QUIRKY WORLD ... Refugee ‘hero’ returns €150k found in cupboard

GERMANY: Police in the town of Minden say a 25-year-old man who arrived last year as a refugee is their “hero of the day” after he found some €150,000 — and handed it to authorities.

The unidentified Syrian discovered the money in a cupboard he had been given by a charitable organisation.

Minden police said he found about €50,000 in cash and a savings books containing over €100,000 under a board while assembling the furniture. Police said in a statement that while small amounts of money are regularly handed in to authorities, “such a large sum is the absolute exception”.

The man arrived in Germany last October as a refugee.

Hit-and-run body stuck

USA: Oceanside police say a suspected drunk driver struck and killed a man, then drove for a mile with his body lodged in the car.

Esteysi Sanchez, 29, of Oceanside, was arrested for vehicular manslaughter.

Police say that around 6.30am, Sanchez hit a man on a footpath. His body went through the windshield and ended up on the front passenger seat but his severed leg crashed through the back window and landed on the boot.

Police say Sanchez drove about a mile, parked in a cul-de-sac, and walked away. She was arrested a short time later.

Flame thrower

BRAZIL: A man has been arrested for trying to extinguish the Olympic torch by throwing a bucket of water over it as it passed through his farming town of Maracaju.

Police arrested the 27-year-old at the scene for damaging public property. The flame continued to burn, however.

The crime can carry a sentence of between six months and three years in prison.

“He said it was a joke, a dare on Facebook,” said an officer in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul.

A video, available on YouTube, shows a heavy spray of water thrown indiscriminately over the group around the torch bearer by someone out of view. The man was freed on bail after paying 1,000 reais (€265.32).

Darwinian recreation

ENGLAND: The bedroom in which Charles Darwin died has been recreated after more than a century, English Heritage has said.

Working from family letters, a detailed inventory, descriptions from the time, paint analysis, and research into mid-Victorian interior design, the charity has closely matched the original appearance of the room at Down House, Kent, in the late 1850s.

Visitors will now be able to see the room where Darwin, father of evolutionary biology, died in 1882, and for 20 years before that enjoyed reading and resting, recovered from illnesses, and looked on his garden experiments from the window.

Poop aid scooped

SPAIN: A town is facing an unexpected bill after thieves apparently made off with a giant dog dropping that was being used as part of a local campaign.

Torrelodones, a municipality just outside Madrid, is €2,400 out of pocket after the 3m-high inflatable, bought as part of a campaign to encourage pet-lovers to pick up after their dogs, went missing.

The bizarre inflatable disappeared after it had been packed away in its carry-case and the police are now on the trail of the dog poop, town officials say.

Slippery slope

GERMANY: A driver lost control of his car when it slipped on an unlikely road hazard — snail slime.

A slimy trail was left across the road in Paderborn when a procession of snails crossed it, and police say the car flipped over when it hit the trail. The driver was not injured, but his East German Trabant car was ruined.

Twinkie Twinkie

USA: In a glass box in a private school sits a 40-year-old chemistry experiment still going strong — a decades-old Twinkie.

The experiment started at George Stevens Academy in Maine in 1976 when Roger Bennatti was teaching a lesson to his chemistry class on food additives and shelf life. After a student wondered about the shelf life of the snack, Bennatti sent the pupils to a shop with some money and they returned with two Twinkies, cream-filled sponge cakes.

He ate one and left the other, and it still remains in the office of the school’s dean of students.