Faced with a choice between their life and their valuables, most people would choose the former in a heartbeat, but one Michigan man showed that he would rather die than part with his beloved designer bag.

On Monday, May 21, Jerad Kluting was out for a walk in Michigan’s Holland Township when a masked robber came out of nowhere, pulled out a gun from his waistband and demanded that he hand over his bag. But this was no ordinary bag. It was a $1,700 Louis Vuitton that Kluting had fallen in love with the moment he saw it. He had saved up the money to buy it for a long time, and he wasn’t going to just give it up to a stranger, even if his life was on the line.

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After being served an official notice asking why he had only been present at work 16 times in the last 8 months, an engineer from the Indian state of Gujarat replied that he was the 10th incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, and had been too busy with divine work to focus on his job.

Rameshchandra Fefar, an engineer at Gujarat government’s Sardar Sarovar Punarvasvat Agency (SSPA), claims he first got an indication of his “divine greatness” in August of 1999, from the newspaper horoscope. He felt his body being detached from his being and getting filled with ‘divya anand’ (divine happiness), but didn’t know exactly what had happened until his wife read the daily horoscope. It mentioned that he would become a leader of men and be supremely intelligent.

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A 71-year-old woman from Mazatlan, Mexico, claims that she is six-months pregnant and will soon give birth to a beautiful girl. This would make her the oldest mother in history.

Maria de la Luz says that she first suspected she was pregnant three months ago, when she started feeling tired and experienced symptoms like dizziness and vomiting. She went to a private clinic for an ultrasound which revealed that she was going to become a mother for the ninth time. The 71-year-old woman admits that doctors at the clinic were even more surprised than she was and claims to have had a total of 10 ultrasounds in the last three months, just to be sure.

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Joe Quililan, a young snake catcher from the Philippines, has been dubbed “Venom Man” for his unusual habit of allowing poisonous snakes to bite him every week and even injecting small quantities of venom into his body in order to boost his resistance to it.

31-year-old Quililan, from Cagayan de Oro City, caught his first Northern Philippine Cobra when he was only 14-years-old. Back then, he didn’t have much experience handling snakes, so one day the cobra bit him, only instead of going to the hospital, the teen just brushed it off and got on with his day as if nothing had happened. Most people would have experience severe breathing problems soon after being bitten, followed by a loss of consciousness and then death, but not Joe. He claims that that first snake bite made him realize that he had an unusual resistance to cobra venom, and spent the following years trying to become completely immune to it.

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69-year-old Xia Boyu recently became the oldest double amputee to conquer Mount Everest. That alone is an amazing achievement, but even more impressive is the fact that he did it on his fifth attempt, the first of which had caused him the loss of both his feet as a result of severe frostbite.

Xia Boyu’s first tried to reach the top of Mount Everest in 1975, as part of an expedition backed by the Chinese Government. With only 250 meters to go from reaching the summit, the team was pinned down by bad weather which didn’t let up for two days and three nights. The long wait took its toll on the climbers, and to make sure that everyone made it back alive, the team decided to turn back and fulfil their dream another time. During the descent, Xia gave his sleeping bag to one of his colleagues who was in a worse shape than him. Unfortunately, this selfless act would cause him to lose both his feet to frostbite.

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Authorities in Hejiang county, China’s Sichuan province, have come up with a controversial method of convincing borrowers to pay up their debts – showing their faces and names during short clips played in cinemas before the main movie starts.

Called “Reel of Shame”, the clip features an animated character who tells the audience “Come look at these laolai” before showing the borrowers’ faces, names and other details on the big screen. The derogatory term ‘laolai’ refers to borrowers who fail to pay their debts on time. To maximize the technique’s effectiveness, authorities show the borrowers’ faces in cinemas in their local area.

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A Mexican mayor who incurred the wrath of his constituents by not fulfilling his campaign promises was recently detained in the town hall until he agreed to pay a considerable ransom.

Alfonso Hernández Montiel, the mayor of Chichiquila, had only five months left from his mandate to fulfil the promises he had made during his electoral campaign. However, dissatisfied locals decided they weren’t going to sit around and wait for his term to end while he continued to lead them on with more empty promises. On Sunday, a large number of Chichiquila residents staged a massive protest in front of the city hall, demanding that he deliver on all the things he promised during his campaign, including the construction of an important bridge.

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54-year-old Konstantin Scherbinin, a Russian multi-millionaire who made his fortune in the oil business, is letting his children pick out his next wife on a controversial reality show called ‘Millionaire for Marriage’.

