Australian supermarket chain Drakes recently started a trial of putting GPS locators on expensive meats in order to reduce losses caused by shoplifting.

A South Australian supermarket chain has become so exasperated with meat shoplifting that it is currently trialing a security system that involves putting cuts of expensive meat into transparent cases fitted with GPS locators that allow the product to be tracked. The polpolycarbonate cases are usually used to prevent theft of high-priced items in supermarkets, but Drakes is the first in Australia to use them on meat. Technically, high-quality meat like Wagyu qualifies as a luxury product, so Drakes believes the security measure is justified.

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A 68-year-old French woman diagnosed with Noah’s Syndrome has been given a one-year suspended sentence for keeping 159 cats and 7 dogs in her 80sqm (861sqft) apartment.

The unnamed woman and her 52-year-old male partner got into a dispute with neighbors in their Nice apartment building because of the mess and filth caused by their dozens of pets. Police were eventually called and the state of the woman’s apartment shocked them. There was animal excrement everywhere, over 150 cats and seven dogs, as well as at least two dead cats and two dogs in the bathroom. Many of the animals were dehydrated, suffering from malnutrition, or infected with parasites, and some of them subsequently died because of their health problems. The elderly woman admitted that she had “screwed up” while trying to take care of her many pets, but described the animals as “the love of her life”.

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K. Padmarajan has been dubbed the “Election King” and the “World’s Biggest Election Loser” after participating in 238 political elections and losing every single time.

K. Padmarajan’s story is one of perseverance. The 65-year-old repairman from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu has participated in hundreds of elections over the past three decades and spent thousands of dollars on registration fees. The closest he has ever come to winning an election was in 2011 when he ran for the general assembly in the town of Mettur and got 6,273 votes. He was way behind the winner – he got over 75,000 votes – but it gave him hope that he could one day win. That day is yet to come, but Padmarajan recently pointed out that winning is the secondary goal. Resilience and accepting defeat are key and no one is better at it than him.

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Milbenkäse is a unique type of goat cheese ripened in wooden boxes infested with millions of tiny cheese mites and consumed with the tiny critters for added taste.

The history of Milbenkäse can be traced back to the Middle Ages when it was produced in Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia regions of Germany, but the cheese-making tradition faded with time, and in 1970 the recipe for Milbenkäse was nearly lost forever. An elderly woman in the village of  Würchwitz remained the only person in the world who knew how to make this special cheese, and she passed on her knowledge to local science teacher Helmut Pöschel. He in turn partnered with Christian Schmelzer and together they managed to revitalize the production of the so-called “spider cheese”. Today, Würchwitz is the only place in the world where Milbenkäse is still produced.

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Blonde chocolate has yet to reach the popularity of milk, dark, and white chocolate, but it is already recognized as one of the most ingenious variations of white chocolate ever created.

The history of blonde chocolate can be traced back to the year 2004 when French pastry chef Frederic Bau was busy showing off his skills during an exhibition in Japan. He apparently got so carried away during the show that he left his white chocolate melting in a bain-marie for four days. When he finally got back to it, the chocolate had become a pale brown and had a very distinct smell and flavor. Apart from its caramel-like color, this new confection had the milky smoothness of white chocolate, but also butterscotch, toffee, and shortbread-tasting notes, as well as a distinct aftertaste of roasted coffee. Frederic Bau quickly recognized the potential of his discovery, and blonde chocolate was born.

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Japanese matsutake mushrooms are the most expensive mushrooms in the world. Fetching up to $500 per pound, they rival truffles and are considered one of the most valuable ingredients of Japanese cuisine.

Matsutake, or mattake mushrooms grow on the Korean Peninsula, in China, and even in the United States, but only the ones harvested in Japan, especially around the Kyoto area, fetch truly mindblowing prizes. While imported Matsutake can cost around $50 per pound or less, Japanese mushrooms can cost up to ten times as much. To help Japanese buyers discern between imported and home-grown matsutake, Japan has a law that requires imported mushrooms to be washed of dirt before commercialization, while the domestic variety has a rough, grubby appearance. Japanese matsutake are prized for their strong aroma, meaty texture, and earty taste.

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An Italian woman with no direct heirs left all her €5 million ($5.4 million) fortune to her Albanian caretaker, completely blindsiding the 10 nephews who were expecting the inheritance.

Maria Malfatti, a descendant of one of the most famous families in Rovereto, a town in Italy’s Trento province, died last November at the age of 80. A descendant of Valeriano Malfatti, a former mayor of Rovereto and vice-president of Vienna’s Parliament, the woman owned a number of valuable assets, including several apartments, a historic building in the town center, as well as significant sums of money kept in bank accounts. However, Maria Malfatti had never been married and had no children to leave the family fortune to, so her nephews stood to inherit everything. Only the woman apparently had other plans, as she decided to leave everything down to the last cent to the woman who had cared for her over the last few years, an Albanian national.

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Lily Rain is a popular AI-created digital model that earns her creators around $20,000 a month on platforms like Fanvue simply by appearing in stunning travel photos.

It’s no secret that AI models are killing it online these days. Fitness model Aitana Lopez has over 300,000 followers on Instagram and she’s not even a real person, Emilly Pelegrini, another digital influencer, has been dubbed the world’s hottest model, and “perfect girlfriend” Lexi Love earns over $30,000 a month by acting as a romantic interest for lonely people. Now, another virtual influencer is making news headlines because of her popularity as a travel model. Lily Rain’s profile on subscription-based social platform Fanvue shows the attractive young woman in various eye-catching locations around the world, but the fact that these photos are entirely the work of artificial intelligence doesn’t seem to bother her legions of fans.

