A 19-year-old French woman visiting her mother in British Columbia, Canada, learned the hard way that going for a jog near the Canadian-US border is not a very good idea.

Cedella Roman, who lives in France, was visiting her mother in North Delta, British Columbia, last month, when she decided to go for an evening run on the coast of White Rock, in Western Canada. Cedella was admiring the breathtaking scenery, so even though she knew she was close to the border with the United States, she claims she didn’t realize that she accidentally crossed into the neighboring country. The young jogger only realized her mistake when she was stopped by a couple of U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, shortly after unknowingly  crossing the border.

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A restaurant in Shanghai, China, recently made headlines for employing two young crayfish peelers who do the dirty work right at the customers’ tables, while they check social media or play mobile video games.

Wouldn’t it be nice if someone could handle those nasty crayfish shells and then just hand you the succulent flesh?Well, at one particular restaurant in Shanghai’s Huangpu district, you can actually request a crayfish peeler that will be glad to take care of the dirty work while you watch or chat with your friends or play on your smartphone. Crayfish are really popular in China these days, so the two young peelers usually handle around 100 crustaceans every day, which earns them a nice monthly salary of over 10,000 yuan ($1,500).

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A 64-year-old employee of the waterworks bureau in the Japanese city of Kobe was recently fined and reprimanded by his superiors for going on his lunch break three minutes early, on more than one occasion.

The lunch break at the Kobe waterworks bureau starts at 12 pm sharp and lasts until 1 pm. However, an employee looking for “a change of pace” decided to leave his desk a few minutes early to go get himself a bento box from a nearby restaurant. Unfortunately for him, a senior colleague looking out the window from his office, saw the unnamed offender heading to the restaurant on one of his unsanctioned escapades, and reported him to management. An investigation revealed that the man had started his lunch break three minutes early a total of 26 times in the last 7 months, which they apparently decided was a huge deal.

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A 20-year-old man in Paraguay recently gave his family and friends the shock of their lives when he returned home after three days to find them all grieving over what was supposed to be his dead body.

Juan Ramón Alfonso Penayo, from the village of Santa Teresa, close to Paraguay’s border with Brazil, had last been seen leaving his house last Thursday. He had told no one where he was going, and after failing to get in touch with him, Juan’s family reported his disappearance. As fate would have it, soon after contacting the authorities, the man’s family received news that a charred body had been found in the vicinity of Santa Teresa, and they were asked to come to the morgue and identify it.

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A 24-year-old man from Southampton, England, was banned from contacting his parents for five years after they got so fed up with his constant pestering for money that they got a restraining order against him.

A restraining order was issued against Matthew Kerley last year by the Crown Prosecution Service, after his parents complained that his constant begging for money had caused them extreme anxiety and stress. He was also jailed for 32 weeks on charges of harassment, but continued to contact his mother and father after that, despite the restraining order preventing him from doing that for five years. For example, last month, he called his parents for money over 30 times in 24 hours, with some of the calls being made in the middle of the night.

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A 34-year-old man who lost his ability to burp when he was only a baby, due to a condition so rare it doesn’t even have a name, has recently been cured by Botox injections in his throat, and claims his life has improved more than anyone could ever imagine.

Most of us take burping for granted, or even consider it to be offensive, without considering the fact that without it, we would have to put up with agonizing pain. At least that’s what Neil Ribbens, a man who couldn’t burp for most of his life, claims. The young record label talent from East London, UK, was unable to release gas from his stomach, which caused him to experience excruciating pain, severe hiccups and bloating, especially after consuming large meals or drinking beer and other fizzy drinks.

Neil’s bizarre problem was caused by his larynx, which apparently became so tensed that it would prevent gases from escaping through his throat. Left unable to burp since he was a baby, the man saw various doctors throughout the years, hoping to find a cure to his condition. However, most physicians had never even heard of such a problem, and some didn’t even take him seriously. Neil remembers one doctor laughing at his inability to burp, while most of the others only recommended inefficient medication.

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The owners of a struggling hotpot restaurant in Chengdu, China, hoped that a month-long all-you-can-eat promotion would bring in new customers, but it actually put the place out of business in under two weeks.

On June 1st, Jiamener, a relatively new hotpot restaurant in Chengdu, China’s Sichuan province, kickstarted its cheap all-you-can-eat buffet in the hopes of gaining a new client base. Patrons were offered the chance to fill their bellies for just 120 yuan (US$19) per day, for a whole month. The two owners had anticipated that they would suffer a financial loss during this period, but they hoped that the promotion would pay off in the long run, with some visitors becoming loyal customers. They couldn’t have been more wrong.

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At just 12-years-old, Olivier Rioux already stands at 6-foot-11 (2.11 meters) which makes him one heck of an asset for his basketball team. Not only can he shoot the ball without any of his opponents even coming close to a block, but he can literally slam dunk on the 8-foot-tall basket without his feet leaving the ground.

