Chen Zhitong is an ordinary guy with an extraordinary hidden talent that he only discovered last year – he’s a master of arcade claw machines. You might think it’s a rather useless skill, but get this – he’s grabbed a whopping 3,000 toys in just six months, making him the ‘claw machine god’ of Jianghu shopping mall in Xiamen. He’s so good that claw machine owners actually invite him to dinner and try to convince him to stop using their machines!

“The first time I played was last year in July,” Chen told local media. “I saw the machine in the entrance of a supermarket. I didn’t think much of it, it was just a way to kill time.” He enjoyed himself, so he kept playing whenever he visited the mall, and within a month he got pretty good at it – so much so that people would gather around to watch him play. It wasn’t long before he cleared out an entire machine, and that’s when he knew he was gifted. His house is now filled with all the toys he’s won, over 3,000 of them. They’re all over his bed, couch, floor, dining table, and even in his kitchen.

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Indian company Ringing Bells is making waves in the tech industry with its latest product, the ridiculously cheap ‘Freedom 251’ smartphone priced at an unbelievable 251 rupees ($3.67).

Despite the phone’s low price, the company is promising a host of swanky features like 8GB storage, 8MP and 3.2MP primary and secondary cameras, pattern lock with face detection, 5-inch touch screen, 1080p video support, bluetooth, and of course, 3G support. “We will be the first Indian company to offer an incredible smartphone at a highly affordable price,” the Ringing Bells website states, adding that the phone will work on a “no-frills” platform that’s a “minimalistic and lightweight take on the Android 5.1 Lollipop operating system.”

According to a Ringing Bells spokesperson, the company believes that the phone – strongly resembling Apple’s iPhone 4 – will “bring a revolution” in the industry. While the initial promise was to price the phone under 500 rupees ($7.3), the actual cost was revealed at the launch event last Wednesday, creating a global stir. The high profile event conducted in Delhi was attended by members of the Indian Parliament and other state level leaders. The website went live for pre-orders the next day, but with 600,000 hits per second their website crashed within a few hours and they were forced to close bookings. The company later revealed that they received 37 million orders on Day 1 and 24.7 million on Day 2. They are now promising to deliver the devices to all their customers within four months.

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A restaurant owner in Paris is thoroughly miffed with bankers, so much so that he’s banned them from entering his establishment. A sign outside the place reads: “Dogs welcome, bankers banned (unless they pay an entry fee of €70,000).”

Alexandre Callet’s obvious displeasure towards bankers stems from the fact that many of them turned down his request for a loan of €70,000 ($77,273) to open a second restaurant. He said that he felt humiliated because the amount he asked for is “nothing” compared to the €300,000 turnover of his Michelin-ranked restaurant, Les Ecuries de Richelieu. In fact, most of the bankers who turned him down know Callet and have actually dined at his place.

“I believe in reciprocity,” the 30-year-old said. “They have treated me like a dog, so I have denied them access. As soon as I see a banker that I recognise I won’t let them enter my restaurant. This is not just a kebab shop. My restaurant is in the Michelin guide and film stars come in.”

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In a rather extreme display of patriotism, a Turkish truck driver is suing his own wife for insulting the nation’s president. He told reporters that she would say “unspeakable obscenities” whenever President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan appeared on television, despite knowing that it bothered him.

The latest incident occurred a few days ago during one of Erdoğan’s televised speeches. Ali Dinç repeatedly warned his wife Gülcan not to curse the man, but she did it anyway and even dared to change the channel, earning his wrath.

The wife apparently went ahead with the insults, telling Ali to “record and lodge a complaint” if it upset him so much. So he did just that – he recorded the insults as evidence and then lodged a complaint with prosecutors in Izmir city. “I kept on warning her, saying why are you doing this?” he said, speaking to Turkish newspaper Yeni Safak. “Our president is a good person and did good things for Turkey.”

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Ruslan Shchedrin, a teenage gamer from Russia, has won a bizarre prize for being the 100,000th visitor to a website that sells in-game weapons and gear. He is being rewarded with a month-long stay at a Moscow hotel in the company of an X-rated film star!

The unusual contest was held in celebration of Defender of the Fatherland Day, a Russian holiday held every year, on February 23rd. Young Ruslan turned out to be the 100,000th person to visit the website that day, hitting the jackpot. “At first I did not believe it, but when I realized that this is true, I thanked the site,” he said. “I am overjoyed and my friends are also happy for me, although there is some envy.”

