Police Detain Coconut In Maldives For Potentially Tampering With Presidential Election

Police in the Maldives have detained a young, husky and possibly cursed suspect for potentially rigging the vote in a critical election. So far, a police interrogation has revealed only one thing: The suspect is a hard nut to crack.

That's because the perp is a coconut.

Minivan News, a Maldives newspaper, reports a young coconut was taken into custody Tuesday after police received reports that the suspicious fruit was loitering near the Guraidhoo Island School, a polling station to be used in the Sept. 7 presidential election.

Islanders fear the coconut may have been associated with black magic or been imbued with a spell to influence the election.

--> “The four-inch coconut had a 'Sura' [Quranic verse] written in Arabic and was lying on the ground near the school, easy for the public to see,” a source with knowledge of the incident told Minivan News. Authorities brought in a "ruqyah," or benevolent magician, who determined the coconut was fake and therefore posed no threat.

Black magic and sorcery are often accused of having undue influence on the island nation. In July, school administrators refused to let elections officials place a ballot box in the building, fearing it would attract black magic and make students ill. CNM News reports that the school assented only after the government agreed to be responsible for anyone who was "struck by a spell or [fell] ill."

In 2012, one of the island's religious leaders, Jamiyyathul Salaf, petitioned politicians to make sorcery and black magic illegal.

The heightened fears and rhetoric are perhaps more understandable, given what's at stake in the election. As The Guardian notes, former President Mohammed Nasheed was forced out of office in 2012 by what he has termed a coup. Nasheed is now facing off against three other candidates, one of whom, Abdullah Yameen, is a half-brother of the island nation's former dictator, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who ran the country for 30 years until 2008.

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2-Year-Old Escapes From Day Care, Walks Half-Mile Home Alone

 2-year-old who walked out the door of a nursery school in Runcorn, England on Wednesday managed to find her way half a mile home completely on her own.

The parents of Louise Hilton, are none too impressed with Windmill Hill Nursery, where police say "workmen left a door open" that allowed the toddler to escape, the BBC reported.

--> "The security and staff at the nursery are a total shambles," her mother, Samantha Hilton, said, according to the Mirror. "[Louise] is quite bright and we think she’s spotted a door that was left open and she could get out."

It took the toddler about thirty minutes to walk the half-mile between the nursery and her home, the Metro reported. Her parents saw her knocking on the door at about 1 p.m.

“It is frightening to think what might of happened had the wrong person seen her," her father, John Hilton told the Mirror. "There is a canal 50 yards from the house and she always tries to jump in and feed the ducks when we go past but she cannot swim."

He added that the school has not apologized. A spokesman for Windmill Hill told the Mirror, "I have no comment to make."

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Man Burns Down Neighbor’s House Attempting To Get Rid of Wasp Nest

There are plenty of ways to take care of a wasp problem. You have bug spray, exterminators, and…uh…more bug spray. Guess which option a British man used on his neighbor’s home? A flaming rag.

According to the Telegraph, Lyndsey Brealey returned home with her two daughters from a short vacation to find a fire had gutted their home. Evidently, her neighbor took it upon himself to declare war on a nest of wasps that had taken up residence in a cavity of Brealey’s home. As her neighbor learned the hard way, war can get pretty messy.

The unidentified neighbor decided his best option was to

“smoke them out” by using a flaming rag tied to the end of a pole. Just a side note: When your solution to a problem is fire at the end of a stick you’re probably in for some trouble.

According to the neighbor, a gust of wind came buy and he quickly lost control of the fire. It took ten firefighters to eventually quell the fire but by then Brealey and her two daughters lost everything, including their pet hamster.

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Chicago Woman Charged With Raping Man At Gunpoint

A Chicago woman was jailed after being accused of picking up a stranger in her car and forcing him to have sex with another woman in the back of the vehicle.

Cierra Ross, a 25-year-old resident of suburb Olympia Fields, was charged with armed robbery and sexual assault stemming from the alleged crime, according to DNA Info.

Ross was booked Sept. 5 at the Cook County Sheriff's Department, where she is being held in lieu of $75,000 bail, according to police records.

Assistant State's Attorney Amanda Pillsbury told a Chicago judge in court on Thursday that the alleged incident began around 5 a.m. on the morning of July 26 when Ross offered the victim a ride, reports DNA Info. After he got into the car, however, Ross pulled a gun and "demanded [he] get into the backseat of the car and have sex with [her] friend," Pillsbury said, according to the site.

