WEIRD STUFF

World's oldest person dies

The world's oldest person has died at the age of 117.

Maria Branyas Morera, from Spain, had lived through two pandemics and two world wars. Her passing was announced by her family on social media on Tuesday.

In a post on Morera's X account, they said: "Maria Branyas has left us. She has gone the way she wanted: in her sleep, at peace, and without pain."

They also wrote that she had told them in the days before her death: "I don't know when, but very soon this long journey will come to an end.

"Death will find me worn down from having lived so much, but I want to meet it with a smile, feeling free and satisfied."

Morera was born in the United States of America in 1907, before her family returned to Spain when she was a child. She had spent the past 23 years living at Residencia Santa Maria Del Tura -- a nursing home in the Catalan town of Olot.

She had been acknowledged as the world's oldest person by the Guinness World Records in January 2023 and her title now passes to the 116-year-old Japanese woman, Tomiko Itooka.

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Red meat increases diabetes risk

Eating red meat raises the risk of type 2 diabetes.

Research involving two million people around the globe provides compelling evidence of a link between meat consumption and the health condition, as it was found that eating just two slices of ham per day increases the danger of the disease by 15 per cent.

The experts conducted analysis on people from 20 countries across the world and say that their findings support recommendations to limit the amount of red meat that humans eat, in order to cut the huge amount (totalling over 400 million) of people being diagnosed with the condition.

Professor Nita Forouhi, a senior author of the study at the University of Cambridge, said: "Our research provides the most comprehensive evidence to date of an association between eating processed meat and unprocessed red meat and a higher future risk of type 2 diabetes.

"It supports recommendations to limit the consumption of processed meat and unprocessed red meat to reduce type 2 diabetes cases in the population."

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Snake in toilet bites man's testicles

A man was bitten on the testicles by a python in Thailand. Thanat Thangtewanon received a painful shock when the reptile clamped its jaws on his privates after it had been hiding on the U-bend of his toilet on Tuesday.

Thanat explained that he felt a searing pain through his testicles just moments after he had sat down on the loo.

He said: "I felt something biting my balls. It was very painful, so I put my hands in the toilet to see what was wrong. I was shocked that I grabbed a snake.

"I quickly stood up and plucked it out. I felt pain, really bad pain, and there was blood everywhere, but I was more shocked to have found a python in the toilet."

Thanat -- whose wounds did not require stitches -- fought off the snake by attacking it with a toilet brush, but has been left psychologically scarred by the incident.

He said: "My testicles are safe now. I'm lucky it wasn't a venomous snake. A cobra would have killed me.

"But I haven't used that toilet again since.

"Every time I go, I check what's inside and put a brush in there to make sure."