A New York man has been dubbed the “Pied Piper of Raccons” after a video of him drawing almost two dozen furry critters from the woods with a Native American flute tune went viral online.

The popular video shows Eddy Lawrence playing his flute on the side of the road in Brasher State Forest, St Lawrence County, as dozens of raccoons emerge from the woods and form an audience around him. The otherwise shy creatures appeared mesmerized by the song, and according to the person who shot the video, around 20 of them had gathered around Lawrence by the time he finished playing. As the song ended, the spell it put on the raccoons seemed to break as well, as they scurried back into the forest.

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A Russian man miraculously survived after inserting an 8-inch kitchen knife into his skull. Asked why he did that to himself, the man told police that he was trying to make another hole so he could breathe better.

Last week, police in the town of Donetsk, Russia’s Rostov region, found a local man kneeling by himself in a field with a knife handle sticking out of the top of his head. The 8-inch blade was almost completely buried into his skull, but the man was fully conscious and did not appear to have sustained any serious brain damage. When a shocked policeman asked him who had stuck the knife into his head, the man calmly said that he was having trouble breathing through his nose, so he used the knife to make another hole to breathe through. But the knife got stuck and he couldn’t get it out…

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Police in Gilbert City, Minnesota have been getting reports of birds acting erratically – flying into windows or moving traffic and acting confused. They recently issued a statement explaining that the birds are “flying under the influence” after feasting on fermented berries.

An early frost has caused several types of berries growing in the area around Gilbert to ferment earlier than usual, but that didn’t stop the local bird population from feasting on them. The problem is that, like human teenagers, young birds can’t handle their alcohol as well as mature ones, and the ethanol entering their system causes them to act strange. And as they are getting ready to fly south for the winter, many bird species tend to stuff themselves with whatever food they find in order to build fat for the long journey, causing them to get really drunk.

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I can think of a few good reasons to fake your own death, some of which I actually wrote about in the past, but for some reason, romantic marriage proposal just isn’t one of them. But it worked for one young man, who staged tragic motorcycle accident with him as the victim in order to ask his girlfriend to marry him.

The man, identified by the media as one Jeffrey Delrio, put a lot of thought into his bizarre marriage proposal, even getting local police officers involved to make his apparent demise even more believable. In a clip that went viral last week, Delrio can be seen lying face down on a street in South Cotobato, Philippines, with police redirecting traffic around the scene of the apparently fatal motorcycle accident, as his girlfriend arrives on a moped. She immediately starts screaming in pain after seeing her beloved laying lifeless on the pavement next to his motorcycle, and police rush to restrain her. Little does she know that this is about to become one of the happiest experiences of her life.

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A court in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) recently sentenced a woman to three months in jail after her husband sued her for looking through his phone without his permission.

In a statement made against his wife, the unnamed husband claimed that she would access his phone while he was asleep, copying all the data, including pictures and chat conversations to her own smartphone so she could look through all the information at a later date. The man also complained that his wife would share some of his private information with her siblings. Although the woman defended herself by saying that her husband had given her the password to his phone and permission to look through it, because she had previously caught him chatting with other women, a court in Ras Al Khaimah found her guilty.

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Gilberto Baschiera, the former manager of a bank in Forni di Sopra, a small town in Italy’s Dolomite Alps, has been nicknamed the “Robin Hood Banker” for taking around €1 million ($1.15 million) from rich savers’ accounts, over several years, to help poor people qualify for loans.

It all started in 2009, at the the height of the global financial crisis, when banks’ criteria for credit approval assessments changed. It was no longer about an overall assessment of the customer, but about the reliability of the client, which was established at the bank desk, on a computer. So when a local man came to Gilberto Baschiera’s office asking for a small loan, and the bank manager saw that he didn’t qualify according to the new criteria, he felt sorry for him. Instead of turning him away like most bank managers would have done, Baschiera took some money out of the account of a wealthy client, and added it to the poor man’s account, so that he would qualify. But this was only the beginning of Gilberto Baschiera’s career as a modern-day Robin Hood of the banking world.

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What good is a walking stick if you have to bend over to pick it up whenever it falls down? That was the question that inspired a Greek industrial designer to design Kevdia, a light yet durable walking stick that always stands upright.

The secret of the Kevdia walking stick is a weighted self-balancing base which makes the stick pop right back up whenever it is dropped. This allows the elderly or people with disabilities to confidently let go of the walking stick whenever they need to, without having to hang it on something or bend over to pick it up if it falls down. Made out of lead, the weighted base also promotes a more solid placement of the tip, enhancing the stability and the confidence of the user.

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And the title for the world’s unluckiest diner goes to… A woman in Shenzen, China, who claims to have found sanitary pads in her hotpot, two days in a row, at two separate restaurants.

The woman, known only as ‘Ni’ allegedly found the first sanitary pad while enjoying a hotpot at a restaurant chain called Haidilao, last Friday. In a video that has since went viral online, she can be seen pulling the bizarre object out of her meal and inspecting it. The woman later alerted restaurant staff about her disgusting discovery and asked to talk to the manager, who, after inspecting the object himself, explained that it was probably paper wrapping from the meat. However, the woman dismissed his explanation, claiming that it clearly looked like a sanitary pad. She then proceeded to demand a 1 million yuan compensation from the restaurant.

