A loving mother in China’s Henan province spent more than a million yuan ($154,000) building two metal footbridges in front of her son’s school, to make sure he and the other kids cross the road safely.

The woman, identified only by her surname, Meng, recently told Henan Television Station that the road outside her son’s school was always congested when parents dropped off or picked up their kids, and with no traffic lights installed in the proximity, crossing the road was a dangerous affair for both students and teachers. Another reason why she spent money out of her own pocket to build the footbridges over the road was that the school was located on lower ground and the puddles that constantly formed on the road caused her son to always come home with his feet soaking wet.

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With counterfeit luxury goods getting harder and harder to spot, China’s rich are paying thousands of dollars for  specialized courses on how to tell apart authentic luxury products from fakes.

China’s domestic luxury market is currently valued at approximately 4 trillion yuan ($617.7 billion) and that’s not even taking into account the second-hand luxury goods trade, but this boom has also given rise to sophisticated counterfeiting. Stories of bargain hunters being conned into parting with their money in exchange for hard-to-spot fake luxury products are very common on Chinese social media, so much so that there are now companies offering specialized courses on how to tell authentic luxury goods like Louis Vuitton or Chanel bags from counterfeit ones.

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New dating app ‘Thursday’ is trying to make online dating fun and exciting again by only letting users access it on just one day of the week (yeah, you guessed it).

It’s hard to believe that a dating app that isn’t even active six days a week can have any success, let alone challenge big players like Tinder or Bumble, but George Rawlings and Matt McNeill Love, the two entrepreneurs behind Thursday, are very confident in their product. And judging by the interest Thursday has spurred – over 110,000 pre-registered singles around London and New York alone – they may be proven correct when the app finally launches this Thursday, May 6th.

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A group of seven Zapatistas, indigenous Mexcian revolutionaries, is getting ready to set sale across the Atlantic ocean in an attempt to peacefully invade Spain and mark the 500-year anniversary of the Spanish conquest.

On May 3rd, the Zapatista’s conquering force – three men, three women and a transgender woman – will leave Mexican soil aboard a wooden boat named “La Montana”, or “The Mountain”, hoping to reach Spain by August 13, the day that the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan fell to the Spanish conquistadors in 1521. Only instead of drowning the land in blood, like the conquistadors, the Zapatistas are planning a peaceful takeover that even includes a party upon their arrival.

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Monstera adansonii is a common house plant that can be purchased for as little as $12 at any home & garden store, but a rare specimen recently sold for a whopping 1,799 euros ($2,200).

A garden center in Lovendegem, Belgium recently sold a rare monstera adansonii specimen for a small fortune, in just 30 minutes. The plant in question was only 15 centimeters tall, but featured an extremely rare mutation that caused its perforated leaves to grow yellow or white, instead of the usual green. This type of plant is virtually impossible to grow, so collectors are willing to pay a high premium to get their hands on it. In this particular case, an anonymous plant collector who had been looking for this rare specimen of monstera adansonii for a while, bought it within 30 minutes of it going on sale.

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Mohammed Aisha, a Syrian sailor working on a Bahraini cargo ship stranded off the Egyptian coast, was forced to spend four years as a castaway after a court made him the ship’s legal guardian.

The sailor’s troubles began in July 2017, when the ship he was working on, the MV Aman, was detained at the Egyptian port of Adabiya, because its safety equipment and classification certificates had expired. Usually, this sort of issues are easily resolvable, but the ship’s owners in Bahrain were experiencing financial difficulties, and its Lebanese contractors. As the ship’s Egyptian captain had gone ashore after the MV Aman was technically abandoned at sea, Mohammed, the ship’s chief officer, was named its legal guardian by a local court. When Aisha signed the document, he had no idea he would be sentencing himself to four years of self-isolation on the ship…

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An Indian man recently left an entire country confused after helping his wife of seven years marry the man she had been having an affair with for years.

Uttam Mandal and Sapna Kumari, from Bhagalpur, in India’s Bihar state, got married in 2014, and had two children together. They were happy together for a while, but at some point Sapna fell in love with a relative of Uttman’s, a younger man who came around their house every once in a while, and the two started having an affair. The husband learned about Sapna’s escapade and they fought over the issue many times, but seeing as Sapna couldn’t get over her lover, Uttman decided to do the unthinkable, step aside and help his wife marry the man she loved.

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Raynaud syndrome, also known as Raynaud’s phenomenon, is a rare medical condition that limits blood supply to fingers, and sometimes to the toes, causing them to temporarily turn white or blue.

Named after physician Auguste Gabriel Maurice Raynaud, who first described it in his doctoral thesis in 1862, this rare condition can be described as an overreaction to stimuli like cold or stress. In the case of the former, the body tries to conserve heat by slowing down the flow of blood to the farthest points, such as the fingers. To do that, the small arteries that carry blood to those points constrict, thus causing the extremities to temporarily turn white, and then blue, due to the prolonged lack of oxygen in the affected area.

