From jellyfish shutting nuclear plants to Korean soup with a bite, your weekly roundup of offbeat stories from around the world.

Royal panic and premature obituaries

A radio station volunteer fled his post in panic when he accidentally broadcast a tape declaring Britain’s King Charles dead.

Former pirate station Radio Caroline had its knuckles rapped by the UK watchdog Ofcom after suspending normal programmes in May “as a mark of respect following the passing of His Majesty King Charles III”.

The station said a volunteer doing maintenance played the pre-recorded tape “out of curiosity”, not realising it would cut into the broadcast and then “panicked and left the premises” when the full horror of what they had done dawned.

The station then went silent for 16 minutes and it took the presenter, who still thought he was on air, another quarter of an hour to get back on to apologise.

Criminal enterprises take flight

Crooks made more than 1 800 drug deliveries to a French jail by drone before being caught.

Police said it took two months to crack the “particularly well-organised” nighttime operation until they caught the smugglers red-handed outside Villefranche-sur-Saone prison north of Lyon.

A union official told AFP that prison officers could “hear the drone but couldn’t work out where it was” because its lights were off.

When nature fights back

Swarms of jellyfish shut down three French nuclear reactors, clogging the water pumps used to cool the Gravelines power station near Dunkirk.

Jellyfish, whose numbers have soared due to climate change, have previously taken out a Swedish nuclear plant in 2013 and forced a major drop in output at a Japanese station in 1999.

Hot soup for hot weather

With little in the way of air conditioning, North Korea is urging its people to sup scorchingly hot dog soup to take the edge off record temperatures.

A doctor quoted by state media lauded traditional dog broth with others recommending “hot foods in the hottest period of summer”.

Life may be grinding hard in the closed communist dictatorship, but dog meat, which will be outlawed in democratic South Korea next year, is still a summertime delicacy there.

More mishaps and misadventures

A Brazilian footballer fell down a tunnel after jumping a barrier to celebrate scoring a goal. Jacy Maranhao, the captain of the Coritiba club in Brazil’s top league, disappeared into the tunnel leading to the dressing rooms to the horror of his teammates, in a fall that went viral. To make matters worse, his goal, just before half time, was then disallowed by VAR. He managed to get up and stumble back onto the pitch but was substituted in the second half after the pain got too much.

Germany’s new transport minister tasked with sorting out its ailing rail system got a taste of what he is up against when he had to change carriages on the first train he took on a fact-finding mission after the air conditioning broke down in sweltering heat. Steffen Bilger is only in the job a month after his predecessor was sacked for not making enough progress.

Never wake a sleeping bear, particularly not with a foghorn. Someone who did just that as their boat passed a dozing polar bear in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago was fined $5 255.

A lifelike sex doll was “mistaken” for a murder victim after it was found in a suitcase in Australia. Two men driving through rural New South Wales came upon a dumped case seemingly stuffed with human remains. Murder squad detectives were scrambled but tests soon showed that despite its nose piercing and “markings resembling bruising”, the “victim” was a very realistic sex doll. Police are not holding their breath for the owner to reclaim it.

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