1. Despite having only 1,000 inhabitants, Vatican City has the highest crime rate in the world, with about 1.5 crimes per citizen. Most of the crimes committed in Vatican City are thefts, many of which involve pickpocketing tourists. There is no prison in the Vatican and only one judge, so many criminals are sent to Italy. In 2007, Vatican City handed down its first drug conviction after a man was found with cocaine in his office at work.
2.
Sabrina the Teenage Witch it was a TV staple in the early 2000s, but it actually hit the screen as a TV movie! Melissa Joan Hart, who plays Sabrina, said her mother was instrumental in bringing the original comic to the screen. “My mom doesn’t get enough credit for her work as the leading lady on the show,” Hart told Marie Claire. “She’s the one who delivered the Archie Comics book to a playground at my sister’s school in Manhattan and sold it to Viacom as a Showtime movie.” The film premiered in April 1996 and also starred Ryan Reynolds.
After the initial success of the film, Hart said her mom knew it would be a hit TV show. “He always knew he would make an incredible series, but no one would hear about it until he cut a trailer from the movie and aired it on all four major networks at the time.” There was even a bidding war between ABC and NBC for the series, with the show ultimately going to ABC because Hart and her mother liked the “TGIF” programming lineup. Despite the bidding war, Hart claimed that ABC did not back the show in the first place. “They were calculating Ignorant the show to be a great success. we were just the little show that would follow that,” Hart said. “But we ended up being a fan favorite.”
3. The goblin shark, often known as a “living fossil” because they’ve been around for so long, is probably one of the creepiest shark species out there. Goblin sharks use their long snouts, which are covered in special sensory organs, to detect electric fields in the ocean. That’s not the only thing they use their snout for: They can extend the snout to help them ambush and kill their prey. Goblin sharks are rare and are believed to have not evolved for more than 70 million years.
4. You’ve probably seen memes mocking warnings to check your kid’s candy for drugs, razors, and other dangerous substances, which made me wonder if there have ever been any cases of poisoned Halloween candy. It turns out the warning has been around since the 1970s, likely stemming from the tragic case of Timothy O’Bryan, an 8-year-old who died on Halloween in 1974 after his father allegedly fed him candy lace.
Just days before Halloween, Ronald Clark O’Bryan, Timothy’s father, took out a $40,000 life insurance policy on both his son and his daughter, Elizabeth. O’Bryan was supposedly in debt and reportedly saw politics as a possible way out of financial trouble. O’Bryan then allegedly laced some Pixy Stix with cyanide and then convinced his son to eat one before bed. In order to collect on the contract, O’Bryan had to cover up the murder, so he reportedly decided to distribute the remaining Pixy Stix to trick-or-treaters in his neighborhood so he could pin the poisoned candy on someone else.
O’Bryan eventually distributed the Pixy Stix to at least four other children, including his daughter. Fortunately, it is believed that none of the children consumed the candy. Authorities were able to get hold of O’Bryan’s design because one of the children allegedly had trouble opening the Pixy Stix package, which O’Bryan had resealed with paper clips. O’Brien was executed in 1984 for his crimes. Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Denver who has studied claims of Halloween candy poisoning by strangers, told Smithsonian magazine that in his 30 years of research, he has never found a case where a stranger poisoned and then distributed Halloween candy to children. .
5. After the death of Queen Elizabeth II, there has been tons of speculation about exactly how much the royal family is worth. A big ticket item that was also a source of personal passion for Queen Elizabeth was her £100 million stamp collection. The collection, known as the Royal Philatelic Collection, has been in existence since 1864 and contains stamps from both England and other Commonwealth countries. Elizabeth reportedly added many stamps to the collection and was known for showing them off to visitors.
6. Did you know that the scary spooky classic season Scream is it partially based on a true story? Kevin Williamson, who wrote the screenplay for the film, said he was inspired by an episode of the 1994 series. Turning point which discussed the case of Danny Rolling, who was known as the Gainesville Ripper. Rolling killed five students near the University of Florida over the course of a few days in August 1990.
The crimes reportedly caused intense panic on the University of Florida campus. Many students left town and the school had to beef up their campus security. There were reports of an increase in students buying guns, with some even telling the media that they slept with knives in their beds. Just days after what would turn out to be the final murder, police announced they had a suspect: Edward Lewis Humphrey, an 18-year-old college student who had just been arrested for attacking his grandmother. Humphrey lived in the same apartment complex where one of the murders had taken place. Other residents claimed that he had fallen in love with one of the victims. Once Humphrey was taken into custody, the killings stopped, so police believed they had solved the case.
Despite authorities’ belief that Humphrey was the killer, they continued to pursue additional evidence. Until January 1991, it was believed that Danny Rowling was actually behind the murders. Rowling had been arrested several times before and had been on the run since May 1990 after allegedly shooting his father in the head. In September 1990, just weeks after the murders, Rolling was arrested again, this time for an armed robbery in Ocala, Florida, which is less than an hour away from Gainesville. As police began to dig deeper into Rolling’s history, they discovered that he was a suspect in several murders in 1989 and that the circumstances of those crimes were very similar to the Gainesville murders.
In January 1991, Rolling was sentenced to three life terms for the armed robbery. This gave the prosecution more time to put together a convincing case that he was responsible for the Gainesville murders. In 1994 he was found guilty and sentenced to death. Before his execution in 2006, Rolling reportedly said he was possessed by a demon called Gemini. Williamson claimed that after watching the show about the Gainesville Ripper, he was afraid to go to sleep because he was afraid someone with a knife was waiting for him outside. He channeled that feeling while writing Scream and used the terror Rolling inflicted on Gainesville as fodder for the film.
7. Vampire finches live on Wolf Island, located in the northwestern corner of the Galapagos Islands. Because there are very few water sources near Wolf Island, the birds had to turn to another source of hydration: blood. They use their sharp beak to attack other birds, their most common prey being the Nazca booby. Finches often pull out their wings and drink the blood from the resulting wound.
8. Olympus Mons, a volcano located on Mars, is believed to be the largest volcano in the entire solar system. It is 16 miles high and 374 miles wide, making it about the same size as the state of Arizona. For comparison, the tallest volcano on Earth is Hawaii’s Mauna Loa, which rises just 6.3 miles above sea level.
9. In 1851, Monemia McKoy, a slave in North Carolina, gave birth to twins whom she named Millie and Christine. The twins were conjoined, connected at the base of their spines. By the time they were 2 years old, the girls had been taken from Monemia and sold at various fairs and “freak shows,” taking them all over the United States and Canada. Doctors across the country tested them before they were sold to prove they weren’t fraudulently claiming to be fused. At some point during their early childhood, the girls were sold to someone in England and sent overseas to perform.
During this time, Joseph Pearson Smith was trying to locate the twins. Smith, who had their mother, was technically the “last legal owner” of the girls and had hired a private detective to bring them home. The detective found that the twins were playing shows in Birmingham, England. Smith brought them back to North Carolina when they were almost 6 years old. Once the twins returned to America, they expressed a desire to continue performing and developed a song and dance routine. Millie and Christine soon became known as…
