A retired postman from Turkey and a beautiful white swan have been inseparable for nearly four decades, and the story of their amazing friendship has melted the hearts of millions.

When Recep Mirzan spotted a wounded swan in a filed in Turkey’s Edirne province, in 1984, he had no idea that he was about to meet his best friend. He was in a car with a group of friends, when he spotted a swan that appeared to have a broken wing in an empty field. Mirzan quickly realized that leaving the bird there was the same as signing its death sentence, as predators would have most likely eaten it, so he stopped the car and took the bird with him. He kept in the car until evening, when he took it home and started nursing it back to health.

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Single parents separated from their former partners are allegedly turning to controversial “recovery agencies” to get their children back from former spouses that take them abroad without permission.

Normally, when parents separate, custody of the children is settled by a judge, along with visitation hours and rules, but sometimes one party doesn’t want to play by the rules, and that’s where agencies specialized in child retrieval come in. Most operators of such controversial services claim they are an essential tools for desperate parents with no other means of retrieving their beloved children from dangerous situations, but some sources claim that that isn’t always the case. Some recovery agencies allegedly don’t put in the time and effort to objectively research cases, and downright kidnap kids for parents, even if they don’t have custody rights.

Louise Screene (pseudonym, to protect her identity), recently told Mail Online the shocking story of how she saw her two children kidnapped from arm’s length by a recovery agent paid by their father. Following her divorce from Andrew (not his real name), Louise agreed to share custody of their two children, even if that meant they had to travel between the UK and the Middle East, where Andrew had moved.

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A 16-year-old girl known as “China’s youngest plastic surgery addict” claims to have undergone no less than 100 invasive cosmetic procedures over 3 years, in a bid to improve her looks.

Zhou Chuna, a young Chinese influencer with over 300,000 followers on microblogging platform Sina Weibo, has built her online career on plastic surgery, documenting her extreme transformation from a normal-looking girl to a doll-like idol over a period of three years. She’s not the only girl to have turned to cosmetic enhancements at a very young age, but Zhou Chuna’s case is considered unique because of the sheer number of procedures she has had done (around 100) in a relatively short period of time (3 years). Despite claiming to have experienced severe side-effects due to her addiction to plastic surgery, like memory loss and permanent scarring, the 16-year-old says it’s all worth it.

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44-year-old Niel Kenmuir suffers from aphantashia, a rare and strange medical condition that prevents him from visualizing things in his head.

Niel first realized that there was something different about his brain when he was in primary school. He had trouble falling asleep at night, so his step-father told him to close his eyes and visualize a flock of sheep and count them as they jump over a fence, one by one. The problem was he couldn’t see anything when he closed his eyes, no sheep, no fence, nothing. Later on, he would discover that he had a blind mind’s eye, which means he cannot visualize anything, not even the face of loved ones.

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A 58-year-old French woman has been fight to get her life back, after being wrongfully declared dead by a court, during a long-running dispute with a former employee.

Jeanne Pouchain has been trying to prove she is alive and well for three years, ever since a labor court declared her dead, allegedly acting on information provided by one of her former employees, who she was in a legal dispute with. The verdict not only ended a decade-long lawsuit between Pouchain and her ex-employee, it also ruined her life as a citizen. Her name was wiped from official records, she lost her ID card, her driver’s license, medical insurance, bank account, everything. It was like she didn’t exist anymore.

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The D’Cruz siblings, whose ages range from 75 to 97 years, recently set a new Guinness World Record for the highest combined age, 1042 years and 315 days.

The idea of setting a Guinness record was first mentioned among the D’Cruz family members during a reunion in 2018. 75-year-old Genia, the youngest of the 12 siblings, recalls one of her nephews going “This is amazing. I’m going to write Guinness,” after seeing the family together. They all laughed it off as a joke, but two years later, on December 15, Guinness actually called to let them know that they had been recognized as having the highest combined age of any siblings in the world, 1042 years and 315 days.

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If you’re in the market for a unique kind of house, this $149,000 Vermont property may spark your interest. It doesn’t look like anything special from the outside, but it actually comes with its own creepy jail.

Located in Guidhall, a small Vermont town, this 2,190-square-foot white and green home has been listed on online real-estate marketplace Realtor for two months, with an asking price of $149,000. It has four bedrooms, two bathrooms, wood floors and high ceilings, a nice backyard, as well as its own adjacent seven-cell jail. That’s right, an actual jail, the kind where people used to be locked-up in up until a few decades ago. This used to be the town jailer’s home, and even though the property has changed hands several times since then, the jail has remained intact.

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At only 19 years of age, Maxim Sipakov is already a very skilled animator with his own unique niche – he uses neon effects to enhance the appearance of tattoos.

