Hamburg police recently took to Facebook to report the hilarious case of two young parents who forgot their newborn baby in the back of a taxi on their way back from the hospital where it had been delivered.

According to the viral social media post, the forgetful parents had just given birth to their second child at a Hamburg hospital and were excited to get back home as a family of four. So excited in fact, that when it was time to get out of the taxi and introduce their bundle of joy to his crib, they actually forgot to take the said bundle of joy with them. They took the baby’s one-year-old sibling out of the car, paid the cab driver and said their goodbye. But as the tax was pulling away, the couple got a strange feeling that something was missing, only by the time they realized they were missing their newest family member, it was too late.

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A Chinese DIY enthusiast has become an overnight sensation thanks to his unusual approach to solving household problems. He uses foods like instant noodles, Oreo cookies and rice to expertly fix various pieces of furniture, leaving them as good as new.

The unconventional handyman, who goes by Xiubandrng on Chinese video upload platform Douyin, has been wowing Chinese fans with his skills for months, but the Western world was only introduced to his amazing DIY work this week, when a video of him repairing a broken sink with dry noodles and glue went viral on several social networks. He just fills the hole in the sink with noodles, pours some glue over them, smooths it out with an abrasive strip and paints the whole thing white. When he’s done, the sink looks brand new.

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A Spanish inmate recently invoked the principle of religious freedom in an attempt to convince the prison warden to serve him a glass of wine with every meal so he could worship his chosen deity.

In a letter addressed to the director of Zaballa prison, in Spain’s Basque Country, the unnamed prisoner declares himself a disciple of Bachus, the Roman god of wine, and asks that he be provided with a glass of wine for every meal, so he can properly worship his deity.

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Plougastel, a small village in France’s Brittany region, is offering a prize of €2,000 ($2,250) to whoever can decipher a 230-year-old inscription carved into a nearby rock-slab.

Discovered just a few years ago, the mysterious rock is located in a cove accessible only at low tide. It features 20 lines of writing in a “language” that so far no one has been able to crack, two years  – 1786 and 1787 – as well as carved images of a ship with sails and rudder, and a sacred heart. Local academics have been struggling to decipher the centuries-old images for some time now, but so far all they’ve come up with is theories. Some believe that the writing may be in old Breton or Basque, while others think that whoever carved it into the rock slab may have been semi-illiterate.

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A year and a half ago, Caitlin Little, a sophomore at Southeast Guilford High School in Greensboro, North Carolina, suffered a concussion during a cross-country practice which left her with a rare form of amnesia. All of her new memories are erased each night, so every morning she wakes up thinking it’s October 2017.

Caitlin’s case sounds a lot like the plot of hit romantic comedy 50 First Dates, in which Drew Barrymore’s character was involved in a serious car accident which left her unable to create new memories after that terrible event, causing her to wake up every morning thinking it was the day of of the accident. In 2004, when 50 First Dates Came Out, the amnesia Barrymore’s character was suffering from was nothing more than a fictional condition called ‘Goldberg’s Syndrome’, and one clinical neuropsychologist even wrote an article about it, claiming that it “bears no relation to any known neurological or psychiatric condition”.  However, several real-life cases of short-term memory resetting have been reported since then, and today that once fictional condition is a medically-recognized disorder known as anterograde amnesia.

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Everyone feels the need to stretch their neck every once in a while, but in rare cases it can cause more than a satisfying pop. A 28-year-old Oklahoma man ended up in the hospital after tearing his vertebral artery by stretching his neck to alleviate neck soreness.

Josh Hader was working from his home in Guthrie, Oklahoma when he felt a familiar soreness in his neck and tried to alleviate as he had done many times before, by stretching his neck a bit. Only this time, as he used his hand to apply a bit more pressure, he heard a loud pop and instantly knew something was wrong. His left side went numb almost immediately, so he quickly checked to see if his face was drooping, one of the most common signs of a stroke. His face looked fine though, so he assumed he must have just pinched a nerve and went to get some ice packs. That’s when he noticed he couldn’t walk straight.

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In a time when the cost of renting a home seems to be getting higher virtually everywhere in the civilized world, the residents of an idyllic housing complex in Germany are living in an inflation-free utopia. The people of Fuggerei, a walled district on the outskirts of Augsburg, pay only $1 a year on rent, the same as the first tenants who originally moved here nearly 500 years ago.

Fuggerei was founded in 1514 by an affluent businessman named Jakob Fugger, as a social housing complex for the poorest people of Augsburg. The Fugger family moved to the bustling German city in the mid-14th century and established a prosperous cloth trading business. By the 16th century, the Fugger family was one of the richest in Augsburg, and their operations expanded to real-estate and banking. Jakob Fugger was the wealthiest banker in the city, which earned him the nickname “Jakob Fugger the Rich”, but he stayed true to his family’s values, and in 1514 he started the construction of Fuggerei as a way of giving back to the community.

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Pattharapol and Lee Puengboonpra, a fashion-obsessed mother and son duo from Bangkok, Thailand, have achieved online and offline fame thanks to their impeccably stylish and perfectly coordinated outfits.

Six years ago, when Pattharapol “Peepy” Lee started posting photos of himself and his 60-something mother wearing flamboyant matching outfits on Instagram, he had no idea they’d soon become fashion influencers and online celebrities in their own right. A long-time fashion aficionado and former editor-in-chief of Hi! Magazine, he acted on a whim, and had no idea he’d one day have legions of fans showering him and “mother Lee” with compliments for their sense of fashion. The @peepy_and_mother_lee Instagram page now has around 130,000 followers from all over the world and the Thai pair are regarded by some in the fashion industry as the “world’s best mother and son style” duo.

