From Japan getting its teeth into its bear problem to why all is not so sunny for the Swedes... Your weekly roundup of offbeat stories from around the world.
Japan has come up with a novel way of tackling the growing menace of bear attacks... by eating them.
Bear is back on the menu in country inns cooked on a stone slate -- or in a hot pot with vegetables -- as culls are stepped up after 13 people were killed in maulings this year, twice the previous record.
Bears, who can weigh up to half a ton and outrun humans, have been breaking into homes looking for food, nosing around schools and rampaging through supermarkets.
But as alarm has grown, so too has the appetite for eating them.
“The number of customers who want to eat their meat has increased a lot,” restaurant owner Koji Suzuki, 71, told AFP in the hilly city of Chichibu near Tokyo.
So much so that he is having to turn away customers.
One who nabbed a seat, 28-year-old composer Takaaki Kimura -- who had never eaten bear before -- loved the taste.
“It’s so juicy, and the more you chew, the tastier it gets,” he said, grinning as he and his friends sat around the grilling stone and bubbling pot.
Suzuki, who is also a hunter, said they took care cooking the bears to show respect for their life. “It’s better to use the meat at a restaurant like this, rather than burying it.”
A Mexican pilot barricaded himself into the cockpit and refused to fly his passengers to the resort of Cancun in one of the most unusual strikes of the year.
The captain told passengers he was owed five months’ salary, and said “this plane isn’t leaving until they pay us what they owe us,” according to a video cited by local media.
“I feel bad for you, because you don’t deserve this,” he told holidaymakers before he was arrested by police at Mexico City’s Benito Juarez International Airport.
Those suffering from the post-Christmas blues should spare a thought for the Swedes. The capital Stockholm did not get a single hour of sunshine for the first 15 days of the month.
The sun was only seen for 30 minutes, putting it on track to be the darkest December since 1934 when there was so little light meteorologists “rounded it down to zero hours”.
Famously stoic Scandinavians have cultivated concepts like “hygge” -- or coziness -- to get them through the long winter nights.
But even that is being tested by the gloom, with meteorologist Viktor Bergman “very pessimistic” about snow for a white Christmas and New Year to cheer everyone up.
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