An Italian woman with no direct heirs left all her €5 million ($5.4 million) fortune to her Albanian caretaker, completely blindsiding the 10 nephews who were expecting the inheritance.

Maria Malfatti, a descendant of one of the most famous families in Rovereto, a town in Italy’s Trento province, died last November at the age of 80. A descendant of Valeriano Malfatti, a former mayor of Rovereto and vice-president of Vienna’s Parliament, the woman owned a number of valuable assets, including several apartments, a historic building in the town center, as well as significant sums of money kept in bank accounts. However, Maria Malfatti had never been married and had no children to leave the family fortune to, so her nephews stood to inherit everything. Only the woman apparently had other plans, as she decided to leave everything down to the last cent to the woman who had cared for her over the last few years, an Albanian national.

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Lily Rain is a popular AI-created digital model that earns her creators around $20,000 a month on platforms like Fanvue simply by appearing in stunning travel photos.

It’s no secret that AI models are killing it online these days. Fitness model Aitana Lopez has over 300,000 followers on Instagram and she’s not even a real person, Emilly Pelegrini, another digital influencer, has been dubbed the world’s hottest model, and “perfect girlfriend” Lexi Love earns over $30,000 a month by acting as a romantic interest for lonely people. Now, another virtual influencer is making news headlines because of her popularity as a travel model. Lily Rain’s profile on subscription-based social platform Fanvue shows the attractive young woman in various eye-catching locations around the world, but the fact that these photos are entirely the work of artificial intelligence doesn’t seem to bother her legions of fans.

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Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera, a small rock in northern Africa conquered by Spain in 1564, holds the title for the world’s smallest national border, measuring just 85 meters in length.

Spain has almost 2000 kilometers of land borders with Portugal and France, but it also has much smaller borders with countries like Andorra, the United Kingdom (Gibraltar), and Morocco. It is with the latter, the African nation of Morocco, that Spain shares the smallest land border in the world, an 85-meter-long stretch of land linking a rock about 19,000 square meters in size to the Moroccan coast. Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera has been Spanish territory since 1564 when it was conquered by Admiral Pedro de Estopiñán, and although Morocco has repeatedly laid claim to it, Spain has never agreed to return the land and actually has troops stationed there to enforce Spanish rule.

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A Nigerian woman is facing up to seven years in prison for allegedly breaking her country’s cyber crime laws by posting a negative online review for a can of tomato puree.

In September of last year, 39-year-old Chioma Okoli took to Facebook to voice her opinion about a can of tomato puree she had recently bought, claiming that it contained too much sugar and asking her friends and followers to express their opinions as well. Somehow, Okoli’s post went viral on Meta’s social network, generating over 3,000 comments, including one from a person claiming to be the sister of the founder of Erisco Foods Limited, the company that made the canned tomato puree. They asked Okoli to stop bashing the product and just try something else, but the woman doubled down on her claims, asking the person to ask their brother to”stop ki***ing people with his product”. That ended up costing her, as she was arrested just days later and she is now facing up to seven years in prison.

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Made with rare Nacional cacao harvested from just 14 farms in Ecuador’s Piedra de Plata valley, To’ak chocolate is undoubtedly the world’s most valuable chocolate.

From truffle-infused ice cream to gold-plated sandwiches, the world is full of expensive sweets and treats. But while most of them are gimmicky creations designed to attract attention, a few do more than simply add outrageously expensive ingredients that hardly affect the experience of eating them. Ecuadorian chocolate brand To’ak claims that its products are among these few, although judging whether the price of its most expensive offerings is actually justified is ultimately up to the consumer. To’ak is most often referred to as ‘the most expensive chocolate in the world’, which is technically true, as its small chocolate bars can sell for up to $490 per 50-gram bar, but the company believes that simply referring to its product simply as expensive doesn’t really tell the whole story of To’ak.

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Alba Renai, an attractive digital influencer powered by artificial intelligence, recently announced that she will be hosting a special segment on Spain’s version of popular reality show ‘Survivor’.

Created in the fall of last year by Be a Lion, a subsidiary of television giant Mediaset Spain, Alba Renai quickly became an Instagram celebrity, attracting over 10,000 fans on Instagram. She is a beautiful young woman, only she is not actually real, but the result of AI-powered image generation based on the results of a focus group of 350 young adults who were asked about the physical and personality attributes they find most important, and the team at Be a Lion used this data to create an avatar that would appeal to as many people as possible. But what really catapulted Alba Renai into the public eye was the news that she would be hosting a special segment on Spain’s version of ‘Survivor.

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A Chinese man recently set a new Guinness Record for the longest time to spray water from the mouth continuously, a whopping 5 minutes and 51.88 seconds.

Water sprouting is a fairly old trick that dates back to the 17th century. It involves drinking large amounts of water and then regurgitating it using muscle control. It’s not something that everyone can do, obviously, but we’ve seen some pretty impressive human water fountains over the years. However, none nearly as impressive as Ma Hui, a 35-year-old Chinese man who recently set a new Guinness record for the longest time spraying water from the mouth. To say that he smashed the previous record would be a gross understatement, considering that he managed to sprout water from his mouth for nearly six minutes, while the previous record holder, Ethiopia’s Kirubel Yilma, had managed to do it for “only” 56.36 seconds.

