It’s almost impossible to tell, but the man featured in the photos below doesn’t exist. He is a deepfake, a persona created by a computer algorythim. However, the articles this “journalist” published in several popular newspapers are very real, and a sign of things we can expect from a fast-evolving AI.

Oliver Taylor first got the attention of international news agency Reuters after being alerted about him by London Mazen Masri about an article Taylor had written about him and his wife, Palestinian rights campaigner Ryvka Barnard, in which they were described as “known terrorist sympathizers”. The couple were taken aback by the allegation, especially since it came from a a university student. But the more Masri looked at Taylor’s profile photo, the more convinced he was that something was off about him…

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India is one of the most affected countries by the Covid-19 pandemic, and people are turning to spiritual and divine powers in an attempt to protect themselves from the new coronavirus.

Last month, Indian media reported on a group of women from a village in West Bengal who had decided to fight the coronavirus in their own way – by worshiping Corona Mai, or ‘Corona Goddess’. They set up a small shrine on the banks of Chinnamasta pond, near Asansol city, and started singing songs and mantras, burning incense and bringing offerings like fruits, vegetables, ghee, and jaggery. The women said that they planned to worship and pray to the goddess until she takes away the coronavirus. That may take a while…

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Nguyen Thi Dinh, an 83-year-old woman from Vietnam’s Ben Tre Province, allegedly stopped cutting her hair when she was 19, which explains why it measures 6 meters in length and is shaped like a python.

Just a week after Indian man Doddapalliah made international news headlines with his 7.3-meter-long-hair, which he claimed he had never even trimmed, we feature the story of a Vietnamese pensioner who insists that she hasn’t cut or even shampooed her locks in the last 64 years. It all started when Nguyen Thi Dinh, from Binh Thanh Commune, in Giong Trom District, was 19 years old and cut her hair for the first time. She claims to have experienced such severe headaches that her parents took her to see a doctor, but even after taking the prescribed treatment, the symptoms persisted. The headaches only went away when her hair started growing longer again, so she has refrained from cutting her locks ever since.

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Drug dealers are always looking for ingenious ways to get their products past checkpoints, and sometimes they exhibit some truly outside-the-box thinking.

The attention of Italian customs officers at Malpensa Airport was recently drawn by a small package from Colombia to a man named Santino D’Antonio. If you’re not an action flick buff, that name most likely means nothing to you, but if you’re a fan of John Wick movies starring Keanu Reeves, you probably recognize it as the name of the mafia boss and main antagonist in John Wick 2. Luckily, the officers recognized the name, and decided to inspect the package more thoroughly…

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After seeing his business affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, a Michigan jeweler decided to close shop and make money by using about $1 million in precious metals as treasure for would-be treasure hunters willing to pay for clues.

Johnny Perri has been a jeweler his whole life, after learning the business from his father, but the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus proved too hard for his shop in Macomb County, Michigan. He had to options: either sell everything and retire, or find a new way to make money using the jewelry. Perri and his wife chose option two, allegedly burying or otherwise hiding around $1 million-worth of jewelry in dozens of spots, from the Detroit metropolitan area through the Upper Peninsula. Now the jeweler is challenging people to go hunting for his treasures and claim them for themselves, if they can find it.

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Spanish glassblower Miguel Arribas spent around 500 hours making the world’s largest glass-blown sculpture, a whimsical castle fashioned after Cinderella’s castle, but it took a couple of children just a fraction of a second to ruin it.

Last weekend, the Shanghai Museum of Glass announced that Arribas’ Fantasy Castle exhibit had been broken into pieces after two children accidentally knocked it down while playing inside the museum. Presented as a gift to the museum in 2016 to mark its fifth anniversary, Miguel Arribas’ record-setting masterpiece was created using around 500,000 glass loops, weighed 60 kilograms and featured spires made with 24-karat gold. It was made up of approximately 30,000 individual parts and weighed over 60 kilograms. Its worth was estimated at around 450,000 yuan ($65,000).

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A bizarre love triangle between a 75-year-old woman, her 52-year-old ex-son-in-law and her 56-year-old daughter has sparked controversy in Russia after their story went viral this month.

Galina Zhukovskaya, 75, from St. Petersburg, Russia, married Vyacheslav Zhukovsky, a man 23 years her junior back in 2010, but it wasn’t the age difference between them that made their union controversial in the eyes of the world. The problem was that Vyacheslav had been Galina’s son-in-law after being married to her daughter, Elena, for three years. The couple broke up shortly after his realese from prison, allegedly due to Elena’s infidelity. Vyacheslav, found refuge with his mother-in-law, and the two tied the knot in 2010. They’ve been together ever since, but Galina claims that her daughter has always been envious of their relationship and has been trying to break them up.

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Photos of what many religious people are describing as a detailed representation of Jesus Christ discovered inside the branch of a recently-pruned willow tree have gone viral in Brazil.

