33-year-old Alena Kravchenko, a real-life Rapunzel from Ukraine, had her last haircut at age five, 28 years ago. Today, Alena’s hair is around two meters long and the young Ukrainian claims that she sometimes trips on it.

Alena’s mother had always told her that a woman’s feminine beauty stems directly from her hair, and she took her words to heart. The last time she allowed anyone to cut her blonde locks was 28 years ago, and today, even though her extremely long becomes problematic, she is still convinced that her mother was right. “There is nothing more beautiful in the world than a woman with natural, flowing hair,” Alena says.

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A Vietnamese businessman has been attracting a lot of attention on Asian social media sites for his obsession with gold. 36-year-old Tran Ngoc Phuc wears a total of 13kg of gold wherever he goes, and is always accompanied by at least 5 bodyguards who make sure that no one tries to steal it.

Phuc first started making headlines in Vietnam last week after a series of YouTube videos of him showing off his massive jewellery went viral,  getting several millions of views. Since then, photos and videos of him wearing his huge gold necklace, bracelets and rings have been doing the rounds on Vietnamese social media, and even on several websites in China and Thailand. While some people expressed their doubts that the jewels are real gold, most commenters wondered how he can stand walking around with so much extra weight. The businessman admitted that wearing the jewellery took some getting used to , but claimed that it was worth it as all the gold has boosted his good luck and prosperity.

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A 70-year-old man from Scotland ruined his winter holiday and got himself banned from the United States forever after accidentally declaring himself a terrorist on an online visa form.

John Stevenson and his wife, Marion, an elderly couple from Inverclyde, Scotland, were supposed to vacation in New York this month, but they ended up losing both their flight tickets and their advance for accommodation in The Big Apple, after John got permanently banned from entering the United States for declaring himself a terrorist on an online visa form. Despite several attempts to convince US officials that he had just made a mistake, he remains banned, so the couple can’t even reschedule their trip, as they don’t know if they’ll ever be allowed into the United States.

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The owner of a clothing store in the UK is taking an unconventional approach to preventing theft. The woman, who preferred to remain anonymous, wants to hire skilled thieves to come in and steal from her store and then tell her how they did it, so she can prevent it from happening again.

The witty entrepreneur posted a job offer on Bark.com, which quickly went viral, offering thieves £50 ($64) an hour to come in and try to steal from her store, plus the chance to keep three of the things they manage to steal. Candidates would need to visit her store on a number of occasions over several weeks and then produce a report of all the things they stole and how they did it. Realizing that her job may come off as strange, the woman explained that she is simply taking a different approach to theft prevention after years of suffering significant loses during the holiday season.

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Nick Prosser, a 28-year-old man from Rotorua, in New Zealand, has been stuttering for as long as he can remember, but he recently discovered that speaking in an Irish accent makes his speech disorder disappear almost completely.

The young New Zealander claims he discovered the simple cure to his stutter completely by accident, while trying different accents with a friend, for fun. When he tried the Irish accent, both he and his friend were amazed that his pesky stutter virtually vanished. They were able to have a long conversation without him stuttering at all, which had never happened before. He just couldn’t believe that something so simple could be the cure to a problem that had seriously affected his self-confidence ever since he was a child.

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A 65-year-old woman from a village in India’s West Bengal has allegedly spent every day for the past two decades submerged up to her neck in the waters of a nearby lake, due to an unknown disease.

Before getting into this strange story, I have to disclose the fact that it is unverified. It went viral in Russia (of all places) last month, and I’ve been trying to find a credible source ever since. Unfortunately, I’ve had no luck. Apart from dozens of Russian news sites and a few dubious English blogs, I have found no mention of this woman anywhere. Normally, I wouldn’t even have bothered writing about something like this, but what really intrigued me about this story is that it comes with a video of this woman siting idly in a lake, all by herself, as other people look on from the shore. There’s definitely a story here, I just don’t know if it’s the one I’ve found. So if you’re reading this and can provide any credible insight about this news story, I’d love to hear from you. Anyway, here’s the Russian version:

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When US Border Patrol agent Dennis Dickey decided to reveal the gender of his soon-to-be-born baby to family and friends in an explosive fashion, he never imagined that his stunt would spark a 45,000 acre wildfire, but that’s exactly what it did.

The 37-yer-old Border Patrol agent planned to fire a shotgun at a target that would explode with either pink or blue powder, thus revealing the gender of his unborn child. There were a few things he didn’t really think through, though. First, he packed the target with a legal but highly explosive compound called Tannerite, for a more dramatic effect, and he also chose to place that target among dry grasses and mesquite trees. When Dickey fired his shotgun, blue smoke exploded from the target, revealing that his child was a boy, but there was no time to celebrate, as the explosion immediately ignited the surrounding the dry plants.

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A Colorado man claims that he was on intense chemotherapy and painkillers for five long years, after being diagnosed with a rare form of cancer by multiple doctors, a cancer that he recently learned never existed.

The living nightmare of James Salaz, a resident of Montrose, in Colorado, began five years ago, when he went to a hospital to have an intense pain deep under his armpit investigated. His doctor told him that tests revealed two abnormalities inside his left lung. After undergoing a couple of open lung biopsies, Salaz was diagnosed with Langerhans Cell Histiocytosis, a rare form of cancer that causes cells to build up in parts of the body, damaging tissues and ultimately leading to death. Devastated by the news, he visited doctors in Montrose, Delta, Grand Junction and Denver, and they all confirmed that he had Langerhans. It turns out they were all wrong.

