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

A woman was unaware for 12 years that she was registered as divorced after her signature was forged on official documents, reported The Times. A court has now set aside the divorce after the judge ruled that the woman had no knowledge of it and that her signature had been forged by or on behalf of her husband. The Times said family lawyers have warned that fraudulent divorces could rise because the majority of applications are now submitted online.

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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.