Last Thursday, while pruning a willow tree in Itaquiraí, Brazil’s Mato Grosso do Sul, municipal maintenance workers noticed a strange pattern on the inside of a branch they had just cut with a chainsaw. After examining the pattern, some of them were convinced that it was a natural representation of Jesus Christ. Odimar Souza, a civil servant who was overseeing the pruning operation on Monte Castelo Avenue, in the Monte Castelo neighborhood, was intrigued by the discovery and took a piece of the branch home with him.

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A 15-year-old Chinese boy was rushed to a hospital back in March after passing out in his home in the city of Nannning. He reportedly suffered a stroke that left his left arm paralyzed, after spending the past month gaming and sleeping just two hours a night.

Like many other Year 9 students, the boy, identified only as Xiaobin in the media, had been confined to his home since February due to the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown in China. His parents told doctors that he had been spending most of his time in his room, under the pretext of taking online classes, but they later found out that he was in fact spending his days and most of his nights playing video games. According to medical experts at Jiangbin Hospital, that was the main cause of the boy’s unusual stroke, which left him with a paralyzed arm and hand.

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An Indian man is so obsessed with photography that he named his three sons after iconic camera brands – Canon, Nikon and Epson – and spent a small fortune on a three-story villa shaped like a giant camera.

You hear the phrase “passionate about photography” a lot among photography enthusiasts, but Ravi Hongal, a 49-year-old professional photographer from Belgaum, India, actually came up with some truly unique ways of showing off his passion for the art. After naming his three sons after some of the most iconic camera brands in the history of photography, Ravi recently spent around $95,000 on an impressive house shaped like a giant vintage camera, complete with a lens-shaped window, flash, and even a giant SD card.

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A 95-year-old man from India’s Karnataka state claims that he has never once cut his hair, which now measures an impressive 24-feet-long and has to be bundled into a huge, entangled mass on top of his head.

During this year’s lockdown, a lot of people were freaking out for not being able to visit the hairdresser for a few weeks, but one Indian man claims he has gone almost a century without getting his haircut even once. Doddapalliah, who is reportedly 95-years-old, is revered by many as a human deity in his home town of Molakalmuru, Chitradurga district, needs to have his hair wrapped into a giant ball on top of his head and secured with cloth just so he can move around. That’s because his entangled locks measure a whopping 24 feet (7.3 meters) in length.

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A Japanese former busker turned Zen Buddhist monk has been getting a lot of attention because of his unique music which combines beatboxing, sampling and a wide range of chants.

Before being ordained as a monk in 2015, 37-year-old Yogetsu Akasaka traveled the world as a full-time busker, making a living on his beatboxing skills. A friend had introduced him to the oral art of sound and instrument imitation in his early 20’s, and he was so impressed that he decided to give it a go himself. It turned out that he was pretty good at it, so good in fact that he was able to make a living as a busker in several countries, including the United States and Australia. After following his father’s example and becoming a monk, he realized he missed his music, so he came up with a way to blend his calling and his beatboxing talent in a unique way.

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The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, in the UK, are home to thousands of fascinating plants, but none as lonely as the Encephalartos woodii, an ancient cycad species and, most likely, the last one of its kind.

It was in 1895 that botanist John Medley Wood noticed this interesting-looking palm tree on a steep slope in Zululand, southern Africa. Intrigued by its multiple trunks and arched palm fronds, Dr. Wood — who made his living collecting rare plants – had some stems removed and sent to London in a box.It ended up in the Palm House at the Royal Botanical Gardens of Kew, where it has been waiting for a mate for over a century. Despite numerous efforts to find it a mate, the Encephalartos woodii at Kew remains alone, unable to produce an offspring and propagate its species. For this reason, many consider it the world’s loneliest plant.

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A 50-year-old man from China has been exercising by moving around on all fours and climbing trees like a monkey every day for the past three decades.

Chen Haigang, a fitness enthusiast from China’s Shanxi province, attracts attention whenever he exercises in public, due to the bizarre routine he has been practicing for about 30 years. Instead of the popular tai-chi practiced by many of his countrymen, jogging or simple stretching, Chen acts like a monkey, walking on all fours, crouching his back and dangling his arms, and even imitating the primates’ tree-climbing techniques. He has been doing it for three decades now, ever since he was inspired by a monkey at the zoo, and claims that it’s been keeping him in perfect health ever since.

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While the rest of the world struggles to find a cure or even a treatment for Covid-19, Indonesia’s Agriculture Ministry  claims to have found a solution – wearing a eucalyptus necklace developed by one of its agencies.

The so-called “antivirus necklace” was developed by Balitbangtan, the Agriculture Ministry’s Health Research and Development Agency, and will go into mass-production next month. According to minister Syahrul Yasin Limpo, the necklace was made using a species of eucalyptus that can kill the novel coronavirus. Simply wearing the accessory for 15 minutes allegedly kills 42 percent of coronavirus, while upping the time to 30 minutes doubles its effectiveness. The eucalyptus necklace is just one of a whole line of all-natural products designed to prevent or treat Covid-19.

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