A 64-year-old Japanese woman from Tokyo’s Katsushika Ward has admitted to counterfeiting luxury bags and wallets in the comfort of her own home and selling them in her small shop as originals.

The unnamed woman’s story began a few years ago when she opened a small bag shop in Katsushika where she tried to sell her original bags. Unfortunately, business wasn’t very good, especially on weekdays, and things only got worse when the pandemic hit. But, as it often happens in our darkest moments, the woman came up with a solution to her problem at the peak of the pandemic. She was watching TV when she saw a segment on the popularity of designer bags and accessories and decided that riding that same wave was her way to success. After doing a bit of research, she found branded fabric and synthetic leather online, ordered some, and began making luxury bag knockoffs using her sewing machine.

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A Japanese artisan spent over 500 hours making a hyper-realistic wool felt model of a Miniature Pinscher.

Terumi Ota’s latest creation, a wool felt Miniature Pinscher, received over 32,000 likes on X (Twitter), and for good reason. At first glance, it looks like a real dog, which isn’t really the case with wool-felt sculptures, especially ones of short-hair breeds like the Pinscher. Apparently, due to the complexity of the project< Ota had to work on it intermittently over the last seven years, while she completed other commissioned works. She estimates that she put in over 500 hours of work, which sounds insane but is justified by the painstaking process of getting the dog’s short hair just right.

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A coffee shop in Ganzhou, China’s Jianxi Province, has found success with a bizarre but innovative drink that combines the traditional ice latte with dried chilies and chili powder.

Jingshi Coffee launched its now-famous ‘hot ice latte’ back in December, as a tribute to Jianxi Province’s famously fiery cuisine, but the drink proved a big hit and the café is now selling it at a rate of 300 cups per day. Viral videos doing the rounds on Douyin (China’s version of TikTok), show café pouring the lattes in plastic cups before infusing them with dried chili and topping off the drink with chili powder. Those brave enough to have tried it claim that the drink is a bit more spicy than regular lattes, but definitely not unpleasant.

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Japanese clothing brand Felissimo recently took social media by storm with an unusual garment inspired by the unique shape of the giant sunfish.

“For those of you who want to become a sunfish, we have created room wear that allows you to wear a sunfish,” the Felissimo social media team posted last month. “Opportunities to wear a sunfish don’t come around very often in life, so I hope you will seize this chance.”

Shaped just like the massive marine creature – with its large fins acting as fins and its mouth designed as the collar – the sunfish sweater made quite an impression on X (Twitter), where it received over 15,000 likes.

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A TikTok plastic surgeon known as ‘Dr Kim’ has gone viral for his uncanny before-and-after videos showcasing the radical transformation of his patients who are sometimes left looking unnatural.

Dr Kim’s TikTok page originally went viral last year, when people first noticed his weird before-and-after clips, but one of his videos recently attracted even more attention, making headlines all over the world and sparking a heated debate online. While many users of the popular video-sharing platform are convinced that Dr Kim is either one of the world’s worst plastic surgeons or that his account is some kind of joke, some believe that people’s perception is skewed by the short period of time between the before and after shots. Patients’ faces are not completely healed and they often still have bruises or are visibly swollen, but that’s how Dr Kim chooses to share their transformation.

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A rather bizarre act of vandalism was recently reported at an art exhibition in Moscow, where a security guard damaged an art exhibit and tried to eat it.

Last week, the organizers of a contemporary art exhibition at Moscow’s VDNKh permanent exhibition center noticed that one of the exhibits was missing its main protagonist. Named “Escape of the Goldfish”, the art piece featured a goldfish bowl with a goldfish sticking out of it right next to a painting of the open sea, with another goldfish stuck to it as if it had jumped from the bowl and into the waves. A thought-provoking concept, and one that caught the eye of the security guard on duty, only instead of admiring it from a distance and doing his job, the guy vandalized the very thing he was paid to protect.

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A group of Chinese scientists claims to have created the world’s first ‘AI child’, an entity displaying behavior and capabilities similar to those of a three- or four-year-old human child.

Named Tong Tong or ‘Little Girl’, the world’s first AI child is considered a massive step in the direction of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Unveiled at the Frontiers of General Artificial Intelligence Technology Exhibition, the innovative AI model is reportedly capable of autonomous learning and may display a level of emotional engagement that has not been seen in AI development until now. According to her creators at the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI), Tong Tong continually improves her skills and knowledge through interaction with humans and exploration.

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Tiffany and Grégory, a couple from Belgium’s Wallonia region, have been sharing their home with Oscar, a rescued wild boar, for more than a year now.

It all started about a year ago, during a hunting trip, when Grégory Guiot brought home a 700-gram boar cub that his dogs had found. It was December 6th, Saint Nicholas Day, and Gregory didn’t have the heart to just leave the helpless animal in the wild, where it would have likely perished on its own Instead, he took hit home to his partner, Tiffany Pierre. Neither of them even entertained the idea of keeping the boar at first, instead focusing on caring for it until they found another arrangement. However, Tiffany and Grégory found themselves becoming more and more attached to the little bundle of joy with each passing day, so when they finally decided to take little Oscar to an educational farm where he would be well taken care of, they both had tears in their eyes…

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A 23-year-old Russian man recently revealed that he trained and used ChatGPT to filter through 5,239 girls’ dating profiles and then date the best matches until he found his soon-to-be wife.

