Car-rental operators in Japan recently observed a very strange  trend – a considerable number of their clients were renting cars but logging an unusually low mileage or not driving the cars at all.

Renting a car is a very efficient and convenient way of getting from point A to point B, and operators prefer the distance traveled to be as long as possible, as they make more money. So when a number of leading car rental and car sharing companies in Japan noticed that a significant number of their clients were renting cars, but not driving them at all, they started getting worried. They couldn’t figure out why it was happening, though, so they did some surveys and got some pretty interesting results. It turns out that people are increasingly using car rental services for a variety of reasons, except driving.

Read More »

A New York couple is suing suing the fertility clinic for mixing up the embryos used in in vitro fertilization, causing the woman to give birth to two babies that were of a different ethnicity and turned out to be related to two other couples using the clinic.

According to a federal lawsuit filed in US District Court, the unidentified plaintiffs turned to a company called CHA Fertility after having trouble conceiving naturally. They reportedly spent more than $100,000 on the in vitro fertilization services, including facility and doctors’ fees, specialist services, medication, lab expenses, travel costs, etc.. Early last year, the fertilization clinic collected sperm and eggs from the couple, who were Asian, and formed five euploid embryos, four of which were female. The first fertilization attempt did not result in a pregnancy, but in September of last year the couple were thrilled to learn that they were pregnant with twins. The only problems was that, according to a sonogram exam, both fetuses were male, even though only one of their five embryos had been deemed male, and it had not been used.

Read More »

A 20-year-old man in Lucknow, India, was almost buried alive this week after the private hospital he was admitted to wrongfully pronounced him dead.

Mohammad Furqan was involved in an accident on the 21st of June and was taken to a hospital for treatment. He was in critical condition and after his family exhausted their savings paying for his medical bills, doctors declared him dead. Furqan’s devastated relatives immediately started making preparations for his funeral, but after his body was brought home by an ambulance, his older brother was shocked to see that he still moved his limbs. He notified the other members of the family and after making sure that he wasn’t seeing things, they took him to another hospital where doctors confirmed he was still alive.

Read More »

What appeared as an amazingly generous gesture turned out to be an act of revenge, after a Florida woman left a $5,000 tip to a waitress using her boyfriend’s credit card to get back at him after an argument.

24-year-old Serina Wolfe was arrested on Monday on a felony theft charge for allegedly using her boyfriend’s credit card to leave an unusually generous $5,000 tip, or 10,000% of her total bill, at the Clear Sky Cafe in Clearwater Beach, on June 27. The waitress initially thought that Wolfe was simply incredibly generous, but later learned that the 24-year-old had gotten into an argument with her boyfriend and used his credit card just to take revenge on him.

Read More »

Unless you’ve been living under a rock your whole life, you’ve probably seen one of those souvenir statues of Maitreya, aka the Laughing Buddha. They’ve pretty popular even in non-Buddhist countries, and many people use them as good luck charms. But you know what’s better than a Laughing Buddha statue? A living, breathing Smiling Buddha.

Photos and videos of an overweight, bald man posing as the Laughing Buddha on a stage somewhere in China have been circulating on social media ever since last fall. Back then, Chinese newspapers reported that the man would get showered with money every time he performed, as people hoped their offering would earn them divine favor. He just sat there in the Buddha’s iconic position with his flabby belly exposed and a big smile on his face, but the audience loved it.

Read More »

A Bolivian petty thief recently made international news headlines after it was reported that he managed to escape from jail by squeezing through the bars of his jail cell.

Jorge Mantilla, aka “Coco”, was originally arrested by police in La Paz last week, after a CCTV video showing him breaking into a residence in the Bolivian capital was posted on social media. Coco was known as “the thief of Villa Fatima” after the area he usually operated in, and was carrying a variety of tools to help him break into houses when the police apprehended him. He was charged with burglary and taken to a local jail to await sentencing. However, he didn’t spend much time there as last Saturday he managed to escape his jail cell by squeezing through the metal bars when the guards weren’t looking.

Read More »

34-year-old David Dowell, a father of three from Brisbane, Australia, tragically lost his life after becoming infected with salmonella, which friends claim was the result of him eating a small gecko lizard as a party dare.

Dowell, who would have turned 35 last week, was brought in to Brisbane’s Mater Hospital in “absolute agony” on December 3, 2018, three days after some friends reportedly saw him eating a gecko at a party. He never mentioned it to his partner, Allira, and to this day no one really knows for sure if he actually ate it, but a few days after that Saturday party, he was in the hospital fighting for his life. At first, doctors thought he was suffering from gastroenteritis, but in reality he had become infected with salmonella, a foodborne bacteria, that causes diarrhea, stomach cramps, fever, and, in rare cases, even death.

Read More »

Kong Zhenlan, a 71-year-old woman from China’s Shanxi Province, has dedicated the last four decades of her life to adopting and raising orphaned children, making sure that they had food on the table and got access to education.

Even though she could barely afford to support herself on a modest income, Kong Zhenlan couldn’t bear to walk by the orphanage in Jixian County every day and see so many children struggling in abhorrent poverty. One day, she stopped by and picked one of the orphans in her arms; that’s when she knew she had to to something to make their life better. The modest woman started adopting these abandoned children and raising them as her own. Over the last 47 years, she has adopted 45 orphans, some of whom grew up to become doctors and lawyers.