Scherbinin has allegedly vowed to respect the on-screen decision of his three daughters and one son, and propose to the lucky woman they select out of the 2,000 hopeful candidates. To show his commitment to the reality show, the oil mogul has designated his oldest son to run his businesses while he and the rest of the family focus on finding a new bride. The producers of Millionaire for Marriage have been criticized by Russian viewers for turning a show that is supposed to be about love into a battle for a sugar daddy who can provide a comfortable life fot the winner.

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A video doing the rounds on Chinese social media these days shows chicks hatching in the back of a truck stacked with egg cartons as it’s driving around on what must have been a very hot day.

Ever hear the phrase “it’s so hot outside, you could hatch a chicken egg”? Me neither, but it’s apparently a thing that can happen, at least judging by this viral video from China. It shows a truck carrying dozens of egg cartons, and chicks literally hatching from the eggs as it’s driving along. It’s only a few seconds long, but you can clearly see at least five hatched chicks, as well as some tiny feet breaking through the egg shells and some empty shells.

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Dutch company Vivera claims it has created the holy grail of plant-based protein – a 100% vegan steak that tastes and smell so good that consumers will barely be able to tell that it’s not actual steak.

Made primarily of soy and wheat, the groundbreaking vegan steak is the result of one and a half years of trial and error, with Vivera’s experts working against the clock to ensure that the Dutch company is the first to bring a 100% plant-based steak to market. While getting the taste and smell right was a big challenge, the texture was by far the most difficult to replicate. Making a plant-based product feel like steak when your biting and chewing on it is apparently not the easiest thing in the world.

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A Swedish mother of two whose tattoo artist misspelled her son’s name decided that it was easier and a lot less painful to legally change the boy’s name rather than go through several painful laser removal sessions.

30-year-old Johanna Giselhäll Sandström, from Kyrkhult, Sweden, wanted to show her devotion to her two children, Nova and Kevin, by having their names tattooed on her arm. She visited a local tattoo shop, told one of the tattooists there what she wanted and gave him her children’s name. He never asked anything about the spelling and instead just went to work on her arm. The woman didn’t notice anything strange about the tattoo at first, but when she got home and had a closer look at it, her heart sank. Instead of ‘Kevin’ the artist had misspelled it ‘Kelvin’.

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It’s perfectly normal for someone to laugh uncontrollably when tickled, although some of us are more ticklish than others, but researchers at the University of California, San Diego, recently reported the unusual case of a woman who would burst into laughter when seeing other people being tickled.

Referred to only as TC, the woman was apparently seeking help for her bizarre condition – whenever she saw someone getting tickled, she could feel the sensation on her own skin and would start to laugh uncontrollably as if she was the one getting tickled. Researchers conducted a series of experiments to explore the bizarre phenomenon further and concluded that the woman suffered from a rare condition known as mirror-touch synaesthesia. It is believed to be caused by mirror neurons, connectors in the brain that react the same way when an event is experienced or when it’s simply observed.

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A 25-year-old Dallas man posed as a freshman high-school student for nine months so he could once again relive his glory days as a teen basketball player.

Sidney Bouvier Gilstrap-Portley enrolled at the Skyline High School last year, claiming to be a Hurricane Harvey refugee named Rashun Richardson. At the time, Dallas high-schools had opened their doors to hurricane evacuees, and Gilstrap-Portley was savvy enough to take advantage of that. In October, he transferred to Hillcrest High School, where he again claimed to be a homeless hurricane evacuee. He joined the school’s basketball team, became its star player and was voted the District 11-5A offensive player of the year for the 2017-2018 season. Unfortunately for Sidney, his love for basketball proved to be his undoing.

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Two Singaporean women recently contacted police after being conned out of $S1,450 ($1,080) by a man who sold them nine small bottles of “holy water” which he claimed could cure their bad luck and solve all their problems.

We’ve all heard of cunning snake oil salesmen using their power of persuasion to sell fake cures to gullible people, but it takes a special kind of talent to sell a small quantity of water for a small fortune. Well, either that or you need to find potential customers naive enough to fall for your lies. In retrospect, 30-year-old Ms. Yang, from Singapore, admits that she and her sister probably should have thought twice before spending a total of $S1,450 on nine small bottles of water just because the seller told them it was capable of turning their luck.

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A Chinese woman recently made international headlines after discovering that the white ball of fur she bought a year ago wasn’t really a puppy, but a white fox cub.

Last year, the woman, surnamed Wang, bought what she thought was a Japanese Spitz puppy from a pet shop in Jinzhong, China’s Shanxi province. She started realizing that something wasn’t quite right about her cute pet after about three months, when it stopped eating dog food and started to grow an unusually long, fluffy tail. She didn’t pay too much attention to these details, and just continued feeding it chicken and fruit, which it seemed to like. But then things started getting weirder.

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