April Fool’s pranks, screaming plants and other tall tales

Discover the strangest stories from the past seven days

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It's been another week of unlikely news, including: • Vending machines selling bear meat proving an unlikely hit with locals in Japan, • A "Bigfoot expert" sharing new evidence of the fearsome creature's existence, • Ministers contemplating giving cows fart-stopping pills to cut methane emissions, and • Researchers discovering that plants let out a "scream" when they are stressed. After all those tall tales, calibrate your sense of the absurd by trying to work out which of the following two stories is real and which is fake: • The cost of relocating Pablo Escobar's "cocaine hippos" is projected to be $3.5m, or •  Japanese officials estimate that $8m of drugs are smuggled through deep-sea networks annually. Find out which tale is a little too tall at the end of this newsletter.

meanwhile... In odder news Let sleeping cows lie: Early mornings are part and parcel of running a dairy farm, but a cow has shot to international fame for trying to trick her owner into letting her have a lie-in. Doris, one of a 200-strong herd at an Isle of Wight farm, has been pretending she's still asleep when milking time comes around. A TikTok of farmer John Brodie "trying to coax an unimpressed-looking Doris" went viral this week, said the BBC, and Brodie was even asked to appear on CNN. Many commenters related to the cow's struggle, with some users calling Doris their "spirit animal". Another said the cow was obviously "'udderly' done with this…"  It's 5 o'clock somewhere: The granddaughter of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini protested against proposals to add health warnings to booze bottles in Ireland by chugging wine at a morning press conference. Winemakers in Italy and Spain have expressed outrage at the suggestion, with some describing the idea as a "direct attack" on Italy, said the Irish Examiner. In a show of solidarity Alessandra Mussolini, a Minister of the European Parliament, arranged a tasting event last week, inviting journalists and attendees to sample Italy's finest wines. And as the gathering came to a close at 11am, Mussolini made her feelings clear by taking a hearty swig from a wine bottle, said the paper. Egg-cessive consumption: Easter Sunday is still days away, but a 30-year-old man who claims he's only able to eat a very limited diet says he's already scoffed 200 chocolate eggs this year. Ashley Kean says that chocolate, mashed potato, Yorkshire pudding and fruit are the only foods he can digest, and so he's been making the most of the seasonal sweets being on sale this spring, getting through between three and six eggs a day. "It's like the best part of the year for me," the father-of-two told The Mirror – although he admitted he is "getting quite sick of them" now.

p h o t o   o f   t h e   w e e k Out walking A 12ft puppet of a Syrian refugee called Little Amal toured the UK this week. Created by Amir Nizar Zuabi as the centrepiece of a performance art project called The Walk, Amal – who is operated by three puppeteers at a time – has so far travelled through 13 countries across the world. Leon Neal/Getty Images

Fool'd Win some, lose some For many filmmakers, winning an Oscar is the pinnacle of their career. So the thought of having it taken away is understandably something of a sore spot – which director Sarah Polley's daughter knew all too well when she plotted her April Fool's prank this year. In a letter supposedly signed by the Academy's president David Rubin, the Best Adapted Screenplay winner was informed with "deepest regrets" that she had been named the award's recipient by "mistake", and that All Quiet on the Western Front was the "rightful" winner.  The note stressed that the news was "much too cruel to be a joke", despite the timing of the letter's arrival. Polley was given "one more week to enjoy" the statuette's "presence" before she had to "mail it back to LA".  In response to Polley's tweet sharing a picture of the forged letter, All Quiet director Edward Berger offered to "save on mailing costs" by having Polley send the Oscar directly to his overseas home. "Tracking number please," he said: "Would hate for it to get lost."

From the magazine Caught cheating A 29-year-old has been prosecuted for pretending to be a teenager and enrolling at a high school in New Jersey. Hyejeong Shin was exposed four days into starting at her new school, when administrators at New Brunswick High School realised that her birth certificate was fake and that she was not in fact 16. Her attorney explained that Shin was lonely, and had been seeking the sense of "safety" she remembered feeling at school. "There are personal issues that she needs to resolve," he conceded. For more stories from The Week's "It must be true… I read it in the tabloids" section, subscribe to the magazine.

Spud-stitute Easter bunny boilers The Easter bunny may be distributing potatoes instead of eggs this year, according to Axios. With egg prices at a high since the start of the year, potato producers in the US have jumped on the opportunity to market spuds as a cost-cutting alternative for this weekend's festivities. The idea began circulating on social media several months ago, with memes joking about the idea of kids painting and dyeing spuds instead of budget-busting eggs. Quick to take note, Potatoes USA, the marketing and promotion board of American potato growers, jumped on the trend, encouraging people to share their #Easterpotatoes snaps online. The blogger behind KrazyCouponLady.com told Axios that painting rocks might also make a "decent alternative".

quote unquote "Trying to remember back, I might not have had them on."  While talking to the BBC's Anita Rani, Tom Arnold realises that perhaps he wasn't wearing his reading glasses when he accidentally ordered a further 60 pairs online. His son's tweet about the mishap saw the story go viral.

this week in history Going mobile The first mobile phone call was made 50 years ago this week, on 3 April 1973. Standing on a street corner in the middle of New York, Motorola engineer Marty Cooper rang a contact at rival company Bell Laboratories, informing them that he was ringing from "a personal, handheld, portable cell phone". The 94-year-old recalls being met with silence on the other end of the line, and told the BBC: "I think he was gritting his teeth."  The science hasn't changed much in the decades since that first call was made, but phones have of course completely transformed. The first commercial model to hit the market in 1984 weighed almost four times as much as an iPhone 14, and would reportedly set you back the equivalent of £9,500 today.

Too tall by half True or false? The first story is true: Colombian officials anticipate that relocating 70 of drug trafficker Pablo Escobar's "cocaine hippos" from the Magdalena River basin to sanctuaries in Mexico and India will cost $3.5m, said CNN. The "cocaine baron" originally brought a much smaller number of the animals from Africa to Colombia in the 1980s, but since his death in 1993, the hippos have been left to "roam freely", said The Guardian. With "no natural predators to keep them in check", authorities have been "helpless to curb their numbers".  The second story is false, Japanese officials are not concerned about deep-sea drug-smuggling networks. But researchers in Australia have made an underwater discovery off the country's coastline this week, by filming a gelatinous snailfish at the record depth of 8km below the Pacific Ocean surface. "Until now no one had ever filmed or collected fish at such depths," said The Times.

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