Jose Antonio Garcia has become known as ‘The Pilgrim’ in his native country of Spain, after spending the last 11 years of his life walking over 100,000 kilometers to various pilgrimage sites on all continents except Oceania. This year, his amazing journey has finally come to an end.

Born in Puerto de Santa María, in the Spanish province of Cadiz, Jose Antonio Garcia spent most of his life on water, working as a sailor. He wasn’t the most religious person, but after going through a near-death experience, he decided to dedicate his life to an epic pilgrimage to as many holy sites as he could walk to. In 1999, the fishing boat Jose was working on capsized off the coast of Norway, and he was the only survivor out of a crew of 17. He spent hours in the freezing water clinging to the bodies of two fellow sailors, and it was then that he turned to religion, vowing to the Virgen del Carmel, the patron of sailors, that he would walk to all of the world’s holy shrines, if she saved his life.

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A Belorussian man who had had his car scratched over 20 times in the last six months, finally managed to catch the perpetrator in the act after sleeping in the vehicle for a month.

Finding your car scratched is unpleasant, but definitely not uncommon, which is why Kot Matroskin, a driver from Minsk, Belarus, didn’t pay much attention when it first happened to him, about six months ago. But after noticing subsequent scratches on the fender of his Volkswagen Polo, in a relatively short period of time, he started looking for clues about who might want to scratch his car and why. He was soon able to deduct that the scratching occurred only when he parked his car near a pedestrian walkway at the entrance of a park, and seemed to be done with the same object, as the scratches all looked very similar.

In a story posted recently on automotive forum Scooter Club, Kot points out that he only parks in that particular spot when there aren’t any other places available near his apartment building, and always makes sure not to leave his car on the grass or block pedestrian traffic. But that didn’t seem to matter to whoever had it in for him, as new scratches kept showing up on his vehicle. He started thinking about people he might have had conflict with recently, but revenge didn’t seem likely, as scratching only occurred when he left his car near the park.

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29-year-old Johanna Watkins suffers from an extremely rare condition which makes allergic to literally hundreds of things, including the scent of her husband. For the past year, she has been living alone in a specially-built “safe zone” of her house, and claims that every times she leaves this space her body “goes into attack” mode.

Johanna met her husband Scott five years ago, at Hope Academy, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she worked as a first grade teacher Scott as a second grade teacher. They got married in 2013 and started making plans about their life together, but just two years into their marriage, the allergies that Johanna had suffered from all her life started getting considerably worse. At first they though it was just food allergies, and changed their diet, but that didn’t help. In 2015, she was diagnosed with Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS), a rare genetic disorder that causes her body to develop life-threatening anaphylactic reactions to virtually everything.

MCAS causes  mast cells, which release chemicals that tell our immune system how to react to various stimuli, to build up and go haywire. Basically Johanna’s mast cells release the wrong chemicals, to the wrong place, at the wrong time. The cells react to all sorts of triggers, releasing chemicals that overwhelm the body, leading to anaphylaxis. Unfortunately, the condition was discovered just nine years ago, so little is known about it.

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Seeing his wife go through the excruciatingly painful process of passing kidney stones, a farmer in Jiangxi Province, China, created an ingenious bed that flips over and vibrates to help dislodge the stones.

Zhu Qinghua, a 52-year-old rice farmer from Jiangxi had been thinking of ways of helping his wife since 1993, when she had her left kidney removed because of kidney failure, and stones were discovered in her right one. Doctors told them that surgery to remove the stones was too dangerous for a person with one kidney, so she was advised to eliminate them naturally before they became too large. Zhu says inspiration struck in 1997, when doctors advised his wife to stand upside down for a few minutes every day, to help dislodge the kidney stones. That’s when he started working on his patented kidney stone-removing bed.

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They are the world’s most popular birth control product, but in Cuba, condoms are also ingeniously used to catch expensive ocean fish that they would not otherwise be able to reach.

In a country where the communist government is extremely paranoid about illegal emigration to the United States, and strictly controls who can own and use boats, “balloon fishing” has become a very cheap and effective way of catching fish like red snapper, barracuda and tarpon without having to leave the shore. The secret to this unusual fishing technique – latex condoms.

Fisherman along the Havana seawall use inflated condoms to create homemade floats that carry their lines as far as 900 feet into the ocean and keep the bait high in the water. As soon as they hit the surface of the water, the strong current starts pulling it out to sea, far beyond casting distance, and when a fish takes the bait, the line pulls free, and all fishermen have to do is reel it in. It’s a very simplistic yet surprisingly effective fishing method that puts food on the table for hundreds of Cubans. “It’s amazing how strong they are,”Michel Perez, a young fisherman along Havana’s Malecon sea wall, praised the condoms.