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When riding an escalator, it’s recommended that you keep a tight grip on the handrail, just to be safe. But what if you choose to disregard that advice? Well, one Canadian woman has been fighting a 10-year-long court battle for her right to ride escalators hands-free.

In 2009, Bela Kosoian was riding an escalator at a subway station in the city of Laval when a police officer told her to respect a pictogram on the escalator that said “Caution, hold the handrail”, in French. The Montreal-area woman refused to obey the officer’s command and instead started arguing with him. She ended up being detained and getting a $100 ticket for refusing to hold the rail and another $320 for failing to identify herself. She was also handcuffed and detained for 30 minutes.

Kosoian was acquitted of her “crimes” in municipal court in 2012, and then filed her own lawsuit against the city, arguing that she was not obligated to hold the escalator handrail or identify herself in front of the police officer. She has so far lost twice in Quebec courts, but refused to give up, and this Tuesday her unique case was heard by the Supreme Court of Canada.

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Yoshiro Harada, a newspaper delivery man from Tokyo, Japan, was only 24 years old when he decided to live the rest of his life as a tiger and became Shinjuku Tiger. Today, at age 69, he is considered a living legend of the business district.

Born in Nagano Prefecture, Harada moved to Tokyo in 1967 to attend Daito Bunka University. He started delivering newspapers while he was still in school, and eventually decided to quit the university and dedicate himself to his job full time. He can’t really recall the reason he quit his studies, all he knows is that he wanted to quit. The same can be said about his beginnings as Shinjuku Tiger. One day in 1972, as he was attending a shrine festival in Kabukichō, an entertainment and red-light district in Shinjuku, he passed by a row of shops and noticed one of them was selling colorful, plastic tiger masks. That’s when it hit him, he was going to live the rest of his life as a tiger.

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A newly-married woman from the UAE recently filed for divorce from her husband, who she accused of being too cheap and making her pay for everything.

Arabic newspaper Al Baiyan reports that the unnamed woman filed a case in the Personal Status Chamber at Abu Dhabi court, asking for a divorce from her Iranian husband, even though they were technically still in their honeymoon. She claims that the man, who is 13 years her junior, asked her to pay for everything, including groceries and bills for electricity and water. The scorned woman is apparently so determined to be rid of her husband that she agreed to waive all of her rights just to get the divorce.

The woman complained that her “cheap” husband specifically asked her to register all utility bills under her name, claiming that he had lost all of his personal documents. Her attorney told the court that the man even asked her to handle all the registration for services, while he had his personal documents processed.

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The Lyall’s wren was a species of small, flightless birds that once thrived on Stephens Island, in New Zealand. It’s one of the many species that have been rendered extinct by the reckless introduction of predators in their natural habitat, but what makes this bird’s story unique is that it was allegedly both discovered and wiped out by a house cat named Tibbles.

The lighthouse on Stephens Island was built in 1892, but the existence of a yet-undiscovered species of bird on this small patch of land was only reported a couple of years later, when assistant lighthouse keeper David Lyall moved in, along with a small staff and his pregnant cat, Tibbles. Lyall was a passionate naturalist and amateur ornithologist, and was looking forward to pursuing his hobbies on this previously uninhabited island, but little did he know that he would go down in history as the man who discovered the Lyall’s wren and indirectly caused its extinction, both in less than a year.

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A group of 75 female volunteers from India’s Odisha state has spent every day of the last 20 years patrolling a 75-hectare forest to protect it from woodcutters and timber smugglers.

In 1999, the eastern state of Odisha was ravaged by a supercyclone. People lost their homes, their crops and had to go without food or clothing for several days. But many in Gundalba, a small village in the Mahanadi delta of Puri district, realized that the only reason they were still alive was thanks to a forest and mangrove area that had shielded them from the brunt of the devastation. They knew they had to protect it at all costs, but with all the men busy rebuilding the village after the supercyclone, the task of watching over the forest fell to the women. They quickly formed a vigilante group and  have been taking turns patrolling the forested area in search of timber smugglers and woodcutters for the last 20 years.

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He Yuhong, a 27-year-old beauty blogger from China, has become an online sensation thanks to her amazing ability to transform herself into a doppelganger of celebrities and iconic characters, using makeup.

He, who posts photos and videos of her work on various social networks under the pseudonym Yuyamika, shot to fame last year, when she used her makeup skills to turn herself into a real-life version of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The video of her remarkable transformation got tens of millions of views on China’s Weibo platform alone, and quickly went viral on Western social networks as well. Since then, Yuhong has been entertaining her growing fan base with more makeup magic, turning herself into doppelgangers of celebrities like Johnny Depp and Taylor Swift, as well as Albert Einstein or the Girl with a Pearl Earring.

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A 56-year-old woman from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has been diagnosed with Transient Global Amnesia (TGA) after a terrible headache apparently caused her to completely forget the last 38 years of her life.

One day in early October of last year, Kim Denicola was leaving a bible study at a local church when she called her husband to complain about an excruciating headache and blurry vision. He told her to go to the emergency room, but some friends found her passed out in the church parking lot and rushed her to the hospital. The first thing Denicola remembers from after that incident is lying in a hospital bed and a nurse asking her questions she apparently had all the wrong answers to.

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