Dad takes down town’s internet by mistake

And other stories from the stranger side of life

A hand typing on a keyboard

A father in France accidentally took down an entire town’s internet when he used a signal jammer to prevent his children from going online at night. The tiny town of Messanges in south-western France found that every night at midnight their cellular and internet services stopped working for three hours. Investigators concluded that a signal jammer was being used to block radio frequencies and tracked down the culprit. Technology website Bleeping Computer said that using a jamming device is illegal in France, with a penalty of up to €30,000 and six months in jail.

Woman didn’t realise she was divorced

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Man’s diarrhoea collection discovered by wife

A woman said she was “lost for words” when she discovered her husband had been collecting diarrhoea, said The Daily Star. Writing on Reddit, she said she noticed a row of jars on a shelf in their pantry. “So I got out the step ladder and up there [were] 14 jars filled to the brim with diarrhoea and sealed with lids,” she wrote. She said the jars appeared to have been arranged in order of consistency, “from brown water to a thick black sludge”. Inexplicably, she decided to open a jar and smell the contents, describing the result as “so bad”.

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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.