From a smuggled corpse to bumping into an old friend deep underground ... this week’s round-up of offbeat stories from around the world.

We’ve met before

Sometimes the universe has a way of telling you something...

An Italian caver was rescued after being stuck underground for four days – the second time in 18 months she has had to be carried out of the same cave.

Rescue teams used mini explosives and stretchered Ottavia Piana, 32, out of the narrow cave system in northern Italy after she fractured several bones in a fall.

“We know each other,” Piana told doctor Leonardo Sattin as he treated her far below ground during the epic operation. He had also helped drag her out of the same cave when she broke a leg there a year and a half before.

Italian caver Ottavia Piana was injured and trapped inside the Bueno Fonteno cave near Bergamo for few days. Photo / AFP / Corpo Nazionale Soccorso Alpino E Speleologico (CNSAS)

A bit stiff

An Austrian man has been charged with trying to smuggle a corpse after Croatian police stopped him with a dead woman sitting next to him in his car.

Officers became suspicious of why his passenger “was not communicating” when he handed them their IDs.

The man later admitted the 83-year-old woman, of whom he was legal guardian, had died in Bosnia, but that he didn’t want to go through the tiresome formalities of repatriating her corpse.

Doing a Donald?

Some people will do anything to curry favour with incoming US President Donald Trump. But surely not Emmanuel Macron.

The French President has this week been accused of making boorish behind-the-scenes comments about women, black people and his own openly gay former premier – remarks the Elysee vehemently insists he never made.

Then on Thursday he comforted the people of Mayotte – most of whose homes have been levelled by Cyclone Chido – by saying: “If this was not [part of]) France you would be 10,000 times deeper in the s***.”

Trump reportedly offered to exchange Puerto Rico for Greenland after a 2017 hurricane there, throwing toilet rolls to stricken families and calling the island “dirty and poor”.

A nose for trouble

Peru’s President Dina Boluarte has finally come clean about where she was when she disappeared for nearly two weeks in June and July.

She was having a nose job. But not a cosmetic one, she insisted.

Some lawmakers have called for her to be removed from office for not delegating her powers nor informing the public about her absence.

But Boluarte, 62, hit back, saying the “indispensable” surgery was to help her breathe, and that she had been assured it would not impede her ability to carry out her duties.

- Agence France-Presse