A 28-yeear-old married man from India recently made international news headlines for lying to his family about getting infected with the new coronavirus as an excuse to run away with his lover.

On July 24, Manish Mishra called his wife to say that he had tested positive for Covid-19 and that he didn’t want to live anymore. He then proceeded to shut off his phone, which caused his family to panic. His wife called her brother for help after receiving the bizarre call, and he advised her to file a missing persons report with the Navi Mumbai police. The investigation that followed showed that the 28-year-old supervisor had actually used the dreaded illness as a pretext to leave his family and elope with his mistress.

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A Japanese self-described “nerd” has been playing Nintendo’s Ring Fit Adventure for the Switch for over six months, and he claims it helped him go from overweight to impressively chiseled.

“This is the result of a nerd doing Ring Fit for half a year,” Japanese Twitter user ‘kzm’ posted, along with a picture of his toned torso. The post got a lot of attention back in late July, getting almost 24,000 retweets and nearly 400 comments, mostly from people congratulating him on his resolve. Apparently, kzm has been playing Ring Fit Adventure every day since November of last year, and relied on it to keep himself in shape during the Covid-19 lockdown. Only it helped him do much more than that, as a photo of him from November 2019 shows him looking overweight, at least compared to his new sculpted physique.

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Italian luxury fashion brand Gucci has sparked controversy with its new line of products for Fall 2020, which includes distressed jeans with what looks like grass stains on them.

Distressed jeans have been around for a long time, but fashion companies have been pushing the envelope in this area for a while now. Back in 2017, fashion retailer Nordstrom made news headlines for selling jeans caked in fake mud for a whopping $425 and the Onomichi Denim Project boutique has long been selling premium jeans that have been pre-worn by someone for at least a year. Now, Italian fashion house Gucci has released a pair of jeans and a pair of jeans overalls “specifically treated for a stained-like, distressed effect” They cost $765 and $1,400 respectively…

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Chinese media recently reported the fascinating story of a young boy who, after witnessing his father’s murder at the hands of a neighbor, when he was 9-years-old, spent the next 17 years trying to catch the culprit.

Looking back on that fateful day of August 9th, 2000, Xiang Mingqian wishes he had never thrown that stone that eventually got his father killed… He was only 9 at the time, playing with his neighbor, Zhang Jun in a ditch, by the side of an old road in Changba Town, Zhenxiong County. Jun had thrown a stone into a puddle, and the splash had hit Xiang Mingqian, so he decided to return the favor by throwing an even bigger stone into the water. It was just a childish game, but the quarrel that erupted between the two boys would eventually involve both boys’ families and result in a tragic death…

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A fifteen-year-old boy and a twelve-year-old girl in Indonesia were reportedly forced to marry after breaking a local custom that forbids dating after sunset.

Child marriage has been a controversial issue in Indonesia for a long time, and last week it was once again brought into the limelight by the story of a young teenage couple forced to marry after only four days of dating. According to multiple media reports, 15-year-old Suhaimi and his 12-year-old girlfriend, Nur Herawati, were pressured into the marriage by the girl’s parents, after allegedly breaking customary dating laws, which forbids young couples to return home after dusk. Since the teenage boy brought his young girlfriend home after 7:30 pm earlier this month, her parents gave them no choice but to marry…

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Laungi Bhuiyan, a pensioner from the Indian state of Bihar, has become known as “Canal Man” after it was revealed that he spent 30 years of his life digging a 3-kilometer-long water canal, all by himself, using hand tools.

The remote village of Kothilawa, in the Lahthua area of Gaya district, had always suffered water shortages, with most of the rainwater falling in the nearby hills flowing into the river, instead of towards the village. This was one of the reason that some residents decided to move away and start anew, but one man decided to stay behind and fix the problem instead of running away from it. 30 years ago, local man Laungi Bhuiyan decided to take matters into his own hands and dig a canal to bring the water from the hills to a pond near his village. No one offered to help, so for three long decades he dug the 4-feet wide and 3-feet deep canal himself, using only whatever hand tools he had available.

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Hongeo is a bizarre South Korean dish with a pungent aroma that most people describe as a mix of dirty public toilet and wet laundry left untended for days.

Made from skate, a bottom-dwelling ray fish, Hongeo is considered by far South Korea’s smelliest food. It’s so stinky that many South Koreans wouldn’t come near it, let alone put in their mouths. However, its many fans can’t get enough of the ammonia fumes it emanates and swear that once you get used to it, it’s impossible to replace with anything else. But feasting on this stinky delicacy comes with a social cost, as the smell tends to linger in the mouth as well as on clothes. In fact, hongeo-specialized restaurants advise customers to seal their jackets in plastic bags before eating, and spray them with deodorant before leaving.

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According to his birth certificate, Denis Vashurin was born in 1987, but looking at him you would swear he was still in his early teenage years.