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Young men in Pu Hong, a small village in Thailand’s Kalasin province, have started painting their fingernails as a way to fend off an evil ghost who they hold responsible for the recent deaths of several locals.

The bizarre trend became popular after the deaths of five residents of Pu Hong over the last three weeks. The first two men, who reportedly came from the same family, simply collapsed and died on the spot, another victim, a teenage girl died in a motorcycle accident, while the details of the other two fatalities have not been disclosed to the media so far. Instead of taking the high number of fatalities in their village as a tragic coincidence, locals believe that supernatural forces are responsible, and have started taking precautions to avoid becoming victims themselves.

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An Indian education organization recently sparked controversy by introducing an optional engineering course that teaches students that modern inventions like aeronautics, batteries, as well as knowledge of gravity existed in India during the Vedic Age, thousands of years ago.

Human Resource Development Ministry (HRD) decided to introduce into the country’s engineering curriculum a controversial book that makes all kinds of bombastic claims, from the fact that the Wright brothers didn’t really invent the airplane, to assertions that ancient Indian ‘scientists’ in the Vedic Age (1500 – 500 BCE) knew about gravity long before Isaac Newton. This book is seen as another attempt by Narendra Modi’s government to promote pseudoscience pushed by Hindu groups.

Entitled Bharatiya Vidya Saar, the controversial book is set to be introduced as part of an optional credit course in engineering colleges and universities affiliated with the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). For some reason, the optional course, called Indian Knowledge Systems, will focus on Indian philosophical, linguistic and artistic traditions, as well as yoga and Indian perspective of modern scientific worldview. Those don’t sound like the kinds of things engineering courses should focus on, but wait until you hear what students will actually be taught.

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Shopping malls in China have come up with an ingenious strategy to attract female shoppers. Many of them now offer attractive ‘shopping’ boyfriends that can be rented by the hour at really affordable rates.

What started as a clever promotion for March 8th, International Women’s Day, has apparently become a year-long strategy to attract female shoppers. Walking through mall galleries in Chinese cities like Hebei or Foshan, you’re likely to spot young, dapper men displayed in giant, doll box-like frames decorated with hearts. They are called ‘shopping boyfriends’ and they can be rented by the hour by lonely female shoppers looking for company. Rates start as low as 1 yuan ($0.15) per hour, up to 2 yuan ($0.30) in some shopping malls.

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You’ll have a tough time finding someone who talks positively about their constipation problems, but one Utah woman is one of those rare exceptions, and for good reason. It was her constipation that inspired her to create a simple stool that now helps millions of people improve their bowel movements.

Judy Edwards has been struggling with constipation her whole life, but the problem only got worse with age. A few years ago, a medical professional advised her to use a foot stool while sitting on the toilet, and that worked surprisingly well for her, so she passed on the same advice to her husband Bill. They were both amazed both about the difference that a little foot stool made and that they had only learned about this trick in their 60s. But it wasn’t until their son Bobby, a self-described gypsy always looking to make a “big splash”, learned about the benefits of the foot stool that the idea of a profitable business started to materialize.

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Samelyn Lafuente, a young primary school teacher from Masbate City, in the Philippines, spent the last three years turning a bland classroom into a little girl’s real-life fantasy, decked in pink and full of Hello Kitty-themed decorations.

Walking into Samelyn Lafuente’s classroom, you would be tempted to think that it’s an obsessed Hello Kitty fan’s shrine to the popular Japanese character. The floor is covered with a Hello Kitty-themed carpet, the walls are all pink, as are the school desks, and there are Hello Kitty decorations everywhere, hanging from the ceiling, plastered on the walls and even in the windows. It would be fair to assume that parents of little girls in Ms. Lafuente’s class must be struggling to pull them away from this real-life fantasy in pink every day, which is just what the teacher planned all along – to create a place where her students would be happy and enjoy their time at school.

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A family in Russia’s Barnaul region was recently taken to court by the local energy company for accumulating a debt of approximately 80,000 rubles ($1,218) in unpaid bills. In their defense, the accused claimed that it was all their cat’s fault, not theirs.

It’s one thing for kids to say “the dog ate my homework”, but you don’t often hear adults trying to lay the blame on their pets in order to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. That’s exactly what this family in Barnaul did, though, and not just anywhere, but in front of a judge. Accused of refusing to pay the local energy company around 80,000 in electrical bills, they claimed that they hadn’t actually used the electricity, but that meter had been tampered with by their mischievous cat.

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Yungar, a remote town in the Peruvian Andes, has been receiving worldwide attention in the past couple of weeks, because of the efforts of a man named Lenin to stop one of the candidates, named Hitler, from running in the upcoming municipal elections.

Hitler Alba Sánchez, also known as ‘Hitler of the Andes’ or ‘The Good Hitler’, has already served as mayor of Yungar between 2011 and 2014, and he is now trying out for a second term. However, his candidacy was challenged by a local man called Lenin Vladimir Rodríguez Valverde, who claimed that Hitler wasn’t eligible because of his previous term as mayor. The attempt to sabotage The Good Hitler’s election ultimately failed, but the bizarre coincidence of these two men’s names has become an international news topic.

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