A regional minister in the Spanish province of Castilla y León has come under fire for proposing that brick and mortar clothing stores charge a fee for customers to try on clothes in order to discourage the ‘unethical practice’ of trying on clothes only to buy them cheaper online.

María del Pilar del Olmo, Castilla y León’s economy and treasury minister, made her controversial idea known at a recent Retail Industry Conference, after reportedly discussing it with the province’s tourism, trade and industry minister. She argued that nowadays too many shoppers tend to first visit brick-and-mortar boutiques just to try on clothes, and, having figured out which items and sizes fit them best, leave empty-handed only to buy the same clothes online, at lower prices. The regional minister proposed a fee for trying out clothes in order to discourage this ‘unethical practice’.

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Richie the Barber has wanted to be a clown for as long as he can remember, but instead of simply putting on makeup from time to time, he decided to tattoo his face, cut his hair and get silicone implants to become a permanent clown.

Richie the Barber has all the makings of a clown – a big red mouth, red nose, large red eyebrows, dyed hair that only grows on the sides of his head, a blue face, fancy mustache and the colorful attire of a performer. But while the clothes come off, and the hair could be left to grow normally, everything else is permanent. The mouth and nose are tattooed, as is the blue makeup and all the artwork decorating his face, and those impressive eyebrows are actually enhanced by sub-dermal silicone implants. He’s a permanent real-life clown.

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A man managed to get himself jailed for 16 weeks and miss the birth of his child, after lying to his pregnant girlfriend that he had been kidnapped, just so he could get drunk with his buddies.

This kidnapping prank gone wrong took place in January, when Leigh Ford, a 45-year-old man from Blackpool, England, made several frantic phone calls to his pregnant partner Zoe Doyle, telling her that he had been kidnapped and that he was going to be tortured unless she transferred all the money she had into the kidnappers’ bank account. At first, the woman thought he was kidding, but he sounded really scared, and there were other men shouting in the background, threatening to cut off Leigh’s legs, and pour hot water on him. So she complied, but she also called the police.

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A 50-year-old Chinese man was recently arrested by Shanghai police for allegedly stealing over 70 dresses from various local sellers during the last year. Asked why, he did it, the divorced man said that he wanted to feel like he was getting married again.

Shanghai police had received a report from a wedding dress wholesaler in the city’s Pudong New Area on August 21. The woman, surnamed Wang, claimed that dozens of her dresses had disappeared from her home since the beginning of this year. She added that losing one or two every month wasn’t unusual, but she decided to alert the authorities after eight gowns from her latest batch went missing.

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Hosts are considered the modern version of geishas in Japan. They are charming women who engage in a carefully choreographed performance designed to make clients feel like the most important person on Earth. But in certain clubs around Tokyo’s Kabuchiko district, the tables have turned; here it’s male hosts who cater to the needs of female clients, and there’s no one better at it than Roland, the so-called emperor of Japan’s male host industry.

Like their female counterparts, male hosts work in specialized host clubs in Tokyo’s red lights district and have a very specific goal – to entertain their clients and encourage them to spend as much as possible on drinks. That’s how they earn a living and it’s also how they are ranked. Some clubs actually have posters of their male hosts displayed outside based on how much they managed to convince clients to pay the previous month. This usually involves a lot of drinking on their part as well, but Roland, the 25-year-old head manager of the Platina club and the hottest male host in the business, is a rare exception. He gets clients to spend huge amount of money without having to get drunk himself.

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An extraordinary and terrifying medical case revealed in the July issue of the American Journal of Transplantation proves that organ transplants can pass not only certain infectious diseases to recipients, but in rare cases, also cancer.

Patients known to have malignant tumors are often not able to donate their organs, but that was not the case of a 53-year-old woman who died of a stoke in 2007. She had no known conditions that could prevent doctors from transplanting her organs, and repeated tests revealed no sign of cancer. The woman’s kidneys, lungs, liver and heart were transplanted into donor recipients, but instead of saving their lives, they infected four of the five recipients with cancer, while the fifth died of unrelated causes shortly after the transplant.

The four organ recipients had recovered well after the transplants, but 16 months later, the woman who had received the donor’s lung fell ill and was subsequently diagnosed with cancer in the lymph nodes in her chest. Unfortunately, we live in an age when someone is diagnosed with cancer every couple of minutes, but what made this case remarkable was that tests showed the cancerous cells were actually breast cancer cells. Further DNA analysis revealed that they had come from the organ donor.

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A young couple has been making news headlines in Russia for claiming that live chicks hatched out of a carton of store-bought eggs they forgot on a window sill before going on vacation three weeks ago.

Irina and Ivan, two entertainers from Moscow, Russia, recently posted photos of cute yellow chicks on their social media accounts, which they allege hatched out of eggs that they forgot to put back in the fridge before going on vacation, three weeks ago. When they returned, they started hearing faint squeaks from the kitchen, which they initially attributed to faulty gadgets, but later traced back to a carton of eggs that had been sitting on a window sill for weeks. Shortly after, they claim chicks started chipping away at the egg shell from the inside.

