Odd & Interesting

A suburban Chicago man faces firearm charges after police say he told officers he accidentally shot himself in the leg while dreaming that an intruder was breaking into his home.

An abandoned litter of raccoons discovered at a construction site in northern Utah found new homes earlier this week after a construction crew uncovered the animals below the remnants of a demolished home.

A Florida professor known as “Dr. Deep” has resurfaced after spending a record 100 days living underwater. Dr. Joseph Dituri raised his face to the sun Friday for the first time since March 1.

A British man has been detained after climbing more than half way up the world’s fifth-tallest skyscraper in Seoul with only his bare hands.

Former UFC champion Conor McGregor knocked out the Miami Heat mascot in a midgame bit that went wrong. Burnie — more specifically, the man who occupies Burnie’s costume — briefly sought medical attention Friday night after taking two punches from McGregor during a third-quarter stoppage of Game 4 of the NBA Finals between the Heat and the Denver Nuggets.

While judges, lawyers and support staff at the federal courthouse in Concord, New Hampshire, keep the American justice system buzzing, thousands of humble honeybees on the building’s roof are playing their part in a more important task: feeding the world.

A woman taking a Memorial Day weekend stroll on a California beach found something unusual sticking out of the sand: a tooth from an ancient mastodon.

The big cheese of extreme U.K. sports events is back.

Hundreds of people visited a small town in Missouri this week and last to see a Black nun whose body has barely decomposed since 2019.

A hungry black bear barged into the garage of a Connecticut bakery, scared several employees and helped itself to 60 cupcakes before ambling away.

For those seeking to live in the most sustainable way, there now is an afterlife too.

A tiff over Taco Tuesday is heating up, with Taco Bell asking U.S. regulators to force a Wyoming-based fast-food chain to abandon its longstanding claim to “Taco Tuesday” as a trademark.

A city in northern Michigan has a new Mother’s Day memory: A 350-pound bear was in a tree for hours, watched by dozens of people, before it fell asleep and dropped onto mattresses below.

The firing of two employees at a religious school in western New York is fanning the culture wars roiling parts of the United States.

A man has been indicted by a grand jury on charges of stealing a pair of ruby red slippers worn by Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz,” federal prosecutors in North Dakota say.

One of Kenya’s oldest wild lions has been killed by herders and the government has expressed concern as six more lions were speared at another village on Saturday, bringing to 10 the number killed last week alone.

A university professor broke a record for the longest time living underwater without depressurization this weekend at a Florida Keys lodge for scuba divers. University of South Florida professor Joseph Dituri spent his 74th day underwater Saturday in a Key Largo lodge for scuba divers.

Guinness World Records says the world’s oldest dog recently celebrated his 31st birthday.

Scientists for the first time have caught a star in the act of swallowing a planet. And it’s not just a nibble or bite, but one big gulp.

Authorities in a central New Jersey town say they are no longer noodling over the mystery of how hundreds of pounds of pasta were dumped near a stream.

When Julia and Robert Jones discovered that a judge from the Akron Municipal Court in Ohio would be officiating “Star Wars”-themed weddings on May the Fourth, the couple felt the Force calling them to commit to the ceremony.

He is a senior at 16. His grade point average is 4.98. Even before graduating from high school, he has earned 27 college credits and, perhaps the most impressive numbers of all, he has scholarship offers from around 130 colleges and universities that, as of Thursday, totaled more than $9 million.

The final curtain came down Sunday on New York’s production of “The Phantom of the Opera,” ending Broadway’s longest-running show with thunderous standing ovations, champagne toasts and gold and silver confetti bursting from its famous chandelier.

A spacecraft around Mars has sent back the most detailed photos yet of the red planet's little moon.

German officials seized cooked bats and nearly a ton of unrefrigerated fish after police stopped a van that had entered the country from Belgium, authorities said Wednesday.