A 65-year-old Chinese pensioner shocked his entire nation after it was reported that he kidnapped his own granddaughter and demanded over $70,000 as ransom.

Chinese news media recently reported the bizarre case of a gambling-addicted grandfather who kidnapped his 4-year-old granddaughter and held her for ransom, asking his own daughter to pay him 500,000 yuan ($72,500) if she ever wanted to see her child again. The bizarre story, which shocked and outraged millions of Chinese, began when the man, surnamed Yuan, went to pick up his young granddaughter from school. Only instead of taking her home to her parents, the called the 65-year-old man phoned the little girl’s daughter, his own daughter, to tell her that she needed to pay him half a million yuan if she wanted to see her little girl again.

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A new board game marketed as a ‘Christian’ version of the Ouija board has sparked quite a controversy among clerics, with one priest describing it as a ‘trap from the devil’.

It sounds like a clever April Fools prank for Christians, but it turns out that the Holy Spirit Board is an actual game that anyone can find on sites like Amazon. It’s basically a Ouija board, only instead of demons, ghosts and other unholy beings, ‘this is a one-way ticket straight to heaven’ that relies on the classic planchette system to allow users to communicate directly with “our lord and savior Jesus Christ!” The layout of the planchette is similar to that of a Ouija board, only it is decorated with Christian symbols like Jesus crucified on the cross, three angels, and a dove. Oh, and instead of the triangular pendant moved on the Ouija board, the Holy Spirit Board uses a golden cross.

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Every year, visitors of Peru’s Vilcanota mountain range are treated to a unique natural phenomenon, a river running blood red through the pristine rocky valleys of Cusco.

Located approximately 100 kilometers from the city of Cusco, near the well-known Palcoyo Rainbow Mountain, the red river is known as Palquella Pucamayu by the locals. It only runs red for about 5 kilometers before mixing with other streams and small rivers in the area, at which point the color becomes diluted, losing its unique hue. The best time to see the red river in person is during the rainy season (December – April), because the color of the water is directly influenced by the level of precipitation. For most of the year, Palquella Pucamayu is a muddy-brown color, but during the rainy season, large quantities of soil rich in iron oxide are carried down from mountains and color the water bright red.

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89-year-old Seiichi Sano holds the Guinness World Record for the oldest surfer on Earth, but what makes his feat even more impressive is that he only took up the sport at age 80!

They say surfing is a young man’s game, and it’s easy to see why. The water sport requires a combination of balance, coordination, and speed, all of which decrease considerably later in our lives. Add the fact that one has to pull themselves out of the water onto the board and then into a standing position and you’ve got a sport that doesn’t really appeal to the elderly. But there are exceptions, the most notable of which is Seiichi Sano, an 89-year-old Japanese man who was recently crowned the world’s oldest surfer by Guinness Records.

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Sacculina carcini is a common species of barnacle that not only attaches itself to various species of crab, forcefully castrating males and turning them into females willing to care for and release their eggs.

Most barnacles spend their entire existence attaching themselves to underwater rocks or the bottoms of ships and just filtering food from water, but sacculina carcini has evolved into a parasite that seeks out unsuspecting crabs, usually green crabs, and becomes the bane of their existence. It all starts with a microscopic Sacculina larva that attaches itself to the most vulnerable part of the crab, the membrane at the base of one of its hairs, and injects a microscopic blob called ‘vermigon’ into the crustacean’s bloodstream. This blob then grows into a parasitic barnacle that uses its host both for protection and reproduction, often changing its sex to achieve its insidious goal.

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A farmer in India’s West Bengal state has been working on an unusual-looking house modeled after the famous RMS Titanic ship that sank after colliding with an iceberg.

Mintu Roy, a man from Bengal’s Darjeeling district, has been dreaming of living in a house shaped like the Titanic since he was a small child growing up in Kolkata. One year, during the Durga Puja festival, he was so impressed with a Titanic-shaped pandal – a temporary structure built to venerate gods during Hindu religious celebrations – that he decided to one day build his own house to resemble the iconic passenger liner. Today, at age 52, Roy still hasn’t given up on his dream and he is working hard to finish his already impressive Titanic house in Darjeeling.

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Joasia Zakrzewski, an accomplished ultramarathon runner from Australia, was stripped of her bronze medal and trophy won in a recent 50-mile race after organizers learned that she had used a car for a portion of the course.

47-year-old Joasia Zakrzewski finished third in the 2023 GB Ultras 50-mile (80km) race from Manchester to Liverpool on April 7 and even posed with her medal and trophy after crossing the finish line despite knowing full well that she had broken the rules of the competition. After analyzing GPX data, race organizers concluded that Zakrzewski had reached a speed of 35mph (56km/h) during a short section of the race, which made her faster than Usain Bolt, the fastest human in history. Upon interrogating race staff, witnesses and the runner herself, Joasia Zakrzewski was disqualified and stripped of her medal for riding in a friend’s car during the race.

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A travel agency in Argentina recently had the misfortune of being robbed twice in one day, once by a couple of aggressive robbers and then by the police officers that were supposed to catch the criminals, not copy them.

