The village of Mafi Dove, in southern Ghana, is home to around 5,000 people, almost none of whom were born here. Because of an archaic belief that childbirth in the village brings offense to the gods, expectant mothers are rushed to neighboring communities to deliver their babies there.

Like many other Ghanaian communities, Mafi Dove has a host of customs and traditions that have been passed down since times immemorial. But apart from minor taboos that don’t really impact the lives of its inhabitants, this village continues to enforce three major rules that make it unique in the world. One of the first things you notice when visiting Mafi Dove is the complete absence of animals. Apart from the wild birds flying overhead, there’s virtually no bird or mammal to be found here. Rearing animals in Mafi Dove has been forbidden for as long as anyone can remember, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon. Interestingly, bringing animals into the village and slaughtering them on the same day is permitted, but people aren’t allowed to rear them here.

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A football match between two teams from Poland’s third division received a lot of international attention last week, not for the quality of the football displayed by the players, but for the appalling conditions in which fans of the visiting team had to watch the game. Shocking photos show a group of supporters crammed in a large metal cage that some media outlets described as a human zoo.

Last week, around 100 supporters of Hutnik Krakow accompanied their team for an away game against Spartakus Daleszyce, in the Polish third football division, and found themselves locked in a large metal cage for the entire 90-minute game. According to Polish rules, supporters of the away team must be kept separated from fans of the team hosting the game, but they usually end up in an isolated sector of the stadium, or in a seating area divided by a high fence, to avoid violent clashes. However, Spartakus Daleszyce, is one of several Polish teams that have opted to keep away fans in metal cages. The controversial structure has actually been around for years, but it only recently attracted attention after photos posted on a popular Polish football fan website went viral online.

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A Chinese university professor has sparked a heated online debate after giving his students an unusual assignment that required them to add 1,667 friend on WeChat, China’s most popular social network, in order to get an A+.

The controversial assignment required students taking the Online and New Media course at the Henan University of Economics and Law to add at least 1,001 new friends on WeChat in order to earn a score of 60 out of 100. The more friends they would add above that threshold would increase their score, with those getting at least 1,667 new friends guaranteeing themselves an A+. Although some of the students – especially the most introverted ones – complained that the task was too difficult, faculty at the university defended their colleague, explaining that the assignment prepares the youths for real life.

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A North Carolina thrift shop recently sold a $1,000 hand-carved furniture set that came with a warning of haunting activity reported by its previous owners.

We’ve all heard stories about allegedly haunted furniture or memorabilia before, but it’s not everyday that we see these claims made on the price tags of stores selling them. However, the staff at Habitat for Humanity, a thrift shop in Salisbury, North Carolina, felt that the haunting activity reported by the previous owners of a queen canopy bed-frame and highboy chest of drawers was something they needed to disclose to potential buyers. Believe it or not, the eerie paranormal activity warning did nothing to dissuade people, if anything, it got more of them interested in the set.

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The small village of Dinoša, in Montenegro, is home to an old mulberry tree that turns into a water fountain every time it rains heavily.

As we all know, water doesn’t normally gush out of living trees, but at least in this case the phenomenon has a perfectly reasonable explanation. You see, the meadow that the mulberry tree grows in has many underground springs which flood during heavy rainfalls, and the additional pressure pumps the water up through the hollow trunk of the tree and out through a hole a few feet above the ground.

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Today, Dan Drake, aka ‘Dancakes’, is known as one of the world’s most talented pancake artists, but few people know that he never planned, nor trained for this career. He was just a guy flipping fried foods at a diner to make ends meet, but his artistic talent catapulted him to international fame.

Dan had always had a talent for drawing, but never really considered turning it into a career. In high-school, he would doodle and draw comics in the back of the classroom out of boredom, and dreamed of becoming a renowned musician with his band, Psychedelic Psycho Nuts. While trying to get his musical career off the ground, Drake got a job as a fry cook at the Courtesy Diner, in his home city of St. Louis. Because he needed to earn his chops, he was placed on the slow shifts, which resulted in few tips but a lot of time on his hands. It was on one of these shifts that he got his feet wet in the world of pancake art.

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No one ever said that ending a romantic relationship was easy, but planning your own kidnapping and subsequent murder just to avoid telling someone “it’s over” sounds ridiculous. And yet, one Chinese woman did just that rather than tell her boyfriend she didn’t want to be with him anymore.

A 37-year-old woman from Wuhan, in central China’s Hubei Province, was recently arrested after it was revealed that she had faked her own kidnapping and murder at the hands of her ex-husband in order to avoid having to break up with her current boyfriend, whose financial situation she considered lacking. The woman, surnamed Yu, had been dating her boyfriend, Lin, for a while, but she only learned that he was poor after visiting his home during the Chinese New Year. It was something she apparently just couldn’t get over, so she decided to leave him, but fearing that he would get clingy and refuse rejection if she simply told him she wanted to end the relationship, Yu devised a plan to make herself disappear.

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Police stations all around Thailand are sending their chubbiest officers to a weight-loss camp as part of a nation-wide program aptly called “Belly Destruction”.

