A Swedish city is training crows to pick up litter, rewarding them with treats every time they place cigarette butts and other litter in a special machine.
The ‘Corvid Cleaning’ trial in Södertälje, a suburb of Stockholm, will determine whether the project will be rolled out more widely.
The project was launched by the Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation, and founder Christian Günther-Hanssen predicts it will save the city around £1.2m per year. He said the crows were “taking part on a voluntary basis”.
A 64-year-old from Switzerland is being investigated over claims he registered as a woman so he could collect his pension a year early.
The man from Lucerne successfully changed his sex on January 5 after a new law came into place, intended to help the trans community. He passed an interview with a civil registrar but is said to have since boasted that he became female just to avoid waiting another year for his state pension.
To avoid intruding into personal privacy and to act in good faith, registrars are told to presume the sincerity of the person applying to officially register as a different sex. They can reject applications that are “manifestly abusive”, but this means only when “the person concerned admits before the officer they have filed a statement as a joke, for a fraudulent purpose or in any other insincere way”.
German former-supermodel Heidi Klum has admitted she used to carry her old teeth around the world in a pouch as a good-luck charm.
Klum told the I’ve Got News For You podcast: “All of my teeth that I’ve lost, my mom kept them. I had my wisdom teeth taken out and then I had an overbite, so I had even more teeth that had to come out.”
“When I was young and I was travelling everywhere and I was always by myself, for me, this was kind of like my good luck charm,” she added. “I don’t know why, it’s just something that I did.”
Klum, now married to musician Tom Kaulitz of German band Tokio Hotel, said that she lost the tooth pouch several years ago and has not suffered any bad luck as a result.
Italian fraudster Roberto Vivaldi is in jail after 25 years on the run after police used a vinyl record sting to get his fingerprints.
Officers tracked Vivaldi, who was given a 20-year jail sentence for fraud and money laundering in 1997, down to Margarita Island, off the coast of Venezuela.
When they discovered he was selling old vinyl records on Ebay, they set up a fake account, ordered a copy of the vinyl LP The Girl from Ipanema and dusted the cover for fingerprints, discovering that some of them belonged to the 69-year-old fugitive.
A statue of Christ at the scourging pillar has been posted back to its owner 19 years after being stolen in Salzburg, Austria.
The religious figure was sent anonymously to local police after going missing from the home of builder and local politician Alois Reinthaler in 2003. It had formed part of a marble-floored ‘Gothic room’, with frescoes decorating its walls, where he hosted dignitaries.
An investigation has found a Dutch gynaecologist impregnated at least 21 women with his own sperm without their consent – the third such discovery in the Netherlands in recent years.
DNA testing showed Joe Beek, who worked as a specialist in Leiden for 25 years, is thought to have used his own sperm in fertility treatments between 1973 and 1986. His case follows those of a Zwolle gynaecologist who in 2020 was found to have fathered 17 children, and the head of a sperm bank in Rotterdam, revealed in 2019 to be the biological parent of 49 children with unknowing patients.
In all three cases, the culprits are already dead.
A woman in Hagen, Germany, came home to find the ground floor of her house vandalised by a wild boar, which was sleeping off its rampage on her sofa.
Police say the animal must have gained entry through an unlocked sliding patio door, which then closed after it. They were able to coax the 60kg animal back outside, but warned: “If a wild boar shows up in your living room, call the emergency services.