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Filipino online influencer Abby Domer Salle has come under fire for alleged animal cruelty after being spotted wearing a live chick in a small metal cage on her head on the streets of Manila.

Inspired by Japanese Kawaii culture, the so-called ‘duckling fashion’ has become very popular in Southeast Asia in the last few years. The exact origins of this fashion trend are unclear, but it has been linked to anime series or characters. There are multiple variations of this trend all over the world, but in its simplest form it involves wearing decorative plastic or plush ducklings on one’s head. However, one Filipino influencer recently took this already unusual fashion trend and took it to an all-new level of weirdness by caging a live chick and wearing it in public as a bizarre hat.

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For 50 Years, the Rogan Megane Hakubutsukan or Spectacles Museum in Ikeburo, was the most iconic place to go shopping for eyeglasses and sunglasses in all of Japan, probably the world.

Located on the Higashi-dori shopping street in Minami-Ikebukuro, Tokyo, the Spectacles Museum was one of the most Instagram-worthy places in the Japanese capital. Although this was once a simple warehouse, under the guidance of founder and longtime owner Yutaka Takei, it became a giant advertisement for the products being sold inside. What really put the Spectacles Museum on the map was its unique facade, which consisted of thousands of pairs of colorful sunglasses attached to a giant metal frame. It was meant to attract attention, and that’s exactly what it did, in time becoming one of Ikebukuro’s main tourist attractions.

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A Tennessee man has been diagnosed with prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO, an extremely rare neurological disorder that makes other people’s faces appear severely distorted.

Imagine waking up one day and looking at the faces of your loved one only to discover that their ears, noses, and mouths are stretched back and deep grooves have appeared on their foreheads, cheeks, and chins. Then you go outside and see that everyone has this goblin-like look on their faces and you start to freak out. It sounds like a nightmare, but it’s one that 59-year-old Victor Sharrah has been experiencing since one November morning in 2020. He was only recently diagnosed with prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO, an extremely rare disorder that causes faces to appear distorted in shape, size and color.

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Three boys, ages 11, 12 and 16, and dubbed the “Little Rascals,” were recently arrested after being turned in by their parents for robbing a Houston bank.

Most kids spend their spring break from school playing video games, watching TV, or hanging on with their friends, but three Houston juveniles decided to put their free time to better use by robbing a local bank. Police claim that the three boys walked into a Wells Fargo bank in the Greenspoint area of north Houston on March 14, passed a threatening note to a teller, and managed to get away on foot with an undisclosed amount of money. When police arrived and checked the surveillance footage, they were shocked to see that the bank robbers were incredibly young.

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Samuel Davalos Pasillas, a 47-year-old California pastor, was recently arrested for allegedly paying to men to kill his daughter’s boyfriend.

Last week, Riverside police arrested Samuel Pasillas after gathering enough evidence that he had ordered the attempted murder of the man dating his own daughter. The hit took place on October 21, 2023, in Riverside. The victim was sitting in his car when he was shot multiple times from a vehicle that pulled up alongside his. The shooters quickly drove away, but the victim survived by driving himself to a nearby hospital. He couldn’t provide investigators with too much information about his would-be killers, but five months later, police concluded that the incident was a “murder-for-hire shooting” orchestrated by his girlfriend’s father, Pastor Pasillas.

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Virtual news anchors and presenters have been around for quite a while now, but they’ve gotten so good that Government organizations are using them to replace actual humans and save money.

The provincial government of Jeju Island, in South Korea, recently hired a news anchor to conduct its weekly YouTube program, Weekly Jeju, for a fraction of the cost of its former employees. J-na seems very experienced at her job despite her young age, but that’s only because she isn’t a real human, but a computer-generated virtual avatar managed by a private contractor. The news she appears to read on-screen is also a script generated by AI language models like ChatGPT. According to the island province, switching to a virtual news anchor was a much cheaper option, as J-na and the news generation script reportedly cost only 600,000 won ($450) per month.

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Haementeria ghilianii or the Amazonian Giant Leech is the world’s largest leech by quite a significant margin, growing up to 18 inches (46 cm) long.

Leeches are found in wet and humid areas all over the globe, and while most are smaller than the average person’s index finger, a few can grow a lot longer than that. But one particular species of leech can get so big that it is considered the stuff of nightmares. Haementeria ghilianii, also known as the Amazonian Giant Leech, is an elusive leech that can only be found in French Guyana and certain nearby areas in Brazil, so you’re unlikely to run into one unless you live there, but photos of this slimy critter should be enough to send shivers down your spine. While most specimens measure between 30 and 35 centimeters, exceptional specimens can grow up to 46 cm long.

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Casa du Currivu, aka ‘House of Spite’, is a bizarre-looking house in the Sicilian village of Petralia Sottana that holds the unofficial title of ‘world’s narrowest house’.

Petralia Sottana, a small village of about 2,000 people in the heart of the Madonie mountains in the province of Palermo, is home to one of Italy’s most unusual tourist attractions – a two-storey house with a normal ground floor and an upper level that is only around 3-feet, or one meter thick. It is known as Casa du Currivu, or the House of Spite, mainly due to the local legend surrounding its purpose. Seeing as it isn’t wide enough for two people to pass by each other, let alone live inside it full time, the thin edifice was allegedly only designed to block a neighbor’s window view following an argument.

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