His family, however, is furious. They believe he’s already wasted too much time on the video games and this prize will now be another colossal waste of his time. “I am totally against it,” said his mother, Vera Shchedrin. “He has exams, what do you mean a month with a porn star? Even a week is too much! They should just give him 100,000 rubles instead, we would be happy with that.”

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We’re used to reading about people struggling to find a decent job, or any job, really, but this story is about a small town clinic that has been unable to attract any applicants for a job that pays over $400,000 a year.

While the people of Norman Wells are struggling to find a hairdresser willing to move in and tend to their needs, another small town halfway across the world is dealing with an even more pressing problem. Tokoroa, town in the Waikato region of New Zealand’s North island, is finding it hard to attract young doctors willing to work for a salary most people would kill for – $400,000.

Dr Alan Kenny, co-owner of Tokoroa Family Health clinic, has been trying rather desperately to fill the position of GP, but he hasn’t received a single application in four months despite the huge salary he’s offering. He’s also promising no weekend or night duties and co-ownership of the clinic, but that hasn’t gotten anyone interested either.

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Canadian software engineer James McGowan is so passionate about McDonald’s that he’s traveled to 53 different countries just to sample their regional dishes. In the past four years, he’s reviewed over 300 items from the chain’s wide-ranging regional menus on his blog, Traveling McD’s.

James started his McDonald’s tasting trips in 2005, sharing pictures of every meal with friends and family and posted his first review of a McD’s regional treat in October 2011, when he wrote about a taro and Oreo McFlurry he had tried in Macau. Since then he’s reviewed exotic McDelicacies from countries like Russia, Malaysia, Tahiti, Greece, Germany, and Qatar. Interestingly, he doesn’t always have to wait until he travels to a country to try their McD’s menu, as fans of his blog sometimes send him food to try to Bangkok, where he currently resides. 

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Romanian woman Ortansa Pascariu is the proud owner of a very unusual piece of wardrobe – a vest made of her own hair! Ortansa had been collecting fallen strands of her hair for 20 years, and when she thought she had enough, she decided to use it for a unique garment.

The 65-year-old revealed that she started collecting her hair in accordance with a tradition followed in her hometown of Stauceni, in the north-eastern part of Romania. The practice suggests that women should never throw away their hair if they want to retain their beauty and good luck.

“I heard from elderly friends that women should not throw their lost hair away after combing,” she said. “They need to keep it. If not, the elderly say, it is as if you are throwing away your beauty. I started gathering my hair when I was 40 and by the age of 60 I had managed to gather one kilo, which was as much as I needed for a vest.”

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Three decades after locking eyes with the woman of his dreams, a British man is finally trying to track her down. It was in 1986 that Vernon Burton briefly glanced at a beautiful woman while traveling on a double-decker bus in the New Forest area of southern England. Most people would forget such a fleeting encounter, but Burton never quite managed to put the mystery woman out of his mind and is now looking for her everywhere.

Vernon, aged 62, was born and grew up in Hythe, a small town on the south coast of Kent. He moved to Canada in the 1970s for work but briefly returned to the UK in 1986 for a holiday. He boarded the top deck of a Solent Blue Line bus from Mousehole Lane to Southampton city center, which is when he made eye contact with a woman on the top deck of another bus headed in the opposite direction.

“For some reason I looked back at that other bus and saw a woman looking back at me,” Vernon recalled. “I came over all light-headed, my stomach felt like it had butterflies and my legs started to shake. The buses started to pull away and I just had to reach my hand out to try not to let her go. To my surprise, she did the same.”

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A Brooklyn-based personal trainer spent three months systematically wrecking his perfectly toned physique, just so he could accompany his client on her weight loss journey. The duo were featured on the third episode of a new A&E show titled Fit to Fat to Fit.

Having struggled with a food addiction only a few years back, going on this new unhealthy regime was a huge challenge for 35-year-old Adonis Hill. But he did it anyway by stopping exercise and gorging on donuts at breakfast, hot dogs and pizza at lunch, McDonald’s at dinner, and Oreos in between. He stopped gaining weight in the third month, so he added a gallon of soda a day to his diet, a move that sent him to the ER with high blood pressure.

Doctors warned Hill that he was doing serious damage to his body, but he had already put on 69 pounds by then, thanks to the 8,000-odd calories he was consuming per day. He was finally ready to take up the Fit to Fat to Fit challenge along with his client Alissa Kane, an overweight teacher. Together they quit junk food, but stayed on a high-fat, high-protein, low-carb diet in order to burn fat. They spent an hour lifting weights and an hour on cardio about five to six days a week. After four months, Hill managed to lose 57 pounds, while Kane lost 58.