Last Wednesday, two armed robbers entered the offices of a travel agency in Buenos Aires and brutalized the staff before running off with hundreds of thousands of pesos. The victims called the police as soon as the assailants left the premises, but that proved to be a big mistake. In about 10 minutes, three police officers arrived on the scene, and after a brief interrogation of the staff regarding the robbery, they stormed off after the criminals. That’s when one of the agency’s employees noticed that a black bag containing about 4 million pesos that the robbers had missed was nowhere to be found…

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A Mexican influencer and businessman recently sparked controversy by offering to sell his embryos for $2 million each to people who can’t have children and want the guarantee of good-looking babies.

Poncho de Nigris, a Mexican television presenter, entrepreneur and influencer who originally became known nationwide after participating in the second season of hit reality show Big Brother Mexico, recently sparked controversy after claiming that he is considering selling two embryos he and his wife saved in case they ever wanted to have more children. The Mexican celebrity said that because the quality of the embryos is ‘guaranteed’ and they would be helping ‘improve the human race’, it wouldn’t be fair to just give them away. Instead, he reportedly plans to charge interested couples for $2 million for each of the two frozen embryos.

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A bold inmate managed to nonchalantly walk out of the Southwest Washington jail on Monday by impersonating another man who was due for release that day.

Brian Francisco Roman was in jail on a drug possession charge, but when he woke up Monday morning and heard a guard calling the name of a cellmate due for release that day, he saw an opportunity to regain his freedom. Since he and his sleeping cellmate looked similar, he decided impersonating him was worth a shot, and his bet paid off. Not only was Roman escorted out of the cell, but he was given his unnamed cellmate’s things, including his clothes, keys, and wallet, before being released. Guards only realized what had happened when the man due to be released woke up and started asking when he was going home.

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A Chinese couple visiting South Korea took revenge on the Airbnb host who refused to cancel their booking by using over 120 tonnes of water as well as thousands of dollars worth of gas, electricity and other utilities.

A Seoul Airbnb owner recently experienced a nightmare scenario in which guests went out of their way to waste as much water, electricity, and gas as possible during their stay. It all started when a Chinese couple booked a stand-alone villa in Seoul on Airbnb for 25 days without checking its location in the South Korean capital. When they arrived and realized the place was in the outer suburbs, they decided to contact the owner and ask for a refund, claiming that traveling to and from the city center was too inconvenient. However, the host refused, arguing that the booking had been confirmed and the payment made in full. The couple seemed to accept the situation, but they were secretly plotting to make the host pay…

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Police in Russia recently arrested a woman who reportedly dressed a cat in thick baby clothing in order to look like an innocent young mother and traffic dangerous drugs.

It’s a well-documented fact that drug traffickers come up with all sorts of ingenious techniques to move their products undisturbed. We’ve written about drugs diluted in women’s breast implants, or concealed in hollowed-out coffee beans, but these methods pale in comparison to that used by a young Russian woman trying to conceal packets of methamphetamines in the city of Nizhny Tagil. According to police spokeswoman Irina Volk, the unnamed woman was spotted walking hand in hand with a little girl and pushing a stroller with what looked like a baby inside. It’s unclear whether police were tipped off about the woman, or they simply noticed something off about her, but neither she nor her baby were what they seemed.

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A Vietnamese architecture student and diehard fan of The Dark Knight spent six months building his very own Batpod with the help of a team of friends.

Born in 1998, Nguyen Dac Chung was just a child when Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight hit cinemas, but the movie made such a big impact on him that he grew up dreaming of one day driving his own Batmobile and Batpod on the streets of his native Hanoi. He fulfilled half of that dream in 2020, when he built a functional replica of the Tumbler, Batman’s impressive Batmobile from the Dark Knight series, and earlier this month he completed his goal by unveiling a cool DIY Batpod as well.

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As the name suggests, anti-climbing paint is a special type of security paint designed to deter criminals from trying to access a property. However, one can’t simply smear a fence with this stuff without legal consequences.

Anti-climbing paint is a non-drying coating that, once applied onto a surface, makes it virtually impossible for someone to climb that said surface. Once coated in anti-climbing paint, a surface remains slippery for a minimum of three years, retaining its protective properties in both hot and cold weather conditions. Anti-climbing paint is usually applied in thick 3mm layers and develops a glossy skin similar to that of regular paint, only beneath this skin, the paint is still wet, so once an intruder tries to climb a surface covered in it, the skin is breached and the wet coating makes scaling virtually any surface impossible.

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A Spanish extreme athlete who voluntarily isolated herself from the world by entering a cave in November 2021 recently emerged from her self-imposed exile after a record 500 days.

When female climber Beatriz Flamini entered an isolated cave in the Spanish region of Granada on November 21, 2021, the world was still in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia had not invaded Ukraine, and Elon Musk had not yet become the tzar at Twitter. Falmini was 48 years old when she entered the cave, but she had turned 50 by the time she stepped out of it and had no idea what had occurred in the outside world in the last 500 days. Although she did not make contact with any other humans, Beatriz was carefully observed by a team of scientists, including psychologists and speleologists, in what is considered a first-of-its-kind experiment.

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