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A Chinese woman is being accused of trying to terminate a co-worker’s pregnancy by poisoning her water to prevent her from taking maternity leave and thus avoiding a higher workload.

In one of the most shocking cases of work-related incidents reported in China, a worker at a government-affiliated institution in Hubei Province allegedly tried to terminate a co-worker’s pregnancy by repeatedly poisoning her water in order to avoid the higher workload caused by her maternity leave. The nefarious plan reportedly came to light when the victim noticed that her water kept tasting strange, regardless of its source. At first, she was convinced that it was the office’s water supply, but the taste persisted even after she switched to bottled water. That’s when she decided to investigate further.

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Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera, a small rock in northern Africa conquered by Spain in 1564, holds the title for the world’s smallest national border, measuring just 85 meters in length.

Spain has almost 2000 kilometers of land borders with Portugal and France, but it also has much smaller borders with countries like Andorra, the United Kingdom (Gibraltar), and Morocco. It is with the latter, the African nation of Morocco, that Spain shares the smallest land border in the world, an 85-meter-long stretch of land linking a rock about 19,000 square meters in size to the Moroccan coast. Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera has been Spanish territory since 1564 when it was conquered by Admiral Pedro de Estopiñán, and although Morocco has repeatedly laid claim to it, Spain has never agreed to return the land and actually has troops stationed there to enforce Spanish rule.

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32 Degrees North is an innovative pair of adaptive glasses created by Deep Optics that uses pixelated liquid crystal (LC) lenses and works as both protective eyewear and adaptive reading glasses.

Liquid eyeglass lenses have been around since 2017, but it was only recently that a company used the revolutionary invention to create a truly intriguing pair of eyeglasses that could theoretically become the only pair of glasses a person would need. That’s because the adaptive concept of the glasses allows the wearer to adjust their purpose with a single swipe of the frame. For stylish sunglasses, simply swipe backward on the right frame, and to put them into vision correction mode, you just swipe backward. Additionally, the lens power can be changed from 0 to 2.5 diopters, and the lightweight built-in battery offers up to 48 hours of power.

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A Nigerian woman is facing up to seven years in prison for allegedly breaking her country’s cyber crime laws by posting a negative online review for a can of tomato puree.

In September of last year, 39-year-old Chioma Okoli took to Facebook to voice her opinion about a can of tomato puree she had recently bought, claiming that it contained too much sugar and asking her friends and followers to express their opinions as well. Somehow, Okoli’s post went viral on Meta’s social network, generating over 3,000 comments, including one from a person claiming to be the sister of the founder of Erisco Foods Limited, the company that made the canned tomato puree. They asked Okoli to stop bashing the product and just try something else, but the woman doubled down on her claims, asking the person to ask their brother to”stop ki***ing people with his product”. That ended up costing her, as she was arrested just days later and she is now facing up to seven years in prison.

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Made with rare Nacional cacao harvested from just 14 farms in Ecuador’s Piedra de Plata valley, To’ak chocolate is undoubtedly the world’s most valuable chocolate.

From truffle-infused ice cream to gold-plated sandwiches, the world is full of expensive sweets and treats. But while most of them are gimmicky creations designed to attract attention, a few do more than simply add outrageously expensive ingredients that hardly affect the experience of eating them. Ecuadorian chocolate brand To’ak claims that its products are among these few, although judging whether the price of its most expensive offerings is actually justified is ultimately up to the consumer. To’ak is most often referred to as ‘the most expensive chocolate in the world’, which is technically true, as its small chocolate bars can sell for up to $490 per 50-gram bar, but the company believes that simply referring to its product simply as expensive doesn’t really tell the whole story of To’ak.

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Alba Renai, an attractive digital influencer powered by artificial intelligence, recently announced that she will be hosting a special segment on Spain’s version of popular reality show ‘Survivor’.

Created in the fall of last year by Be a Lion, a subsidiary of television giant Mediaset Spain, Alba Renai quickly became an Instagram celebrity, attracting over 10,000 fans on Instagram. She is a beautiful young woman, only she is not actually real, but the result of AI-powered image generation based on the results of a focus group of 350 young adults who were asked about the physical and personality attributes they find most important, and the team at Be a Lion used this data to create an avatar that would appeal to as many people as possible. But what really catapulted Alba Renai into the public eye was the news that she would be hosting a special segment on Spain’s version of ‘Survivor.

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A Chinese man recently set a new Guinness Record for the longest time to spray water from the mouth continuously, a whopping 5 minutes and 51.88 seconds.

Water sprouting is a fairly old trick that dates back to the 17th century. It involves drinking large amounts of water and then regurgitating it using muscle control. It’s not something that everyone can do, obviously, but we’ve seen some pretty impressive human water fountains over the years. However, none nearly as impressive as Ma Hui, a 35-year-old Chinese man who recently set a new Guinness record for the longest time spraying water from the mouth. To say that he smashed the previous record would be a gross understatement, considering that he managed to sprout water from his mouth for nearly six minutes, while the previous record holder, Ethiopia’s Kirubel Yilma, had managed to do it for “only” 56.36 seconds.

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