Alexander Zhadan first made waves on RuNet – the online Russian-speaking community – a year ago, when he tweeted that he wrote an academic thesis using ChatGPT in just 23 hours. A few days ago, the young Russian IT professional once again made news headlines, this time for using the same AI tool to filter through thousands of online dating profiles and relying on its tips and advice to find the perfect partner and then make her his wife. Zhadan’s story, originally told through a series of posts on X/Twitter, has sparked a heated debate on the morality of using AI tools to find love online, and while the 23-year-old admits that his story could change how others see online dating, he did point out that ChatGPT has its limitations and that he needed to get involved personally to connect with his dates.

It all started with Alexander’s disappointing experience with popular dating apps like Tinder. He would swipe left, then right, then spark a conversation with a potential match and then that person would just disappear. It was a huge waste of time, but having become familiar with ChatGPT, he wondered if there was a way to use the AI tool to make his online dating experience more efficient.

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A Hong Kong finance worker at a multinational company was tricked into transferring $25 million to scammers after attending a video conference with deepfake CFO and several colleagues.

Hong Kong police recently reported that it is investigating an elaborate scam that saw a group of bad actors defraud a multinational firm of $200 million Hong Kong dollars ($25.6 million) using deepfake technology to impersonate company management during a video call. Fraudsters initially targeted one of the unnamed company’s finance workers with an email from the company’s UK-based chief financial officer (CFO). Seeing that the message involved a ‘secret transaction’ to the tune of $200 million Hong Kong dollars, the man suspected it was a phishing email, but those doubts were put to rest when he was invited to a video conference with the CFO and several other colleagues he recognized.

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Russia’s Ministry of Education and Science recently fired the director of the prestigious Institute of General Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences allegedly for controversial remarks that are incompatible with science.

Geneticist Alexander Kudryavtsev was named director of the General Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in June of 2021 and was scheduled to carry out his mandate until 2027, but last month, Russia’s Ministry of Education and Science announced that Kudryavtsev had been relieved of his duties and replaced. His sacking was immediately linked to a series of controversial statements made in March of last year, during the 3rd International Scientific and Theological Conference “God – Man – World”. The Russian scientist claimed that before the biblical flood, humans used to live for up to 900 years, but that their lifespan has shortened since then due to “original, ancestral and personal sin.”

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A stretch of beach in Hakodate City, Japan’s Hokkaido Prefecture, has been dubbed ‘Fishbone Beach’ after being covered by a thick layer of brittle fish bones.

In December of last year, thousands of tons of dead fish were washed ashore in Hokkaido, in an event that many linked to the release of treated water from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the ocean. But that was 600 miles away, and several experts labeled the theory as completely false. About 80 percent of the dead fish were sardines and the rest were other species of small fish, like mackerel. They covered a stretch of 1.5 km along the coast of Hakodate, and the local government dealt with the fish washed ashore via incineration, leaving the ones in the water to naturally decompose. What they didn’t expect was for the fish bones to turn the beach into a veritable fish graveyard.

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A 23-year-old Chinese man recently lost his life as a result of a double tooth extraction that sadly caused intracranial bleeding.

In this day and age, tooth extraction is considered a fairly routine procedure that poses minimal risk to the patient’s life. But a recent story from China shows that ”minimal’ is not synonymous with “zero”. A 23-year-old man named Wang, from Hunan Province in mainland China, went to Kuiyong People’s Hospital in Shenzhen to have his tooth pain treated. After examining his teeth, the dentist there decided that he needed two of them extracted, which Wang agreed to. Following the procedure, the boy was asked to get some dental X-rays, but as he got up from the chair, he suddenly lost consciousness and fell to the ground.

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A 48-year-old English man vacationing in Pattaya, Thailand, ran out of money and tried extorting more from his family back home by having his mates pose as his kidnappers.

Time and money fly when you’re having fun, and Ian Robbie Day, a 48-year-old man from Portsmouth, England, was having the time of his life in Thailand’s party capital of Pattaya. After repeatedly prolonging his exotic vacation and asking his family back home to send him more money, Ian found himself with no more money to burn on booze, drugs, and other local pleasures. His family refused to fund his non-stop partying anymore, so he was forced to make a decision – either end his Thai vacation and return home, or find a way to get his hands on more money. It was a no-brainer, so he convinced his mates to beat him up and pose as masked gangsters, so he could fake his kidnapping and ask his family for ransom money…

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A Turkish woman recently filed a lawsuit against her husband, claiming that he rarely showered, smelled of sweat, and brushed his teeth only once or twice per week.

The woman, identified only as A.Y. by Turkish news media, filed for divorce from her husband, C.Y., citing his lack of personal hygiene as the main reason. The plaintiff’s lawyer told the 19th Family Court in Ankara that the defendant wore the same clothes for at least 5 days in a row, rarely showered, and constantly reeked of sweat. Witnesses were brought in to confirm these claims, including mutual acquaintances and even some of the husband’s co-workers. They all gave statements confirming the defendant’s poor personal hygiene. The court approved the woman’s request for a divorce and also ordered the husband to pay her 500,000 Turkish lira ($16,500) as compensation to his now-former spouse for putting up with his lack of personal hygiene.

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