From the bull and the horse who made themselves at home to a larger-than-life Indian Lionel Messi... Your weekly roundup of offbeat stories from around the world.
An Australian politician was left in udder disbelief when he came home to find his dog had let a bull and a horse into the house.
Pet cam footage posted by MP Andrew Mackay on social media showed his dog Thunder nudging a glass door open, allowing a castrated bull named Sue to dander into his Darwin home.
It was followed by his horse Cricket, who found a bowl of vegetable scraps meant for the chickens, and proceeded to throw them around the room.
Then, amid the crunch of broken china, they had a good drink from the fish tank. “I don’t know how many fish I had before,” Mackay told AFP, but they did “drop the water a considerable amount”.
McDonald’s pulled its Christmas ad in the Netherlands after it was fried and filleted online for serving up “AI slop”.
The tongue-in-check advert, “the most terrible time of the year”, depicts Christmas chaos, with Santa caught in a traffic jam and a present-laden Dutch cyclist slipping in the snow.
But its use of AI sparked a (Mc)flurry of criticism on social media.
“This commercial single-handedly ruined my Christmas spirit,” said one user. “Good riddance to AI slop,” posted another, with creatives also blasting it for the Scroogery of getting rid of so many actors and extras.
Indian football fans have something big for Lionel Messi’s three-day visit to the country -- a 21-metre (70-foot) golden statue of the Argentinian idol.
The iron sculpture in Kolkata of the striker holding aloft the World Cup is 12 times bigger than the little man himself.
They have also built a life-sized Messi sitting on a throne for the “Hola Messi” fan zone and a recreation of his Miami home, with mannequins of his family members.
Unfortunately Messi will not be there to unveil the statue Saturday for security reasons, but he will do it virtually.
Never mind the pandas or the Amazon, who is going to save pubic lice? That’s the worry of Dutch biologist Kees Moeliker, who compared the trend to keep things trim downstairs to the disasters of deforestation.
The fashion for Brazilians has left the little critters with nowhere to hide. So he is pleading with people to send any specimens they find to him at Rotterdam’s Natural History Museum. Some have already arrived sticky-taped to the back of a postcard.
Moeliker, a winner of the alternative Ig Nobel prize for documenting the first case of homosexual necrophilia in a duck, said all hope is not lost. “I’ve heard stories from people in the fashion industry that pubic hair is coming back,” he told AFP.
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