A suspected murderer who had evaded capture for 12 years by pretending to be a mute has allegedly lost his ability to speak, Chinese media recently reported.

The Chinese man, identified only by his surname ‘Zheng’, had been charged with murdering his wife’s uncle, a Mr. Cao, in a dispute over a 500 yuan ($76) rent, back in 2005. During one of their heated arguments, Zheng, then 33, allegedly stabbed Mr. Cai, then ran from his home in Hangzhou, China’s Zhejiang Province, before authorities could apprehend him. The runaway murder suspect adopted the fake name of Wang Gui and started pretending to be a mute beggar in order to make ends meet.

Zheng eventually settled in a small village in Anhui Province, 700 km north of Hangzhou, where he began working in construction, while staying true to his mute persona. He even got a new wife and fathered a child, but never spoke a word to them, for fear of saying something that could blow his cover.

Read More »

Cryptocurrency is all the rage right now, but while most people wish they that they had invested in Bitcoin and other altcoins in the early days, dozens of men are mining crypto and simply giving it away to a woman they’ve never met.

Theodora is a financial dominatrix, which basically means she receives money and other “tributes” from male clients who experience pleasure by being financially exploited. These tributes can range from a few dollars to tens of thousands. Some clients go so far as to give her complete control over their bank accounts, a.k.a becoming human ATMs. Theodora claims that she also runs crypto slave farms in which clients use their own cryptocurrency mining rigs to mine cryptocurrency 24/7 and then hand it over to her.

Read More »

If run of the mill disaster survival kits just don’t cut it and you can afford to splurge a few extra bucks on something more befitting your social status, try Preppi, a luxury doomsday kit supplier for the super rich.

Film director Ryan Kuhlman founded Preppi in partnership with costume designer Lauren Tafuri, and they run the business out of their downtown Los Angeles loft. The couple experienced a small earthquake in 2014 and realized that they should have supplies on hand for such emergencies. Today, their Prepster disaster kits are the most popular luxury survival accessories on the market.

Read More »

A group of fraternity members in Bethesda, Maryland recently gave the phrase “drink the air” a literal meaning, after staging a monster party so fueled by alcohol that the air in the venue tested positive on a police breathalyzer.

Last month, Montgomery County police officers raided a home in an upscale neighborhood of Bethesda after receiving several complaints from neighbors, and broke up what must have been one hell of a party. Court documents show that the officers found insulated windows, plastic bags full of beer cans and liqueur bottles, and the floors sticky with spilled booze. The ambient air inside the suburban house was tested with at least one breathalyzer and registered a positive result of 0.1.

Read More »

If you’ve ever wondered why washing your pillow case every once in a while is so important, this case may give you an idea. A Chinese woman who, for some reason, hand’t washed her pillow case in five years recently turned up at a hospital in Wuhan, where doctors discovered over 100 mites living on her eyelashes.

The woman, known only as Ms. Xu, told doctors that her eyes had been red and itchy for around two years, but that she just simply got used to their condition and relied on over-the-counter eye drops to alleviate the symptoms, instead of seeing an ophthalmologist. It was only when the problem got so bad that her eyelashes and eyelids started getting stuck together that she finally decided it was time to get some professional help.

Read More »

An entire Italian family suffer from a strange genetic mutation that makes them almost completely immune to pain. The condition is so rare that scientists have named it ‘The Marsili Syndrome’, after the family.

Letizia Marsili, 52, became aware of her immunity to pain in early childhood when she didn’t experience any particular sensation from burns or fractures. Five other members of her family, spanning at least three generations, also share this rare genetic anomaly that makes impervious to pain situations where an average person would require an anesthetic. The Marsilis have become the focus of researchers hoping to discover how their mutation works, in the hopes of developing new ways to treat pain.

Read More »

A resourceful pickpocket managed to steal 53 smartphones at a concert in Birmingham, England, by using a very unusual accessory – a women’s swimming suit. This allowed him to conceal all the stolen phones as he tried to get his hands on even more.

Romanian national Alin Marin, 22, attended a Royal Blood concert at Arena Birmingham on 18 November wearing the black and pink compression suit and a pair of skinny jeans. He made his way to the mosh pit where he was able to relieve dozens of revelers of their phones without them noticing. The pickpocket would stash each of them inside the swimsuit, and move on to the next target. He was kind of like a living, breathing deposit box. At one point, he had 53 phones stashed close to his body.

Read More »

Wealthy residents of an elite neighborhood in Bristol, England have installed ‘anti-bird spikes’ on trees  in an attempt to protect their expensive cars from bird droppings.

The spikes, which are commonly used to prevent birds from roosting and nesting on building ledges over public sidewalks, were nailed to two trees in the exclusive Clifton area of the city, near the wildlife-rich Downs and the Avon gorge. The use of these spikes in trees has outraged locals and environmentalists alike, with one Twitter user calling it a war on wildlife. The affected trees have been described by a local Green Party councilor as uninhabitable to birds. A spokesperson for Bristol city council, however, said that the trees were on private property, so there was nothing that the local authorities could do to stop them. The spikes had apparently already been in place for several years.

Read More »

Two male Irish friends, neither of which is gay, have decided to get married in order to avoid paying a hefty inheritance tax. It sounds like the plot of a Hollywood comedy, only in real life.

