Weird news: The weirdest news stories today from around the world – Manchester Evening News
The week’s coming to an end, so why not take a quick break and read some of the weirdest stories that have happened round the world this week
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Here's a collection the weirdest stories from around the globe this week, including sky divers who landed in a marijuana farm, and a fish who is looking for love…
Pot luck
A team of smoke-jumpers parachuting into a fire in the mountains of Southern Oregon landed in an illegal marijuana garden being prepared for the growing season.
The six jumpers found the site when there was a rash of lightning strikes. Jackson County sheriff’s spokeswoman Andrea Carlson said they told authorities, who hiked into the remote site in the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest and seized two guns and more than 1,000 pot plants.
Ms Carlson said the site was being cultivated by growers for Mexican drug gangs.
Twinning ceremony
A small village is to hold a ceremony to twin its former phone box with another phone box 150 miles away.
The traditional kiosk in Marden, near Devizes, Wiltshire, is to be twinned with a kiosk in Thurlestone, near Kingsbridge, south Devon. Organiser Lalu Carter said the Wiltshire kiosk was being linked with a redundant K6 phone box in her parents’ village in Devon as a “bit of fun”.
Fitted with shelves, the redundant Marden kiosk, which was bought from BT for £1, is used by the village as a “swap shop” for everything from books to vegetables.
Looking for love
A worldwide appeal has been launched to find a mate for the last remaining males of a tropical fish on the brink of extinction.
The Mangarahara cichlid, from Madagascar, is believed to have vanished from the wild as a result of the building of dams which has dried up its habitat on the Mangarahara River.
Two of the last known individuals from the species are in London Zoo’s aquarium, but both are male, the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) said. Described as “gorgeously ugly”, the zoo is hoping to start a conservation programme if a fit female can be found for the captive males.
Child's play
Police are investigating a complaint that a 10-year-old girl was told drawing a hopscotch grid on the pavement outside her Ramsgate home was criminal damage.
The girl’s father, Bob Allen, who runs a karaoke business, contacted the police after the incident which he said left his daughter Lilly-May frightened, Kent News reports.
He said: “The policeman said to her that what she had done was criminal damage and she could be arrested. He then drove off. She didn’t come into the house for a while and didn’t tell us straight away because she thought I was going to tell her off for being naughty.”
Snap decision
A Florida driver who made a snap decision to flee from police ended up in hospital after he ran into an alligator.
Bryan Zuniga, 20, was pulled over for a traffic offence by Pinellas County officers but ran off. He was found at a local hospital a few hours later and said he had been attacked by an alligator, leaving him with puncture wounds to the face, arm and armpit area.
He has been charged with fleeing police, driving with a suspended or revoked licence and resisting an officer without violence.
Ghost town
A strange ghost town that spent a quarter century under water is coming up for air again in the Argentine farmlands south-west of Buenos Aires.
Residents fled from Epecuen in 1985 when its saltwater lake overflowed its banks after a heavy rainstorm leaving the former bustling little lakeside resort under nearly 10 metres (33ft) of water.
Now the water has mostly receded, exposing what looks like a scene from a film about the end of the world with rusted cars and crumbled homes. The town has not been rebuilt, but it has become a tourist destination once again, for people willing to drive at least six hours from Buenos Aires to get there.