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Vladimir Chaika, a pensioner from the Ukrainian city of Kiev, spent 15 years turning the staircase of his Communist era apartment building into an artistic masterpiece reminiscent of 17th and 18th century chateaus.

Vladimir says that he had always been fascinated by the interior design style of 1600s and 1700s castles and estates, and having worked in constructions for many years, repairing various structures around Kiev, he had the skill and experience needed to undertake such a complicated project. It was time that he lacked, but following an accident that left him clinically dead in 1997, he was forced to retire and ended up with a lot of free time on his hands. He was very familiar with the decorating style of 17th century French chateaus, construction materials were cheap, and after asking a friend to supply him with a variety of custom molds, he was ready to get to work.

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An elderly couple in Haikou, China’s Hainan Province, have been sharing their home with a 60 kilogram, 3.7-meter-long python for seven years, raising it as their child and even taking it for walks around their neighborhood.

68-year-old Shi Jimin, a retired meat processing worker, adopted the python in 2009, to save it from certain death. A fish and snake vendor had come by his workplace, and managed to sell his entire supply, except for a small 30-cm long snake that no one had wanted. The man had said that if no one was interested, he was just going to get rid of it, which is when stepped in and asked the vendor how much he wanted for the reptile. Shi says that he eventually got it for free, as the man was just going to kill it or throw it away somewhere anyway. So he took the young snake home to his wife, not knowing that it would grow up into a cattle-eating behemoth.

But even after realizing that they had adopted a python, the elderly couple had no problem sharing their home with their pet, which they consider more as a child. In the last seven years it has grown to an impressive 3.7 meters and weighs around 120 pounds. But experts say it’s still young and bound to get even bigger. Still Shi and his wife are not concerned for their safety, and allow the snake to freely slither around their home during the day. It often sits on their laps as they watch TV together, or just finds a comfortable spot and sits there like a good boy. In they evening, the couple give the snake a warm bath, and before going to bed, they take the python to his very own bedroom.

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There are few things that men hate more than going on long shopping sprees with their wives or girlfriends, so one Chinese mall has come up with the “husband nursery”, a special place where guys can kick back and relax while their better halves shop till they drop.

Just as mothers drop their young kids at the nursery to be looked after while they tend to their daily business, so to can wives and girlfriends leave their male partners at the husband nursery located on the third floor of the newly-opened Vanke Mall in the Minhang district of Shanghai. Instead of having to put up with their miserable-looking faces as they follow them around through dozens of shops, women can leave guys in this special room to kill time by watching TV, reading magazines, sitting in a massage chair or taking a nap in of the comfortable armchairs.

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Dutch beer maker De Prael Brewery claims to have discovered the holy grail of alcoholic drinks – a pilsner-style brew laced with ingredients that greatly reduce the chances of next-day hangover and leave drinkers feeling fresh.

Thomas Gesink, the owner of Amsterdam-based De Prael Brewery, says he came up with the formula for his revolutionary beer after being challenged to create an alcoholic brew that would allow consumer to go to work the morning after without having to deal with the symptoms of hangover. So he and his team of brewers started researching what ingredients they would need to add to achieve their goal, while making sure that they didn’t affect the taste of the beer.

While the exact recipe for this 4.5%-alcohol hangover-free beer remains a closely-guarded secret, Gesink revealed that the main wonder ingredient is vitamin B12, which prevents headaches. “It is actually the only vitamin which can be dissolved in water, and that is why you can brew with it,” he said. The unique beer also contains sea salt to prevent dehydration, ginger and willow fibers, which are known to have a cleansing effect on the body.

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People often prefer to fall asleep while watching TV, but that doesn’t always work out as planned. Sometimes the shows you end up watching turn out to be genuinely interesting and instead of slowly dozing off, you end up spending hours with your eyeballs glued to the screen. But there’s no risk of that happening when using Napflix, a video streaming service designed to be more than boring enough to put you to sleep.

The Napflix website describes the service as a “video platform where you can find the most silent and sleepy content selection to relax your brain and easily fall asleep.” Regardless of what specific type of programs you find least interesting, you’re bound to find them on Napflix. While browsing the selection of boring video material, you’ll find everything from from long lectures and documentaries, senseless game simulations and chess matches to static landscapes and religious rituals.

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It’s not entirely unusual for bosses of successful companies to give out bonuses to employees on major holidays, but how many can claim that they are as generous as Savji Dholakia, CEO of Hari Krishna Exports, who recently gifted some 1,200 cars and 400 apartments to over 1,600 of his most loyal and hardworking staffers.

