It must be true...

I read it in the tabloids

■ A California woman who bought a vacant lot in Hawaii for a tranquil retreat six years ago recently discovered that a $500,000 home had been built there by mistake. Annaleine Reynolds bought the 1-acre lot at auction for $22,500 and was holding it for future use. A developer of an adjacent property hired a builder to put up about a dozen homes, one of which mistakenly went on Reynolds’ lot. “Are you kidding me?” Reynolds said when she was told of the mistake. The developer is now suing the builder and Reynolds, and she’s countersuing. “It’s awful,” she said.

■ Bears at a British zoo began taking rides on a swan paddleboat in a pond in their enclosure. “We had the idea of turning this into interesting enrichment for them,” said Tommy Babbington, zookeeper at Woburn Safari Park. Keepers spread some honey and nuts inside the paddleboat to lure the zoo’s 11 bears, and the animals quickly learned to take rides. “It was great fun for visitors to see them climb on board,” Babbington said.

■ Harvard University has removed the covering of a book in its collection that was bound with human skin. The 19th-century French novel, Des Destinées de l’Ame (“Destinies of the Soul”) was donated to the university in 1934. Its first owner, a French doctor, had bound it in skin taken from a dead female patient at a psychiatric hospital. He left a note inside saying “a book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering.” The university said it removed the “ethically fraught” cover and was considering options for “a final respectful disposition of these human remains.”