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An Indonesian man loves his workplace so much that he has named his son after it. His 5-month-old boy’s name is Statistical Information Communication Office…

Even before he got married, Samet Wahyudi knew that if he ever had a son, he wanted to name him after the department he worked in as a civil servant. He made that very clear to his fiancé before they got married, and she accepted his condition. Their first child was a girl, so Samet agreed on a more conventional name for her, but when his wife, Linda, gave birth to their second child, a boy, in December of last year, he knew exactly what his name would be – Statistical Information Communication Office.

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A 27-year-old Russian man who has been imploring viewers to vote him out of a Chinese boy band reality show for months, has finally got his wish, but not before making it all the way to the final.

Vladislav Ivanov, a translator and part-time model from Vladivostok, Russia, is finally free after two grueling months. Earlier this year, the 27-year-old, who speaks fluent Chinese, got a gig to support to Japanese contestants on a Chinese reality-show that would culminate in the forming of a new boy band. Ivanov agreed, but upon arriving on the tropical island where the show was to be filmed, his good looks kept getting him confused with the contestants. The show’s director noticed this, and knowing that he could speak Chinese, persuaded him to participate in the reality-show, and “live in a new way”. It turned out to be one of the biggest mistakes of his life.

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Hundreds of new sinkholes have been reported in Turkey’s agriculturally-focused Konya Province since the start of the year, almost double the number registered last year, and apparently it’s yet another man-made problem.

Konya Provine, located in the eponymous Konya Plain, has always been known as Turkey’s breadbasket or green silo, because of the vast sea of wheat spanning every which way, as far as the eye can see. But while Konya remains the country’s main agricultural center, the persistent drought plaguing farmers in this area has caused an unforeseen problem that has only been getting worse in recent years – sinkholes. As cultivators increasingly turn to groundwater to keep their crops alive, the giant caverns drained of water eventually collapse under the weight of the soil above, creating holes tens of meters across and up to 150-meters-deep.

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A Florida man and his three sons have been indicted for allegedly selling a dangerous chemical mix called “Miracle Mineral Solution” (MMS) as a cure for Covid-19 and dozens of other serious health conditions.

62-year-old Mark Grenon and his three adult sons, Jonathan, Jordan and Joseph stand accused of marketing and selling tens of thousands of bottles of MMS all over the United States, claiming that it could treat, prevent and cure Covid-19, as well as other diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, HIV/Aids, malaria, and even autism. Prosecutors dispute those claims, saying that Miracle Mineral Solution is actually a solution that, when ingested, becomes “chlorine dioxide, a powerful bleach typically used for industrial water treatment or bleaching textiles, pulp, and paper”.

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A young Vietnamese couple got their five minutes of online fame last month after photos of their unique Doraemon-themed engagement party went viral on social media.

Khanh Lam and Xuan Khanh are both big fans of Doraemon, the blue robotic cat beloved by millions of people all over the world, so while brainstorming ideas on how to make their engagement an event to remember, they decided to go with a Doraemon-themed party. Although they expected their families to disagree with their “childish” idea, they were surprised to receive a lot of support from everybody. About six months ago, they started collecting all sorts of Doraemon memorabilia and last month they finally put together their dream engagement party.

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Chinese media recently reported the story of a scrupulous Lothario who dated dozens of women at the same time, scamming them out of millions of dollars over a period of two years.

On March 20th, a woman arrived at a police precinct in Zhengzhou, China’s Henan Province, to file a rather unusual complaint. Apparently, she had been defrauded of more than 9 million yuan ($1.3 million) by her boyfriend, who she had met in 2019. The accused, a man named Zhang Nan, had deceived the woman, claiming to be the son and grandson of powerful public officials, and asking for important sums of money over the last couple of years. This sort of romantic scams are not entirely unheard of in China, but what made this case special was that the police investigation revealed that Zhang had scammed at least 20 women who he had been dating at the same time.

The woman who filed the original complaint, henceforth referred to by the pseudonym Zhang Li, told investigators that he had met the scammer at a car wash one day. He seemed very nice and after texting on WeChat for a while, they became romantically involved. She was emotionally vulnerable at the time, and fell right into Zhang Nan’s trap, believing his web of lies and ignoring all the warning signs.

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Taasheer is a traditional war dance performed by Saudi men and boys which involves spectacular, well-timed leaps that synchronize with the dramatic discharge of long muzzle-loading rifles.

Once performed before battle to motivate fighters and instill fear in the heart of the enemy, Taasheer is now performed at important social events, like weddings and festivals. Boys are trained to perform the traditional dance from a young age, first with an unloaded weapon, until they are ready to handle the gun powder. It is passed down from generation to generation, and the people of Taif hope to be able to preserve it forever.

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