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Seeing Zhang Ziyu towering over her classmates at the Cultural East Road Primary School, in Jinan, China, it’s hard to believe that they are all in the sixth grade. The 11-year-old already measures 6ft 7in (210 cm), and many believe she is the tallest girl in the world.

Zhang’s parents are both former professional basketball players, and they are both over 2 meters tall, so it’s pretty clear that genetics played an important role in her physical development, but reaching 210 cm by age 11 is still very unusual. Zhang has always been taller than all the other children, and one of her colleagues remembers that in the first grade, she already stood at 1.6m (5ft 3in) tall. That’s already considerably taller than the average Chinese sixth-grade girl (4ft 6in or 1.38m).

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In an effort to spare her young daughter from being ostracized by other children for not having a father, a Japanese single mother made the controversial decision to hire an actor who has been posing as the girl’s father for the last 10 years.

Megumi was only a baby when her parents separated and he father disappeared from her life. The mother, Asako, remembers that the girl started asking where her father was very early, but that her father’s absence didn’t seem like a big deal until she was about 10-years-old. That’s when Asako noticed a change in her daughter’s behavior; she stopped talking to her, became withdrawn, and eventually stopped going to school. Her mother soon learned that she wasn’t just blaming herself for her father’s absence, but she had also become a victim of bullying at school, as it often happens with children of single parents in Japan. Asako was heartbroken, and after appealing to Megumi’s teachers for help, she also decided to give her daughter the thing she wanted most, even if it meant lying to her.

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A Changsha man recently made news headlines in China after it was reported that he became hooked on cold medication 10 years ago and has taken over 30,000 pills since then just to satisfy his addiction.

The 48-year-old man, surnamed Wang, was featured in a viral Pear video in which he explains that he first bought an unspecified brand of cold medicine about a decade ago, to treat a headache. He took a couple of them and they were very effective, so every time he felt even a slight discomfort he always popped some more pills, which made him feel a lot better. The problem was that in time, he had to increase the dose to get the same results, and he reached a point where he took between 8 to 12 of these pills every day just to function normally. In recent years, the man’s addiction to the pills had gotten so bad that if he went too long without taking some, he would start to get melancholic, then become inexplicably irritated. He also experienced physical symptoms, like headaches and a general feeling of discomfort.

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Looking at the new running shoes unveiled by Spanish start-up FBR you would be forgiven for thinking it incomplete, but the missing heel in the sole is actually by design.

Athletic trainer Franc Beneyto came up with the idea for a heelless running shoe five years ago, after reading the book “Running with the Kenyans”, by Adharanand Finn, a journalist and amateur runner who lived for a few months in Kenya with athletes and coaches to investigate why they were able to run more, faster and get injured less frequently than others. In the book, Finn wrote that Kenyans had refined a natural running technique that didn’t require the support of the heel, but instead relied on the Achilles tendon, plantar arch, soleus and calf muscle. That got him thinking, and one day he just cut off the heel of a running shoe to see what running in it would feel like.

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Yoshitaka Sakurada, Japan’s new cybersecurity minister, recently left the whole world dumbfounded after admitting that he has never used a computer.

Sakurada made the stunning admission during a question and answer session with Japan’s Lower House cabinet committee. When asked about things like the power grid and malware, the newly appointed cybersecurity minister seemed overwhelmed, and at one point said that USB was “basically never used” in Japan’s nuclear power stations, which led many to believe that he didn’t understand the technology at all. Most of his replies were met with laughter from the other politicians, but no one actually expected him to casually admit that he had never even used a computer before.

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Two cute felines who have been trying to enter an art museum in Hiroshima, Japan, a few times a week for the past two years recently went viral online. The cats have yet to get past the guards at the museum’s front door, but their persistence has earned them the adoration of millions of people.

This adorable cat-and-guard game started back in 2016, when the Onomichi City Museum of Art in Hiroshima hosted a cat photography exhibition called ‘Cats – Mitsuaki Iwago Photography Exhibition’. Among the many human visitors who came to admire this collection of photos of street cats in various poses, there was also a black cat who, just like everyone else, tried to access the museum through the front door. However the vigilant guard on duty spotted it and shooed it away. The cute scene was captured by Twitter user @mikusuke, who later posted photos of it online. They got thousands of likes and comments, but there’s really nothing unusual about cat pics going viral. What no one anticipated however, was the black cat’s persistence. For some reason it has been coming back to the museum and trying to get inside every week for the past two years, and at one point it even brought a friend.

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Devesh Adivasi, a 7-year-old boy from rural Madhya Pradesh, in central India, has some very unusual best friends. For the past four years, he has been going into the jungle near his village and coming back with all kinds of snakes, some of them poisonous, that he plays, bathes and eats with. So far, he hasn’t been bitten once.

The boy’s family says that his fascination with snakes started when he was 3 years old, after dreaming about the slithering reptiles one night. Next morning, he told his parents about it, but they didn’t think much of it until they saw him running into the jungle near their village and later coming out with two snakes in hand. The reptiles slithered all over his body, but they didn’t bite him. Since that day, Devesh has been going into the jungle almost every day and bringing back new friends to play with. He keeps them for a few days, bathes and sleeps with them, massages them with oil and then releases them back into the jungle.

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