Maxim honed his skills by animating online soccer videos, but he soon found that his talent was much better suited for digital tattoo enhancing, so he decided to focus on that. He takes videos from tattoo artists and other creators and works his magic on them, taking the already impressive body art to a whole new level. Maxim showcases his digital animation skills on Instagram and TikTok, where he has hundreds of thousands of fans and millions of views.

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A Chinese man and his parents have agreed to move out of a Beijing hospital after living there continuously for six years, because of a financial dispute with the medical institution.

No one really likes spending more time than they have to in hospitals, which is why most people can’t wait to get discharged. But that’s not always the case. In 2014, a man surnamed Tian was admitted to a top Beijing hospital with symptoms that included nausea, vomiting and unsteady gait. He was supposed to spend a few days there after a medical procedure, but following a dispute regarding his medical bill, he ended up living there for six years, along with his parents. This weird saga finally came to an end last week, when the hospital squatters finally agreed to move out.

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Known as the “Brooklyn Transformer”, Peter Kokis has become a very recognizable figure in New York, thanks to an arsenal of impressive robot exoskeletons made out of all sorts of everyday items.

A former military pilot, Peter Kokis started making his now-famous exoskeletons after joking around with an ex-girlfriend. At one point, during a conversations, she told him “you’re too stiff, you need to loosen up and do something weird,” and he decided she was right. Using his experience in aviation, he started piecing together things he had around the house into an impressive exoskeleton that became known as Squid Boy. But that was only the beginning, as over the years he made wearable costumes inspired by the likes of The Transformers, The Terminator or the Xenomorphs of Alien.

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A giant puddle in Russia’s Far East city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk is being described as “invincible”, after it somehow survived unfixed for over a quarter of a century. It now has its own Instagram page and over 16,000 followers.

As it often happens in Russia and other eastern European countries, what started out as a small pothole gradually grew to become a giant puddle. It attained that rank in 1994, and locals have been trying to get local authorities to fix it ever since. So far it has proven a futile endeavor, as scheduled repairs have been postponed repeatedly. In the meantime, a frustrated local known only as Nikolay decided that the 25-year-old pothole was old enough to have its own Instagram page, and created one for it in September. The witty sarcastic posts created in first-person quickly went viral and got the local government to act.

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A coal seam approximately 30 meters under Australia’s Mount Wingen has been burning continuously for approximately 6,000 years, earning the place its famous nickname, Burning Mountain.

Underground coal seam fires are not at all uncommon, in fact it’s estimated that about 1,000 coal seams are burning around the world at any one point. Such fires usually occur in coal-rich but less-developed countries, and are usually put out in a matter of days, a month at most. That’s not always the case though, and India’s Jharia coalfield, which has been burning continuously for over 100 years, is a perfect example. But even this century-old fire pales in comparison with the world’s oldest coal fire, an underground coal seem that has been smoldering for about six millennia.

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A Connecticut mother was shocked to find that her 6-year-old boy used her credit card to spend a small fortune on his favorite smartphone game over a couple of months.

In July of this year, Jessica Johnson, a real-estate broker from Wilton, Connecticut, discovered that substantial sums of money were being deducted from her Chase account by Apple and PayPal. Thinking it was a mistake or fraud, the 41-year-old mother-of-one called the bank and ended up filing a fraud claim in July. By that time, her suspicious credit card charges had reached  a whopping $16,293.10, but it wasn’t until October that her bank told her that the charges were legit and she needed to contact Apple.

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The owner of a dark grey C-class Mercedes Benz was shocked to find it stripped down to a metal shell last week, after a gang of “professional” thieves dismantled it right in front of his house, at night.

When 56-year-old Paul Hampton, of West Bromwich, in the UK, saw his neighbor standing in front of his house early Thursday morning, he knew something was wrong, but he never imagined just how wrong. He had been out the night before, and parked his car, a £28,000 Mercedes C-class, outside their home on Marsh Lane, at around 9.30pm. At 4.30am, their neighbor was banging their door down, shouting for Paul to come out and see his car, or what was left of it…

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Some people wouldn’t get anywhere near an adult crocodile for all the money in the world, but one Japanese family in Kure City, Hiroshima, has been living with one for almost four decades.

Nobumitsu Murabayashi bought “Caiman-san”, his pet crocodile, from a pet store, after his young son begged him to. He never thought he’d become part of the family, and still be with them nearly 40 years later. Today, the domesticated crocodile measures just under 7 feet long (6feet 8inches) weighs around 45 kilograms, but he’s a gentle giant, as Nobumitsu says he would never hurt anyone. Caiman-san lives in the family home, but also goes on walks with his master and is tame enough to let young children touch and even ride him.

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