Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Friday often brings some of the world’s stranger bits of news, from amusing to weird to hard to believe:

• Young people who are not yet of voting age, in Geneva, Switzerland erected the first new and relatively small minaret, defying the 29 November popular vote that bans them: in the Place Neuve, out of cardboard. Institute of Race Relations, UK (Ed. note: here is a design for homemade miniature cardboard minarets, in case they suddenly sell out in Swiss shops)
• Manchester, England: a 29-year-old man was shot dead when he and friends were confronted outside the money exchange where he worked. Police say he was robbed for cash and for his laptop. A 20-year-old is in custody. Guardian, UK
• A heavily drunk man in the Perm Territory, in the Russian Urals, was saved from flames by his cat. He fell asleep with a cigarette in his hand and when the apartment burst into flames his cat leaped onto him, scratching his face until the man came to and phoned the fire department. Ria Novosti, Russia
• Time to get a Swedish passport: the Vancouver Sun in Canada reports that the US Cancer Institute’s new report on 30 years of  mobile phone use shows no evidence of an increase in brain tumours, based on a study “of just about everyone in Scandinavia.”
• A Numan local government official in Nigeria, Alhaji Dan Tsoho Hassan, was arrested in connection with drug dealing, after “99 bags of substances suspected to be Indian hemp weighing 793.5kg” (Ed. note: not grams) were found at his mother’s house. A 70-year-old woman was also arrested. He denies the charges, saying they are politically motivated. AllAfrica
• A lone Asian carp was found at the end of a $3 million three-day deliberate fish kill in Chicago, the largest ever in the state of Illinois. Worried officials ordered the kill, saying the intruders could wipe out the Great Lakes fishing industry. The Asian carp battle has been going on for 15 years, according to the Chicago Tribune.
• Max, the world’s longest tracked white stork, who migrates between her Swiss-German border area home and southern Spain, or sometimes North Africa, has apparently decided to settle in Cordoba, Spain this winter, where she has been enjoying the balmy weather, reports the Natural History Museum of Fribourg, Switzerland, which tracks her.
• Stories GenevaLunch won’t be covering today or tomorrow or the next day, whew: Roman Polanski, Tiger Woods, UFOs. The first two because there is no news and hasn’t been for days to the despair of popular media and the third because the British Ministry of Defence has declared the death of the unidentified flying object and closed its UFO office after 60 years. Telegraph, UK

Not an Asian carp, not a UFO, just a Friday fish from Switzerland: enjoy your weekend!

(Ed. note: RIP, it’s Friday)

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