The man eventually escaped and -- wearing only his shirt -- flagged down a nearby cab, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. The cab driver allowed the victim to email himself a picture of his alleged attackers' license plate. The victim also later picked Ross out of a line-up, per the Sun-Times.

Ross, a mother of two who works at a local Denny's restaurant, has a previous misdemeanor conviction for prostitution, according to the Sun-Times.

In a similar case in April, a Toronto man told police he was sexually assaulted by four women who offered to drive him home from a nightclub, according to the National Post.

Female-on-male rape is "presumed to be greatly under-reported," writes Salon. National studies report anywhere between 1.4 and 3 percent of men say they have been raped at some point, according to The New York Times. Another one in 21 men "had been forced to penetrate an acquaintance or a partner, usually a woman; had been the victim of an attempt to force penetration; or had been made to receive oral sex," according to The Times.

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Bus Driver Drops Kindergartener Off In Wrong Town

Sending your child off to his first day of kindergarten is nerve-racking for any parent, but to have them go missing that same day is simply a nightmare. Unfortunately, Valencia Bates of Blasdell, NY., a town outside of Buffalo, experienced just that on Tuesday when her 5 year-old son Jon Anderson was dropped off nearly 10 miles away from his home in a completely different town.

After finishing his first day of school at Central Charter in Buffalo, Anderson was supposed to be dropped off at his home in Blasdell, however the young boy was instead left outside of an apartment complex in Cheektowaga — several miles away from home — with no parent or adult in sight.

Anderson walked aimlessly around the apartment complex until a Good Samaritan spotted the boy looking lost and crying. The woman soon called the police and Anderson was eventually reunited with his mother two hours later.

The West Seneca School District is responsible for Anderson’s transportation to and from school, and have acknowledged that the driver went against school policy. “We have a practice in transportation where for kindergarten children, they are not to be let off the bus unless a parent’s there. So that protocol was not followed,” said the Superintendent Dr. Mark Crawford. Crawford claims the bus driver was under the impression Anderson was another little boy who was absent on Tuesday, but shared the same first name as Anderson.

The boy’s mother Valencia Bates, who works as a bus driver, is rightfully outraged with the school district and cannot understand why anyone would leave a child unattended. ”My baby sat on the curb and and cried. When he saw me, when I came out of the police station I told him ‘I love you so much.’ I was lost,” she said. “Anyone could have gotten Jon. Anybody not in their right mind could have got my baby.”

The superintendent would not say whether or not the bus driver would be fired, referring to it as an “internal matter.” What a nightmare. Our hearts truly go out to Valencia Bates and her little boy. We’re glad he was able to walk away unharmed.

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PHOTOS: These Trees Eat Things. Seriously.

We may try to control it, but nature really can't be tamed.

Case in point -- these hungry, hungry trees munching on everything from signs, to cars to entire buildings.

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VIDEO: Party In The Afterlife: This Coffin Comes With A Subwoofer And A Spotify Account

The dance of death eventually envelops us all, but until now there wasn’t any music.

That’s all changing, thanks to Swedish company Pause Ljud & Bild, which is offering coffins complete with speakers and a streaming Spotify account to keep the tunes rocking in the grave, MyFoxNY reports. For $30,000, audiophiles can jam all afterlife long in one of these special coffins, known as the CataCombo Sound System and featuring two-way speakers and a “divine” subwoofer.

Friends and relatives of the deceased can even select

songs to play using Spotify that will then go out over the coffin's speakers via a wireless 4G Internet connection embedded in the person's gravestone, according to the company's website.

Fredrik Hjelmquist, CEO of Pause, has vowed to be buried in one of the coffins and is allowing strangers to add to his "Pause 4-Ever" playlist. As Silicon Republic points out, it now features such fitting songs as Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” and Jon Bon Jovi’s “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” -- but at only 931 songs for all eternity, Hjelmquist better hope the list is set on repeat.

The CataCombo Sound System first made headlines back in December 2012, before it included the addition of Spotify. The idea was lampooned on "The Colbert Report,"where Stephen Colbert summed up his take on the product: "If you just spend enough money, death will be pleasant.”

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