After the success of a two-week pilot program, police stations in Thailand have begun sending their fattest officers to the Central Police Training Center in the city of Pak Chong, to take part in intense physical activity designed to adjust the size of their bellies. Each station will periodically send two to three overweight policemen to the center, where they will work out, ride bicycles and adopt a healthy, protein-rich diet to shed as much extra weight as possible. The Belly Destruction program started gaining attention after photos of overweight police officers taking part in the daily exercise routine went viral online.

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A 59-year-old man from Taiwan has become an internet meme thanks to his ridiculously square hairdo that makes him look like a real-life Minecraft character.

Wu Goren first made news headlines back in 2014, when photos of his bizarre square hairdo went viral on social media. Taiwanese news channels quickly tracked down the middle-aged man and questioned him about his unique hairdo. As it turns out, Wu, who works as a medical scientist at National Taiwan University Hospital, adopted the look after being rejected by a woman, as a way of making himself look like a man in his 20s or 30s. It’s unclear how he came to the conclusion that square hair makes someone look younger, but there’s no denying that it is eye-catching.

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An Indian-born man living in New Zealand is fighting a David-vs-Goliath battle against a supermarket chain that accidentally sold him beef mislabeled as lamb. He is demanding a soul-purifying journey to India as compensation, but the supermarket is only willing to offer a $200 voucher.

Jaswinder Paul’s spiritual woes began back in September of 2018, when he bought a packet of “lamb roast” from a Countdown supermarket in Blenheim, New Zealand. He went home, cooked the meat and ate it, only to later discover that the packet had a second label that claimed the meat was actually beef. Cows are considered sacred in Hinduism and eating their meat is strictly forbidden, so a panicked Jaswinder went back to the supermarket, where his worst fears were confirmed – the meat he had eaten was actually beef mislabeled as lamb due to an in-store labeling error.

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A New Jersey man will never forget 62nd birthday after his sons posted his phone number on a large roadside billboard inviting people to call and wish him well. So far, he has gotten over 15,000 calls and texts from people all over the world.

Chris Ferry’s sons used to prank him when going to restaurants by telling waiters that it was his birthday just so they could watch him squirm uncomfortably as they brought him cake. This year, they took things to a whole new level by renting a billboard outside Linwood and posting their dad’s phone number on it, inviting people to send him their best wishes. They thought it would be something of a local joke, with their dad getting a few calls from random strangers, but after the photo went viral on social media, things got a bit out of hand.

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Members of the Aetherius Society, a fringe religious movement founded in the 1950s, believe that spiritual power is a tangible type of energy, like electricity, so they store it in special “spiritual power batteries” for release in case of global catastrophes. The Aetherius Society claims to have prevented several international crises by releasing the concentrated spiritual energy stored in these special batteries.

Founded in 1954 by a former taxi driver called David King the Aetherius Society is one of the earliest UFO-based religious movements in the world. Its members believe that some of the most famous religious figures in human history come from different planets. The Hindu god Krishna, for example, apparently comes from Saturn, which also happens to be home to a “Cosmic Hierarchy” or “Interplanetary Council”, while Jesus and Buddha are from Venus. The main goal of the Aetherius Society is to work with these “Cosmic Masters” to help humanity solve and prevent its problems so it can advance into the New Age. One of the ways it does this is with the help of spiritual power, which can be stored in special batteries indefinitely.

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Ed Stafford, a former British Army captain and renowned adventurer recently embarked on a 60-day challenge that saw him sleeping on the streets of various cities in Britain. His experiment was meant to highlight the plight of homeless people, but he was shocked to find that begging can be more lucrative than he had ever imagined.

Stafford, who is known as the first person to walk the entire length of the Amazon river, spent 60 days sleeping on the streets of cities like London, Manchester and Glasgow, and observing the lifestyle of real homeless people for a TV documentary soon to air on Channel 4. Although the adventurer admits that he did observe drug addiction problems among the homeless and heard some truly heartbreaking stories from them, what really shocked him was  how much money some of these beggars made – up to £200 ($260) a night – and the amounts of free food they received from passers-by and volunteers.

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A series of photos showing students casually lighting up cigarettes in what looks like a college classroom have been doing the rounds online for several months, leaving everyone puzzled as to what is going on. As it turns out, it’s just a display of hands-on learning in a course on tobacco.

The controversial photos originally went viral on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, back in November of last year, but they’ve been resurfacing on various other social networks and news sites ever since. Young students can be seen lighting cigarettes and casually smoking them, while others take their photos with smartphones and the teacher casually observes the spectacle. Teen smoking is frowned upon in China, as it is pretty much everywhere else, so the photos caused quite a stir online even after the dean of the university where the smoking took place offered an explanation.

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A strict mother in China reportedly abandoned her 12-year-old son in the middle of a busy street in Luoyang City after he only managed to score 81 percent on an exam, which apparently wasn’t good enough.

Police officers in Luoyang’s Gucheng district found the boy wandering the streets close to where his mother dropped him off before driving away. They had been alerted by passers-by who saw the woman stopping her car in the area, pulling the boy out and then scolding and hitting him before leaving him there by himself. CCTV footage shows the officers approaching the disoriented child in an attempt to find out what happened. They later told local reporters that the boy had been abandoned for not achieving the 95 percent score that his mother expected on a recent exam.

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