Michael O’Sullivan, from Stoneybatter, north Dublin, has been friends with Matt (surname not disclosed for privacy reasons) for almost 30 years. Both are in their 80s, and O’Sullivan is now Matt’s caretaker and stands to inherit his home and other possessions. Unfortunately, because of Ireland’s Capital Acquisitions Tax (Cat), which applies to gifts and inheritances over specified amounts, Matt would have to pay 33% to the government. However, the tax does not apply to gifts or inheritance given to a spouse or civil partner, so the two men decided that the best way would be to get married.

Read More »

With prices starting at 25,000 euros per bottle, AurumRed Gold is considered the world’s most expensive wine. It is made from Tempranillo vines that have to be at least 100 years old, using a mix of modern and traditional techniques, but what really sets it apart from other wines is the use of ozone therapy, an alternative medicine treatment generally used to treat cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis and more.

Hilario Garcia, who produces the AurumRed Gold wine on a small vineyard in La Mancha, Spain, became familiar with ozone therapy after using it to ease a condition of the spine that had left his lower body paralyzed. After experiencing success with the treatment, he decided to experiment with it in his lab, and attempt to apply it to winemaking by ozonating the water that irrigates the vines. Ozone therapy is merely the increase of oxygen in the body through the introduction of medical grade ozone, which is a highly reactive form of pure oxygen.

Read More »

Wilfa Soto Peguero, a struggling mother-of-four from the Dominican Republic, thought her life was finally going to become easier after hitting it off with a Welsh man she had met online. After six months of online conversations, 46-year-old Glyn Thomas Bailey told Wilfa he wanted to visit and help her raise her kids. She made the big mistake of accepting his offer, and she has spent the last month and a half trying to get rid of him.

Wilfa and Glyn met on online dating site Badoo, and despite having to use Google Translate to understand each other’s messages, they got along well, so when the Welsh man told her that he wanted to come meet her in person and help her raise her four children, Wilfa was thrilled. She told him to send her some money, so she could come meet her at the airport, but he never did. Glyn just told her when he would arrive, and she couldn’t just leave him hanging, so she borrowed some money and traveled to meet him.

The Dominican woman became even more suspicious of her online boyfriend after looking at his plane ticket and seeing that it was one-way. She would later realize that he also didn’t have any money whatsoever and that she would actually have to support him, not the other way around. Soto Peguero took the broke sugar daddy to her rented home where she tried to explain to him that raising four kids was hard enough and she couldn’t afford to look after him as well, but he just stared at her like he didn’t understand a word.

Read More »

Ever watch a whole season of your favorite TV show just to have a friend casually tell you how it ends just before the final episode? Or did you ever like a movie so much that you wish you could see it again without knowing anything about it, just to experience the same feelings? Well, thanks to a new and intriguing service, now you can!

UnSpoil Me is a service developed by Samsung Electronics Nordic in partnership with famous Swedish hypnotist and mental coach Fredrik Praesto, which allegedly allows users to hypnotize themselves into forgetting significant plot points and twists. Each self-guided session lasts 18 minutes and viewers are able to guide themselves through the process by following a series of on-screen prompts and listening to Praesto’s commands.

Read More »

Imagine inheriting more money that you and your family could ever hope to carry. That’s exactly what happened to a family in Bremervörde, Germany, who received an inheritance of over 1.2 million coins weighing around 2.5 tonnes. In this particular case, however, counting the money proved a lot more difficult than carrying it.

It all started 30 years ago, when a German truck driver started saving  1 pfennig (0.01 Deutsche Mark) and 2 pfennig (0.02 Deutsche Mark) coins for his family. He managed to collect around 1.2 million coins until his death, earlier this year, all of which were inherited by his family. Now, Deutsche Marks haven’t been in circulation since 2002, but the Bundesbank  – the central bank of Germany – still exchanges the old currency, so the man’s family were still able to collect their inheritance. All they had to do was weight until the coins were all counted by hand. It took a while.

Read More »

We’re constantly told that parents know best and always act in the interests of their children. Except when they don’t, like Kaylene Bowen-Wright from Dallas, Texas, who subjected her son to 323 hospital visits and 13 major operations by convincing doctors that he was terminally ill. Now aged 8, Christopher has basically spent his whole life in doctors’ offices, and has undergone over a dozen surgeries that left him with several life-threatening blood infections.

The cycle began days after Christopher was born and continued until 2015, when physicians at the Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston noticed that his mother’s accounts clashed with the test results and overall visible condition of the young patient. They alerted Child Protective Services (CPS) and Bowen was arrested on charges of causing injury to a child. The 34-year-old woman admitted she had lied to doctors that her son was gravely ill, which resulted in numerous medical interventions.

Read More »

We trust doctors with our lives and often remember some of them for as long as we draw breath. But how would any of us feel if branded with the initials of a physician who has saved our life, and branded on the inside at that? A renowned English surgeon literally left his mark on the livers of two patients he operated on in 2013 and is now awaiting his verdict on charges of assault by beating. Simon Bramhall, 53, has pleaded guilty to the charges in a case without precedent in the British criminal justice system.

Bramhall carved “SB” on livers he transplanted into one male and one female patient at the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham, where he worked for 12 years before handing in his resignation in 2014. He might have gotten away with the deed if a colleague hadn’t noticed the initials while performing a follow-up operation on the female patient. They were left by an argon beam, which surgeons use to stop bleeding during liver operations. The harmless marks left by the beam usually disappear after a while, but in this case the tell-tale signs were still in place at the time of the follow-up surgery, and Bramhall was exposed, becoming the subject of an internal disciplinary investigation.

Read More »