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Jaroslav Bobrowski, a young Ironman triathlete from Germany, was recently banned by an-all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant for eating around 100 plates of food, something the owner considered “not normal” and very bad for business.

30-year-old Bobrowski works as a software engineer, but also trains for Ironman triathlons and is on a special diet where he doesn’t eat anything for 20 hours a day and then eats until he is full. Last weekend, he and his girlfriend stopped at the Running Sushi all-you-can-eat restaurant in Landshut, Bavaria, where he paid the fixed price of €15.90 and spent about an hour and a half stuffing himself with around 100 plates of sushi. At one point, waiters just stopped clearing his table of plates and when he finally finished, the former bodybuilder was told that he wasn’t welcome anymore.

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South Korean parents are increasingly turning to “uncle service” providers to make sure their children don’t have to put up with bullying in schools. Such services are apparently a pricey but efficient alternative to having schools handle the matter.

Earlier this month, Korean media reported on the growing business of leasing intimidating uncles to either protect children from bullies, gather evidence of bullying for filing an official complaint with the school, or even contacting the bully’s parents at their workplace. Most companies offer different packages to meet clients’ needs, and business is reportedly booming. But while many South Koreans view this type of service in a positive light, there are those who see it as simply answering bullying with another type of bullying.

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Australia’s strawberry industry has been brought to its knees after reports of sharp needles found in store-bought strawberries have been coming in from all the six of the country’s states. So far, no one knows who is behind this act of “agroterrorism” or what their motives are.

What started as an isolated case in Queensland, earlier this month, has gradually turned into a nation-wide panic, as more needles were found all around the country. Things have reportedly gotten so bad that some growers have recalled much of their strawberries and turned to metal detectors to restore customer confidence. The only problem is that no one knows at one point from the growers to store shelves the needles are being inserted, and until more information about this aspect becomes available, there’s no clear way to solve the problem.

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A Russian pensioner recently made national news headlines after stripping two tall pine trees on his neighbors’ property of all their branches and using them as supports for a wooden tree house. He never asked for permission to do this, instead taking advantage of the fact that they were away on vacation.

Irina Chukanova and her family have been living on a small plot of land near the city of Nizhny Tagil for 10 years, and they’ve never had any problems with their neighbor, Yuri Stepanov. That all changed this spring, when the pensioner started complaining about the two pine trees growing on the Chukanovs’ property, claiming that all the needles and cones ended up on his land, and he was sick of having to clean up the mess. He repeatedly asked his neighbors to cut down the trees, but they were reluctant to do so, and instead promised to come up with a solution in the fall. Only Stepanov apparently got sick of waiting, and decided to take matters into his own hands.

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For the past seven years, a family from Taiwan’s Chiayi county had only been able to access their kitchen with rubber boots on or risk getting electrocuted. Even turning on the faucet with their bare hands was a risky affair as current could be running through it.

The man of the house, known only as Mr. He, was recently featured in a short news segment on the bizarre phenomenon affecting his household. Seeing him getting ready to enter his kitchen, one would assume that he’s dealing with a flooded room, but in fact the rubber boots he always puts on are supposed to protect him from the electricity running through the kitchen. Every time he touches the metal walls of the kitchen, or even the water faucet with his bare hand, He claims to get an electrical shock. To avoid that, he always operates the faucet with a soup spoon equipped with a wooden handle.

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English artist Anna Brownsted left 100,000 pennies in an abandoned public fountain in Cambridge, over the weekend, in a bid to explore human nature. The money was all stolen in just one day.

The coins worth £1,000 were placed in the fountain at Quayside, in Cambridge, at 8 am on Saturday, and were supposed to be left there for 48 hours. However, by 9 am on Sunday, over 99% of the coins had been removed from the fountain, despite clear signs informing passers-by that the fountain was under constant CCTV surveillance. Only £1.66 worth of pennies were left, but organizers didn’t consider it theft, but a “provocative outcome”.

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Pycnandra acuminata is a rare tree native to the shrinking rainforests of New Caledonia that has the rare ability to collect large quantities of nickel from the ground. Its blue-green sap reportedly contains up to 25% nickel.

Trees, or plants in general for that matter, and heavy metals like nickel and zinc don’t really go well together, and that’s what makes Pycnandra acuminata and a few other rare tress species known as “hyperaccumulators” so special. They have somehow evolved to suck out normally toxic levels of heavy metals from the soil and store it in their stems, leaves and seeds. Unfortunately, heavy deforestation in New Caledonia has put this remarkable tree on the list of endangered trees before scientists could even figure out how and why it can tolerate such high quantities of nickel in its latex-like sap.

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Ever wish you could play a game of catch at night, without needing a powerful light source? Well, with the new SparkCatch LED-illuminated baseball, now you can.

SparkCatch, aka Meteor Baseball, is the brainchild of two Chinese baseball enthusiasts who spent over four years trying to come up with a solution that would allow like-minded baseball fans play the beautiful game anytime, even in the dead of night, without proper lighting. After years of researching materials and concepts, about 100 tests and three generations of prototypes, the two young entrepreneurs managed to come up with an illuminated baseball that can actually withstand being hit with a baseball bat.

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