Odd & Interesting

Dozens of customers who stopped for a drink at Britain’s highest altitude pub got a longer stay than they bargained for, after the building was cut off by a blizzard.

One of the first coins minted in Colonial New England, which was recently found among other coins in a candy tin, has sold at auction for more than $350,000, more than it was expected to get, the auctioneer said.

A man in Germany has discovered the hard way that it’s best to get a driving license first before trying to use it.

A wayward roadrunner is on the mend in Maine after traveling across the country in a moving van.

A Florida family is in trouble with their homeowners association for putting up their Christmas lights too early.

Volcano scientists issued an alert Wednesday, warning that a cloud of ash — from an eruption more than century ago — was headed toward Alaska’s Kodiak Island.

A 10-point buck sought sanctuary inside a southern Michigan church on opening day of the state’s firearm deer hunting season.

An 89-year-old Rhode Island man has achieved a goal he spent two decades working toward and nearly a lifetime thinking about — earning his Ph.D. and becoming a physicist.

Santa may have fewer eyes in homes this Christmas season after a Georgia judge — jokingly — banned the Elf on the Shelf.

Thousands of Britain’s iconic red phone boxes will be protected from removal under new rules, the U.K.’s telecommunications regulator said this week.

A tiny home in a wealthy Boston suburb has sold after about a month on the market, albeit for far less than the original asking price of almost $450,000.

Colin and Donna Craig-Brown were weeding their garden in New Zealand when Colin’s hoe struck something huge just beneath the soil’s surface.

The bloom of a giant and stinky Sumatran flower nicknamed the “corpse plant” because it smells like a dead body is drawing huge crowds to a Southern California botanical garden.

New York City’s Republican mayoral candidate, Curtis Sliwa, tried to bring a furry friend to his polling place on Tuesday — one of his many pet cats.

As he made history by becoming the first person to fly across New Zealand’s Cook Strait in an electric plane, Gary Freedman thought it only fitting that the first thing he saw when approaching the Wellington coastline was the rotating blade of a wind turbine producing renewable energy.

The King of Rock n’ Roll is back in the building.

A man being booked into an Alabama jail wound up at a hospital rather than behind bars after a scan revealed a shotgun shell in his abdomen.

Three sisters in Florida share the same birthday, but they’re not twins or triplets.

No bull: Tucson police had to respond Tuesday morning to reports of a bull roaming a neighborhood near an elementary school.

A U.S. Marine Corps veteran who disarmed a teenage robbery suspect in an Arizona gas station by grabbing his gun says he was “doing what needed to be done.”

An Israeli scuba diver has salvaged an ancient sword off the country’s Mediterranean coast that experts say dates back to the Crusades.

A large cat native to Africa that escaped from its suburban Detroit home was captured after spending several hours on the lam, according to an animal recovery group.

A dog trapped for five days deep inside a narrow, rocky crevice at a state park north of New York City was rescued unharmed — though it was hungry and thirsty, parks officials said Wednesday.

A rare two-headed diamondback terrapin turtle is alive and kicking — with all six of its legs — at the Birdsey Cape Wildlife Center in Massachusetts after hatching two weeks ago.

Wildlife officials in Colorado say an elusive elk that has been wandering the hills with a car tire around its neck for at least two years has finally been freed of the obstruction.