“If we keep our employees happy, God will keep us happy,” Dholakia says, and while he is certainly not the only boss to claim that he puts his staff first, the man actually puts his money where his mouth is. He started a long streak of generous bonuses 20 years ago, when he gave three of his top employees their own cars, and he has been upping his game every year since then. In 2014,  he distributed Rs 500m (£6m, $7.5m) as performance incentives and last years he gave away 491 cars and 200 apartments, but this year seems to be the most special yet. To celebrate his company’s 25th anniversary, the man known as India’s most generous boss just gave away over 1,260 cars and 400 apartments to over 1,700 of his most valuable employees.

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In the Western world, bridesmaids are also known as maids of honor, but in China, they are more like maids of dishonor. From drinking large quantities of alcohol on behalf of the bride to putting up with groping and other forms of harassment, bridesmaids often take part in traditional customs that most people would consider extremely vulgar. And as fewer women are willing to serve as bridesmaids for their friends and relatives, professional bridesmaid rental services are a booming business.

In medieval times, Chinese bridesmaids would dress up as the bride to act as decoys for rival clans and hooligans looking to kidnap her. As centuries past and legal protections for marriages were established, this particular role was no longer required, but maids of honor still retained their protective functions, and their ‘job’ remained as dangerous as ever. Even today, women who take on this responsibility are humiliated, physically or sexually harassed and some end up losing their lives in their attempt to best fulfill their tasks at a wedding. It sounds absurd that an honorary position at what is supposed to be a joyous celebration involve such risks, but in China, it is a harsh reality.

For example, it is customary for Chinese newlyweds to toast bottoms up to every wedding guest, and at big weddings that adds up to a lot of alcohol. In order to protect the honor of the bride, it falls on the bridesmaids to fend off drinking requests and in most cases drink on the bride’s behalf. This often results in alcohol poisoning, and in extreme cases, death. Just last month, it was reported that a 28-year-old maid of honor in Wenchang, Hainan province, lost her life after getting pressured into consuming a large amount of alcohol.

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Tribal Huk, an ethnic gang from Ngaruawahia, a small town in New Zealand, took it upon themselves to rid their community of methamphetamine dealers, after seeing the local youth negatively affected by the synthetic drug. After giving offenders an ultimatum, the gang cleaned their town of meth dealers in just one weekend.

It all started on Thursday, October 13, when Jamie Pink, the notorious leader of the Tribal Huk gang gave methamphetamine dealers 24 hours to pack up and leave, during a local town meeting. He told attendees that his group had polled local children, and around 75% of them were affected in some way by methamphetamine, so they had decided it was time to take action.

“For a lot of years, the Huks have kept a lot of other gangs out of here in Ngaruawahia and we are always going to do that, but we haven’t kept their poison out of here. We are a bit sorry about that,” Pink said. “From this second on, without disrespecting, we know who they are – some of them are whanau (extended family), but they’ve got to go. They have 24 hours to stop. We ask nicely first, then they’ve got to go. We’ve got no choice. The kids are asking for it. They’ll be asked nicely the first time.”

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After falling victim to no less than seven break-ins last summer, the owner of a second hand auto parts business in Montserrat, Spain, has replaced his guard dogs with a pair of ‘toro bravos’, a Spanish breed of bull used in bullfighting, to roam the property and deter potential intruders.

Emilio Cervero told Spanish reporters that his troubles began earlier this year, when local authorities in the Valencian town of Montserrat built new roundabout next to his junkyard. He was expropriated of part of his property, and the provincial government sealed off his downsized land with a flimsy wire fence to replace the original concrete wall which featured barbed wire protection. Since then, he claims thieves have broken in seven times, by snipping a hole in the wall, luring the guard dogs out of the compound, and simply walking in to take what they needed.

Señor Cervero claims that the financial cost of the break-ins wasn’t considerable, as it turns out that most of the thieves were young people looking to steal a rear-view mirror or a tire for their cars, but the frequency with which the intrusions occurred had become an inconvenience. The fence had to be fixed every time, not to mention that the alarms were set off, bothering his neighbors. And since guard dogs were proving ineffective, he decided it was time for something more extreme.

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A divorced Russian couple recently made headlines after they split their expensive mansion in half with a brick wall, which left the ex-wife unable to access the upper floors on her half because the stairway is on her former partner’s side.

After their divorce, Margareta Tsvitnenko, 45, and her former spouse, Sergei, were ordered to split the three-storey property in half. They have been in several legal battles since they decided to break up, in 2010, and the woman claims that Sergei has tried to force her and their 12-year-old disabled son out of the house several times, by disabling the heating system during winter time. But recently, he came up with a new, more effective way of causing her trouble. After the court approved his request to separate his side of the mansion with a wall, he quickly brought in a team of workers who bricked up all connecting doors and other access areas including the only staircase to the upper floors.

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