything wrong.
Don’t cross this old lady
One of the most ferocious fighters in the shoot-’em-up online video game “Free Fire” is an 81-year-old granny from rural Chile.
Maria Elena Arevalo needs a crutch to get about, but in the game her avatar “Mami Nena” is a lithe, gun-wielding warrior in a kimono and fang mask who takes no prisoners.
“I never imagined I would be playing this,” she told AFP from her gamer’s chair.
Arevalo, who has four million followers on TikTok, started playing just “to keep my fingers moving”.
At first “I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” she added, but with time, she developed a taste for blood.
Her grandson Hector Carrasco, who introduced her to the game to help her cope with loneliness after her husband died, is hugely proud of his nan.
“It’s cool that she is famous. Wherever I go my classmates know that my grandmother is a famous gamer.