Mitsutoki Shigeta, the heir of a wealthy Japanese businessman, was recently awarded sole custody of 13 children he fathered through surrogate mothers in Thailand. Dubbed the “baby factory dad”, 28-year-old Shigeta is believed to be the father of at least 17 children, all conceived through surrogacy.

The “baby factory” scandal began in 2014, when Thai authorities stormed the Bangkok apartment of Japanese millionaire Mitsutoki Shigeta, where they found nine surrogate babies, each accompanied by a nanny, living in mostly unfurnished rooms and surrounded by playpens and baby bottles. DNA tests showed that Shigeta was the father of all nine children, as well as four others not living in the apartment. They had all been delivered by surrogate mothers that the Japanese national had paid between $9,300 and $12,500 each.

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At just 24 years of age, Dain Yoon is already a master when it comes to optical illusions. Using only makeup, face paint and brushes, she uses her own face and body as canvas for mind-bending visual effects.

Yoon’s talent for painting was obvious from a very young age, and it later allowed her to attend some of the most prestigious art schools in South Korea – Yewon Arts Secondary, Seoul Arts High School and the Korean National University of Arts. But instead of pursuing what you would call a conventional artistic career, she decided to focus on ‘illusion art’, a modern art form that has proven very popular thanks to social media sites like Instagram and Facebook.

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A 30-year-old woman in Egypt recently filed for divorce from her 32-year-old husband after only 40 days of marriage on grounds that he is so stingy that he refused to buy her a shawarma sandwich on their first and only outing as a married couple.

Speaking before the Family Court in Zananiri, the young woman, known only as Sameeha, said that the shawarma incident was the straw that broke the camel’s back. She had married Ahmed, a teacher, after only knowing him for two months, which apparently wasn’t long enough for her to realize how incredibly stingy he was. However, his frugal nature became very obvious right after their traditional wedding. On their first day of marriage, Ahmed allegedly told his wife that he hated going out because he viewed it as a waste of money. She didn’t pay much attention to his words then, but things got worse with each passing day.

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Ever wish there was a way to instantly erase all of your financial debt without actually paying back one cent? Who hasn’t, right? Well, an Indonesian guru claims he can do just that for the followers of his mysterious debt forgiving cult, Swissindo World Trust International Orbit.

With most of the world’s wealth concentrated in the hands the elite, excessive lending has become virtually the only way to ensure that the rest of the world can maintain a decent lifestyle. Over the past couple of decades millions of people around the globe have incurred massive debts that they are unable to pay off. Facing constant pressure from banks or Government financial institutions, many of them are left with no other option than praying for a miracle. And that’s exactly the kind of solution that Swissindo, a cult-like organization in Indonesia, offers – to magically rid the world of financial debt with the help of a massive stash of gold and platinum.

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Residents of Windsor, a Canadian city near Detroit, have been complaining about a mysterious noise interfering with their daily lives for over eight years now, but despite numerous attempts to establish its origin, nobody has been able to figure out what’s causing it.

Called the ‘Windsor Hum’, the mysterious noise plaguing the Canadian city of over 210,000 people reportedly varies in intensity and comes and goes at random intervals. Sometimes it can be heard for just a few hours, and other times it lingers for days, causing those who can hear it to suffer from symptoms like severe headaches, sleeplessness, irritability, depression, among others. Some residents have been so affected by the Windsor Hum that they packed up and moved far away just so they could escape it.

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David Bayo, a self-taught artist from Strasbourg, France, spends hundreds of hours carefully placing tiny ink dots on a white canvas to create incredibly detailed portraits.

To truly appreciate David Bayo’s skills, you need to lean in and examine his amazing artworks up close. Only when you see the millions of dots expertly placed by the artist over dozens, sometimes hundreds of hours, do you begin to understand the hard work and patience that go into each and every one of his stippled portraits.

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Every year, the Nikola-Lenivets art park, near Moscow, Russia, burns a wooden structure to celebrate Maslevitsa, the oldest surviving Slavic holiday. This year, founder Nikolay Polissky burned the largest structure yet – a 30-meter-high Gothic cathedral made of wooden branches.

On February 17, 2018, art lovers gathered at the Nikola-Lenivets art park witnessed one of the largest bonfires in recent history – a wooden cathedral built for the sole purpose of being raised to the ground. A team of around 20 workers had laboured for three months under the guidance of famous Russian artist Nikolay Polissky, assembling the dry tree branches into the impressive 30-meter Gothic edifice, only to see it eaten up by the flames in a matter of minutes. It was an impressive display indeed, but a controversial one as well.

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Kipposhi, a restaurant in Tokyo, Japan, has seen its popularity skyrocket recently, after photos of its bright blue ramen soup started going viral on social media platforms like Instagram.