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In a miraculous turn of events, a refugee cat that got separated from his family while fleeing Iraq has not only survived the treacherous sea voyage to Lesbos, but has also been reunited with his owners, now living in Norway.

Kindness towards animals is not new to the people of Lesbos – we’d previously written about a café in the Greek island that opens its doors to stray dogs at night. So when volunteers found the poor, frightened cat all alone in November last year, they took him in, naming him Dias and deciding to care for him until his real owners could be found.

A few volunteers recalled that there had been a refugee family that was separated from their pet cat on reaching Lesbos a week earlier, so they began their hunt by putting up posters at reception centers all over the island. They also set up a Facebook page called ‘Reunite Dias’ to help spread the word. In the meantime, Dias was left in the care of volunteers Amy Shrodes and Ashley Anderson, who had been working with refugees on the island.

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After three years of isolation on a remote island, Ponso the chimp finally received a visitor this year – Estelle Raballand, director of the Chimpanzee Conservation Center. The lonely chimp’s happiness was obvious from his ear-to ear-grin and the way he almost immediately hugged Estelle when she reached out to him.

Ponso’s tragic story began thirty years ago, when he was abandoned off Africa’s Ivory Coast along with 65 other chimpanzees. These chimps, most of which were captured in the wild, were used by the New York Blood Center (NYBC) for hepatitis research. During the testing phase they were reportedly biopsied, anesthetized, and chained by their necks to jungle gyms. After the tests were complete, the lab left the chimps on various remote islands with no natural source of food, occasionally dropping off supplies.

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‘Barndominiums’ are becoming a major home improvement trend in North Texas, thanks to Morton Buildings, a construction company that specializes in converting ordinary barns into luxurious dwellings. They started in the year 2000, and they have since transformed thousands of barns and sheds across the US into beautiful mansions.

Paul and Judy Pogue, from McKinney, Texas, are the proud owners of two of the most amazing barndominiums made by Morton – one in their hometown and a 10-bedroom one in Oklahoma. The one in McKinney, a 6,600 square-foot steel structure, looks rather boring from the outside, but the inside is simply breathtaking. The old barn is finished with hard wood walls and floors, leather furnishings, chandeliers, a bar, kitchen, and all the other comforts of a luxury home.

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La Modelo prison in Botogá, Colombia, is notorious for the free reign that its 11,000 odd inmates enjoy. The prisoners completely run the show, with easy access to guns and grenades, while the prison guards do not carry any weapons inside the premises.

The inmates frequently resort to violence in order to settle disputes between the left-wing rebels and the right-wing government supporters and paramilitaries that inhabit the north and south wings of the prison, respectively. The rivalry between the two sections has lead to several killings, all of which were carried out in the central area in between the two wings. Members of the guerrilla movement FARC who are imprisoned in the north wing actually carry out their military drills within their section of the establishment. Ammunition is smuggled into the prison and sold at about $1,000 per gun, thanks to the cooperation of corrupt officials.

Guns aren’t the only perks that the inmates enjoy. They use cell phones freely and have access to satellite communication, which allows them to carry on with their criminal activities in the outside world, like drug dealing, kidnapping, and extortion. They even have restaurants inside the prison, one of which is sponsored by FARC and provides free food to left-wing rebels. Other restaurants are run by individual inmates, who pay taxes to the gangs every month. But the most baffling of perks enjoyed by La Modelo inmates is ‘Ciambiazo’ or ‘big change’, in which a prisoner can change places with a visitor from the outside for only 2,000 to 2,500 dollars.

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18-year-old Malachi Love-Robinson, from West Palm Beach, Florida, was arrested last week for pretending to be a medical doctor. The teenager had opened a medical practice of his own in a professional medical building at 4700 North Congress Ave., where he swindled patients for thousands of dollars before he was caught and arrested.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time Love-Robinson has tried posing as a doctor. In January last year he was caught impersonating a gynecologist in an exam room at St. Mary’s Medical Center. Then 17, he happened to be wearing a coat with the clinic’s logo, a face mask, and a stethoscope. The staff at the clinic were flabbergasted and later recalled seeing him roaming the halls for at least a month before the incident.

“I’ve been in practice for 36 years, this is the first time something like this has happened,” Dr. Sebastian Kent, OB GYN at the center, told the Sun Sentinel. “It’s strange. Very, very strange.”

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