Denis became one of the hottest topics on Russian social media after doing an interview with popular YouTube personality “Vasya na sene”. People can’t seem to get over how incredibly young he looks for a 32-year-old man, and Denis himself admits that whenever he reveals his age to people he doesn’t know he almost always gets reactions of disbelief. That’s why he prefers living in a small village in Russia’s Krasnoyarsk region, instead of moving to the city. Everybody knows him there, and he gets to spend time alone doing what he likes – hunting, fishing and spending time with his girlfriend.

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Emanuele Dascanio is a super-talented artist whose graphite and charcoal pencil drawings look like high-resolution black-and-white photographs.

Looking at some of 37-year-old Emanuele Dascanio’s masterpieces, it’s easy to see why he sometimes takes hundreds of hours to complete a single piece. He often works 12 to 14 hours a day, often sacrificing his private life for art, but he sees it as an investment, if he sows a lot today, he’ll have more results to harvest in the future. The level of detail he is able to achieve using simple pencils is mind-blowing, making it easy to understand why is considered one of the most gifted hyperrealists of this generation.

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During the month of September, over 500,000 high-school graduates in Sudan will be taking their university admission exams, and to discourage applicants from cheating mobile internet will be turned off nationwide for three hours every day.

Sudan has a long history of turning off its internet during protests in order to disrupt the coordination of participants, but this year it is using the internet shutdown as a measure to prevent “large scale cheating” during university admission exams. Yesterday, September 16, at 8 am sharp, the people of Sudan realized that despite having paid their bills on time, their mobile internet service wasn’t working. After receiving thousands of complaints, internet operators announced that the Government had ordered a daily mobile internet shutdown until September 24, as a way to discourage university applicants from cheating on exams.

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All Kabaddi World is a popular Facebook channel that popularized a bombastic, over-the-top version of the ancient wrestling art of kabaddi. It’s basically a Pakistani version of World Wrestling Entertainment.

The first time I watched a clip posted by All Kabaddi World, I was confused yet enthralled by these two topless men that seemed to chase each other around a dirt ring while slapping the hell out of each other. They were slapping each other on the cheeks, the chest, their bellies, all to the cheers of a huge crowd. Every once in a while one of them got thrown to the ground and fell in a really exaggerated manner that explained the “wwe” in the Pakistani title I didn’t understand. This was a really unique, yet strangely-entertaining take on American wrestling.

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A 7-year-old boy from India’s Uttar Pradesh state has been dubbed ‘Spider Boy’ for his ability to effortlessly scale 10ft walls using nothing but his bare hands and feet.

Yasharth Singh Gaur, a class three student from the Indian city of Kanpur, was inspired by Marvel’s popular Spider-Man to try and scale the walls of his home. It seemed impossible at first, but he kept at it and before long he was able to climb the corners of his room with only his hands and feet. His brother started telling people about Yasharth’s special ability and word about the real-life Spider man started spreading around the city.

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With personal protective equipment becoming so important in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, luxury brands are eager to get a piece of the pie. Luxury goods powerhouse Louis Vuitton has just announced a $1,000 face shield that doubles as a sun visor.

The LV Shield consists of a visor made from a plastic-like material, fabric trim featuring the company’s signature LV monogram, an elasticated strap and golden studs engraved with the Louis Vuitton name that enable users to flip the visor upwards and downwards, thus alternating between a face shield and a peaked cap. The visor is made from a photochromatic material that changes from perfectly transparent to tinted when exposed to direct sunlight. And you can probably have it for just $1,000 or so.

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A young Swiss teacher obsessed with the color pink has been wearing nothing but her favorite color for over a decade and has decked out her apartment pink as well.

32-year-old Yasmin Charlotte has loved the color pink ever since she was a child, but instead of growing out of it, Yasmin only became more obsessed with pink as she grew up. 13 years ago she started wearing pink exclusively, and ever since she moved into her own apartment last year, she has created her very own pink paradise. She used to live with her boyfriend, and had turned half the place pink, but now that she has all the space to herself, she has gone all out. Despite attracting a lot of attention and even some abuse because of her obsession with pink Yasmin says she would never put on any other color, not even for her wedding.

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At just 23-years-old, Dr. Veeragandham Teja had already worked in 16 private hospitals, conducted several medical camps and had volunteered with Bengaluru police and local migrant workers during the pandemic. Not a bad record for any doctor, let alone a 5th grade dropout with no medical education and little training…

Veeragandham Teja had been working as a doctor for over four years when his luck finally came to an end. It was a double whammy that got him in the end: his second wife filed mental and physical harassment against him, and he made the mistake of making a recommendation to police to cancel a person’s rowdy sheet (criminal record), only to then be spotted driving that person’s registered SUV. All it took was a bit of digging and police uncovered a web of lies going back over a decade, false degrees and certificates and several aliases. Their conclusion was that Teja’s career and pretty much all of his life, for that matter, was a fabrication…

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