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A 30-year-old woman in the Spanish island of Tenerife faked her own kidnapping to get her mother to pay a $50,000 “ransom,” sending her a video with fake blood on her face and a man standing behind her holding a knife to her throat. She and her co-conspirators were arrested at a slot-machine casino. Investigators discovered that the mother had already made payments totaling $45,000 on three previous occasions when she’d received menacing letters threatening her daughter’s life.

APPARENTLY, A LOAD-BEARING RIBBON: The moment officials cut a ribbon to open a bridge in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the bridge collapsed.

IT’S A MIRACLE! I CAN WALK!: A drug-sniffing dog led police to 30 pounds of cocaine stuffed into the leather upholstery of a motorized wheelchair at Malpensa Airport in Milan, Italy, belonging to a passenger of a flight from the Dominican Republic. To make matters worse, the drug smuggler, who was sitting in the wheelchair, immediately stood up.

THE REST OF YOU, CLEAR OUT!: Police checked the IDs of 143 people in the City Bar in downtown Madison, Wisc. Only six were of legal drinking age.

I HATE TO SAY I TOLD YOU SO: As lawmakers in Liechtenstein debated the pros and cons of quake insurance, two earthquakes struck the tiny Alpine principality. The quakes hit just after one of the officials warned that the odds were very high that all of its citizens could be affected by an earthquake.

NOT EXACTLY A DEEP THINKER: A fast-food worker, anxious to have a slow night at work, placed a makeshift device on the railroad tracks near where he worked in Tilden Township, Pa., that would keep the gates from going down when a train approached, possibly causing a crash. This nitwit apparently thought that “could somehow block traffic, which would prevent people from getting to Wendy’s.”

NO KIDDING? I’M A COP TOO: A man, impersonating a police officer, activated red and blue lights from a bar in his windshield and pulled over another driver in Brighton, Colo. The man, wearing a security shirt and holding a silver badge, was soon to discover that the guy he pulled over was an off-duty deputy with the Adams County Sheriff’s Office.

TELL MY WIFE I’LL BE A LITTLE LATE!: A man, who got into a hydrogen balloon to harvest pine nuts from a tree in a forest park in Heilongjiang province in northeastern China, spent two days aloft after it became untethered and flew away, traveling about 200 miles to the northeast in Fangzheng region, close to the border with Russia.

FIRST ADMIT YOU HAVE A PROBLEM: A young brown bear was rescued by wildlife officials in Duzce Province, Turkey, after being found disoriented and intoxicated from consuming a large amount of hallucinogenic honey made from the nectar of an indigenous species of rhododendron. It’s known as “mad honey” because it contains a potent neurotoxin.

I’M THINKING OF OPENING AN AUTO PARTS STORE, OFFICER: A man was arrested after police found more than 1,200 stolen catalytic converters in his storage unit in Phoenix. The street value was estimated at nearly $200,000.

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