Mayor Fires Entire Police Force Over Wife Dispute, Japan's Lonely Celebrity Monkey, Beckham Critic Lives in Australia, Tractor Driven Through Family's Living Room & Stepmom Starved Teen to 35lbs

The mayor of Cohutta, Georgia fires his entire ten-person police department after officers allegedly made inappropriate comments to his wife — then rehires them all days later when the town realizes nobody is answering 911 calls. At a small zoo in Japan, a nine-month-old macaque named Punch has drawn tens of thousands of visitors with his quiet, solitary demeanour — and remains completely indifferent to all of them. David and Victoria Beckham's most persistent planning objector — filing complaint after complaint about their £6.15 million Cotswolds renovation — turns out to live nine thousand miles away in Australia. In Middlesbrough, balaclava-wearing thieves hotwire a farm tractor nine miles away and drive it full throttle through the living room wall of a family home at 1:40 in the morning. And in a courtroom appearance by video from her prison cell, 52-year-old Melissa Goodman pleads no contest to charges that she starved her teenage stepdaughter until the girl weighed just 35 pounds. Five stories. All real. All strange. The Daily Strange — where truth is always weirder than fiction.