Blue soup doesn’t really sound like the most appetising dish, but that hasn’t stopped people from flocking to Kipposhi, a ramen restaurant located in the heart of Tokyo, to give its famous Clear Chicken Soup ‘Blue’ a try, or at least take a photo of it to post on social media. It all started in January of 2017, when Mr Kozuimi, the owner of Kipposhi and creator of the unique blue ramen, posted a photo of his invention on Instagram. It went viral almost instantly, becoming a social media sensation, and putting the relatively new ramen restaurant on the map of must-visit Tokyo attractions.

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After making a daring escape while being loaded on a truck headed for the slaughterhouse, a cow in Nysa, Poland, swam to an uninhabited island on a nearby lake and has been living there ever since.

Cows are among the most obedient of domestic animals, but when their survival instincts kick in, they can pull of some truly extraordinary things. Just last month, we wrote another cow in Poland that escaped her farm and went on to join a heard of bison at the edge of the primeval Bialowieza Forest, and earlier this month we featured Hermien, a plucky cow from the Netherlands, that escaped just as her owner was sending her to the slaughterhouse and hid in the woods for over six weeks. Now, we’re heading back to Poland, where another brave cow is making news headlines for her will to survive.

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Krishna Sen, a woman from India’s Uttar Pradesh state who posed as a man for over 4 years, was recently arrested for marrying two women and harassing them for dowry.

Krishna had always been a bit of a tomboy, but in 2013 she went a step further, adopting a male persona on social media and approaching women online in hopes of starting a romantic relationship with them. She started wearing men’s clothes, cutting her hair short and even changed her name to Sweety Sen. Over the course of three years, the disguised woman managed to convince two women to marry her, and then started pressuring them and their families for dowry.

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A woman from San Luis Potosí, Mexico came up with an ingenious way of notifying the man who allegedly got her pregnant and then cut off all contact, even blocking her on Facebook, that her pregnancy test came out positive.

Photos of a bizarre advertising billboard on top of a building between Mariano Jiménez Street and Salvador Nava Avenue, in San Luis Polosi, have been doing the rounds on social media over the last couple of weeks. It features the photo of a man in a cowboy hat, along with his full name and a very personal message from the woman who rented it – she’s pregnant and this was apparently the only way to let him know, as he had blocked both her phone number and her Facebook account.

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Alexander Jheferson Delgado, a convicted sex offender and burglar from Peru, was captured by police a year after successfully escaping prison by drugging his identical twin bother, who had come to visit him, and putting on his clothes.

On January 10th, 2017 Alexander Jheferson Delgado pulled off one of the most incredible prison escapes in history, and the first from from Piedras Gordas, one of Peru’s most secure penitentiaries, in over 12 years. That day, Delgado’s twin brother Giancarlo came to visit him, and deliver food and letters from his friends and. After meeting him in the common area of the prison, the two 28-year-old brothers went to Alexander’s cell, where the inmate allegedly offered Giancarlo a soda laced with sedatives. He passed out shortly after and woke up to the sight of concerned guards standing over him.

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A woman traveling from Dongguan, in southern China, recently made international news headlines after climbing into a train station X-ray machine with her luggage, to make sure no one tried to steal it.

One of the millions of Chinese traveling home for the Lunar New Year holiday, the unnamed woman reportedly had a lot of money in her bag, so when staff at Dongguan East Railway Station told her that she needed to put into the X-ray machine for scanning, she got on all fours and went through the scanner herself, to make sure it didn’t get stolen.

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Bay View, a small upscale community in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, just outside of Petoskey, has been making headlines due to a lawsuit against its unusual ownership laws, which prohibit non-Christian from buying or even inheriting a home there.

What started out as a modest camping ground for Methodist families, over 140 years ago, has blossomed into one of the most beautiful resort communities in the United States. Bay View was named one of the 12 “Prettiest Painted Places” in the U.S., for its 444 Victorian-era cottages, fondly called ‘gingerbread houses’, and it is often referred to as a summer vacation paradise. However, it’s not a paradise open to all, at least not if you actually want to own property here, as according to a law dating back to the 1940s only practicing Christians are allowed to buy houses, or even inherit them.

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45-year-old Michelle Myers, from Phoenix, Arizona, suffers from Foreign Accent Syndrome, a very rare condition that causes her to speak in various foreign accents – British, Australian, Irish – despite having never traveled outside of the United States.

Myers was diagnosed with the unusual condition in 2015, when, after going to bed with a pounding headache, she woke up unable to speak and with the left part of her body completely numb. She was taken to the nearby West Valley Hospital in Goodyear, where doctors said she was suffering from aphasia, loss of speech, symptoms associated with strokes or brain injuries. However, their diagnosis was turned on its head when the woman finally started speaking again.

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