As you can imagine, Olivier Rioux is pretty dominant on the basketball courts, thanks in part to his skill, but mostly to the fact that all of the other players’ heads only come up to his bellybutton. That’s a pretty good advantage to have, in any situation. He can shoot whenever he wants, he’s literally always open for passes and as long as he’s close enough to his opponents, he can block any of their passes or shots. To say this Canadian 12-year-old is head and shoulders above his competition would be a pretty fair assessment.

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Mike Parr, a 73-year-old Australian performance artist, recently spent three days in a container buried under one of the busiest roads in Tasmania, with no food, as a “response to 20th-century totalitarian violence in all its forms”.

The unusual performance was apparently conceived a decade ago for an arts festival in Germany, but could not be pulled off due to health and safety concerns. However, the Hobart City Council, in Tasmania, approved it last month, as part of the Dark Mofo festival, as long as the organizers agreed to cover the roadwork bill. That included literally cutting a section of road and digging a large hole under it in order to lower a large metal container in it, and covering it up so that traffic could go on as usual for the three days Mike Parr spent buried inside.

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It’s not every day that you see octopuses, starfish and prawns literally raining down from the sky, but that’s exactly what happened Wednesday in the Chinese coastal city of Qingdao, after strong winds sucked the marine creatures from the sea.

On Wednesday, the seaside city of Qingdao, in China’s Shandong province, was hit by a severe storm that brought down trees and large sign posts, flooded the streets and brought traffic to a stand-still. But there was a particular phenomenon that captured the attention of motorists in the city during Wednesday’s storm – various sea creatures started falling from the sky.

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The Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office, in Tennessee, has become famous for coming up with a unique approach to catching wanted people. They’ve created a weekly online game show called “Busted Bingo”, where wanted people are assigned numbered balls and randomly selected for an all-inclusive stay in a county jail cell. It’s probably the world’s first game show that no one wants to win.

The first episode of Busted Bingo aired on November 15, 2017, and generated quite a bit of media coverage, especially on a local level. Sheriff Wayne Anderson, the host of the unusual game said that the game was an innovative way of getting the public involved in the process of catching wanted offenders. The idea was that if someone recognized the selected “winner” of the game, they could call the police to turn them in and save officers the trouble of locating them. Believe it or not, it actually worked. The first ever winner of Busted Bingo was busted just a few hours after the episode aired on YouTube.

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Most women think that the worst thing that can happen while doing their makeup in a moving vehicle is to mess up and start over, but as this poor woman in Bangkok recently learned, there are worse things than makeup smudges.

Emergency service rescuers in Bangkok, Thailand, were summoned to the scene of a minor car crash in the Ratchathewi District, yesterday. A cab had crashed into the back of a slow moving truck, but while such accidents are quite frequent and rarely result in serious injuries, in this case, the passenger in the back of the taxi had sustained a piercing wound to her left eye. Rescuers reported that the woman was using an eyeliner when the crash happened, so the pencil jammed into her eye socket.

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Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have trained an artificial intelligence algorithm  to become a psychopath by exposing it to gruesome and violent images on popular social network Reddit.

Called Norman, after the iconic Anthony Perkins character in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic “Psycho”, the AI was trained to perform image captioning, a popular deep learning method of generating a textual description of an image. But there was a fun twist – for an extended period of time, Norman was only exposed to gruesome and violent images from an infamous subreddit dedicated to documenting and observing the disturbing reality of death. Researchers then used Rorsach inkblots to compare Norman to other AI which hadn’t been exposed to the same gruesome images.

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Authorities in the Chinese city of Xi’an recently inaugurated a special sidewalk lane designed for “phubbers” – people who walk while staring at their smartphones and ignore everything around them.

Painted red, green and blue and featuring pictures of smartphones, the special lane is located on the busy Yanta Roan, in Xi’an, and is 80cm wide and 100m long. Chinese media reports that a large shopping mall overlooking the smartphone-user lane had been asking authorities for it over a month, which suggests that it’s just a marketing scheme. However, it turns out that the special sidewalk lane is actually a safety precaution for “phubbers”. Cars often come onto the pavement in front of the mall, sometimes barely missing pedestrians who have their eyebvalls virtually glued to their smartphones, so the lane is supposed to keep them out of harm’s way.

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Anzhelika Protodyakonova, a young fashion blogger from Russia, shot to social media flame after photos of her huge eyebrows, which cover most of her forehead, went viral on the internet.

They say every cloud has a silver lining, and the story of how Anzhelika Protodyakonova became a popular online fashion blogger and a social media star in her native country is a perfect example of that. Seven years ago, while riding on a bus in Yakutsk, Russia’s Sakha Republic, Anzhelika drew the attention of another passenger who just couldn’t take her eyes off her unusually large eyebrows. The woman took a photo of her and posted it online, where it quickly went viral. Anzhelika soon became known as “Bushy Angie”, and while she admits being embarrassed by the photo at first, the young girl quickly embraced her new-found popularity and even managed to make a living off of it.

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