Read More »

Imagine hearing someone chewing a piece of bubble gum loudly and being overwhelmed by a feeling of anger, disgust or panic. Sounds like loud chewing or slurping can be hard to put up with for most of us, but for people suffering from a rare condition called misophonia, it’s virtually impossible.

Misophonia, also known as Selective Sound Sensitivity, is usually described as a strong emotional or physiological response to the presence or anticipation of certain sounds that are usually human-generated, like the sound of someone biting into crunchy foods, clicking noises, knuckle cracking, even breathing. While anger is the most common reaction recorded in misphonia sufferers, anxiety and disgust are also possible responses. But these intense emotions are also accompanied by a release of adrenaline which causes symptoms like raised pulse, shakiness, sweating and a raised heart rate. This makes dealing with experiences most of us consider mundane almost impossible for people with misophonia.

Read More »

25-year-old Varanya Nganthavee will likely remember her first day as a doctor at at Rajavithi Hospital in Bangkok for a very long time. After all, it’s not every day that you find a live gecko in a patient’s ear.

The young doctor recently posted her unusual experience on Facebook. She had nearly finished her first day on the job when a patient walked in complaining of an ear ache that had been pestering him for two days. Using an otoscope to inspect the ear canal, as is routine, Varanya was shocked to see something moving inside. She dripped some antibiotic drops into the man’s ear and asked him to tilt his head to ton side hoping that whatever bug had crawled inside the year would get out by itself. That didn’t happen, so a nurse had to use tweezers to yank it out. Only it wasn’t an insect, but a small gecko lizard commonly known as Jing Jok in Thailand.

Read More »

Zack Pinsent, a 25-year-old tailor from Brighton, in the UK, burned his last pair of jeans over a decade ago, and has been wearing elegant Regency-period costumes ever since.

Zack claims he never enjoyed wearing the modern clothes that most of us put on every day. Instead, he was always fascinated by the elegant fashion of Britain’s Regency Era and other historical styles going back to the 1600s. He taught himself how to make the clothes he dreamed of wearing and once he became good enough at it, he decided to cut modern clothes from his life forever. The talented tailor remembers ceremoniously burning his last pair of jeans at age 14 as a turning point that changed his life. Dressing as a Regency Era gentleman every day gave him a huge confidence boost, and he wouldn’t dream of going back to regular clothing.

Read More »

A 19-year-old convicted killer in Turkey managed to escape from prison by allegedly switching places with his twin brother when he came to visit him.

Murat A. was serving a long prison sentence for murder at the E Tipi Kapası Prison in Mersin, southern Turkey when his twin brother, Huseyin, came to visit him last Thursday. They were apparently allowed to meet face to face and they used this opportunity to swap places. A photo of the two shows that they are not exactly identical, but it turns out they looked enough alike to trick prison guards into allowing Murat to just walk out of the detention facility. It’s not yet clear why the inmate’s brother agreed to take his place in a maximum security prison, but an investigation is ongoing.

Read More »

Spanish police reported that a woman who hired her son-in-law to kill her partner recently turned up to file a complaint against him after he failed to live up to his end of the bargain.

Earlier this month, an unnamed woman and her daughter went to a police station in central Madrid to file two separate complaints. One was against the woman’s romantic partner, who had allegedly scammed her out of more than €60,000 ($60,000) over several years, and the second was against her own son-in-law who had agreed to kill her partner and then sell his organs on the black market to recover the substantial amount of money he had swindled. Unfortunately, things didn’t go very well after the latter revelations, as both women and the would-be hitman were immediately arrested.

Read More »

Valerie Sanders, a 58-year-old woman from the UK, spent 17 hours in jail after being charged with “controlling behavior” after allegedly nagging her husband to clean the house instead of his car.

Valerie’s troubles with the law began in April of 2018, when during a routine check at her husband Michael’s workplace Jobcentre UK staff noticed he was in a bad mood. After asking him about it, they learned it was because his wife was constantly asking him to clean and polish the family home and complaining that he spent too much time at the gym and cleaning his car. Apparently, this qualified as “coercive or controlling behavior”, an offense punishable by law, so police turned up at the Sanders residence in Catterick, arrested Valerie and threw her in jail for 17 hours. She was charged with controlling behavior and was forced to fight a legal battle for over a year.

Read More »

If you’ve visited a news site over the last couple of days, you’ve probably read this incredible story of a Russian “mummified” man who was found more dead than alive after being attacked by a brown bear and somehow survived for a month. Well, it case you haven’t already guessed, it’s fake.

The story of Alexander, a Russian man who had allegedly spent a month in a bear cave somewhere in Russia’s emote Republic of Tuva before being discovered by hunters, went viral yesterday, after major UK publications like Mail Online, Metro and The Sun picked it up and pretty much reported it as fact. In their defense, the news did originally appear on Siberian Times, a Russian news website that covers national events in English. They all claimed that the emaciated man who appeared in a very short clip was the unlikely survivor of a gruesome bear attack that had left him paralyzed. He allegedly told reporters that the beast had then dragged him to its den and kept him around as “tin-can” food to be eaten later. Luckily, he was found by hunters who ventured into the bear’s cave after being alerted by their dogs’ barking. The story ends with Alexander recovering on a hospital bed. Now let’s talk about how the story began.

Read More »