Wordle saves pensioner held hostage in her basement

And other stories from the stranger side of life

Wordle

The viral word game Wordle is thought to have saved an 80-year-old US woman who was imprisoned in her basement bathroom for 17 hours by an intruder who broke into her house in the dead of night. Police in Illinois were alerted to the predicament of Denyse Holt after she did not text her daughter with her Wordle score, reported The Times. Holt was saved and the man arrested. The local police chief said he did not play Wordle himself, but added: “I may have to start now”.

False teeth returned 11 years later

A man’s missing false teeth turned up in the post 11 years after he vomited them into a Spanish bin. Paul Bishop, 63, last saw the false gnashers while celebrating a friend’s birthday in Spain in 2011. After bountiful boozing, he threw up into a bin and lost his teeth in the process. Spanish authorities and the British council used biological information to locate the teeth’s owner and send them back to him. Bishop told the Daily Star that he “couldn’t believe it”.

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Trump denies flushing papers down the loo

Donald Trump has denied allegations that he often flushed documents down a bathroom toilet at the White House. A new book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman claims staff found documents blocking a toilet and had to call in a plumber who found “wads of clumped-up printed wet paper” in the system. The former US president described the report as “another fake story”, said the Daily Telegraph.

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Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i new site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.