A French homeless man who built his own intricate castle out of recycled foam after losing his apartment has been notified by authorities to tear it down because it poses a danger.

David, a 53-year-old former animator from Toulouse, France, has been homeless for over a year, after reportedly losing his apartment to squatting. With nowhere else to go, he had no choice but to sleep in a tent on the outskirts of Tournefeuille, a town on the banks of the Touch River. One day, an old woman stopped in front of his tent and said “that’s not very clean,” so he decided to upgrade his temporary abode to something more visually appealing. Using his experience as an animator, he steadily built himself a fairytale castle out of recycled and painted blocks of foam found in dumpsters. Before long, his home became a popular attraction for both children and adults.

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It’s hard to believe that a humble stamp could be considered exorbitantly expensive, but at $8.5 million, this 1856 postage stamp is considered the world’s most expensive object by weight.

The world is full of valuable objects, from jewelry to rare artworks, but when it comes to value per gram, nothing even comes close to ‘The British Guiana One-Cent Black on Magenta’, a one-of-a-kind postage stamp that weighs just 40 milligrams but is valued at around $8.5 million. To put that into perspective, the average 0.2-carat diamond (which also weighs 40 milligrams) costs about $700, while the same amount of LSD costs around $5,000. There just isn’t an object that can compare to this ultra-rare stamp in terms of value per weight.

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Todoroki, a 30-year-old Japanese woman known as Japan’s plastic surgery idol, has spent over 13 million yen on plastic surgery over the last decade.

Posting as 整形アイドル轟ちゃん (Plastic Surgery Idol Todoroki-chan) on YouTube, Todoroki is one of the few vloggers who not only focuses on a topic that is still considered taboo in her home country but also shows the dark side of going under the knife. She has had dozens of plastic surgery procedures since she turned 18, and has always been upfront about the results. For example, even though she claims that she has no regrets about her plastic surgery journey so far, Todoroki doesn’t hide the fact that one procedure left her with a numb upper lip.

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A new study recently revealed that some Swiss hospitals still rely on a medieval prayer known as ‘The Secret’ to protect patients from excessive bleeding after surgeries.

We live in a time when medical professionals have access to a variety of scientifically-proven tools to prevent excessive bleeding in patients, but according to data presented in a recent study, several hospitals in Switzerland still rely on a “healing formula” dating back to the Middle Ages to keep people from bleeding to death. Known as The Secret, this “blood charm is widely practiced in the French-speaking part of Switzerland,” and reportedly works by mobilizing “superior forces to help cure the patient”. The Secret was recently the subject of a study designed to test the efficacy of the ritual.

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According to NASA Earth Observatory satellites, the coldest place on Earth is a mountain ridge on the East Antarctic Plateau where temperatures can drop to -135.8 degrees Fahrenheit (-93.2 degrees Celsius).

For the past week, much of the US has been affected by an extreme winter storm that brought massive snowfalls, destructive winds, and freezing temperatures as low as -20 degrees Fahrenheit (-28 degrees Celsius). That’s low enough for the average person to suffer frostbite in just under 10 minutes of direct exposure, but it’s nowhere near as dangerous as the coldest place on Earth. NASA satellites recently a high mountain ridge on the East Antarctic Plateau where, on clear winter nights, temperatures drop to an abysmal -135.8 degrees Fahrenheit (-93.2 degrees Celsius).

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Swedish couple Tomas and Hannah Mazetti are trying to raise $15,000,000 so they can buy the rights to Wham’s ‘Last Christmas’ holiday song so they can destroy it.

It’s one of the most popular and widely recognized musical compositions in history. Every year, as the winter holidays start rolling in, you can hear it playing on the radio, on TV, and in stores at least a few times a day. No, it’s not Mariah Carey’s “All I want for Christmas,” but Wham’s catchy winter anthem, ‘Last Christmas’. Unless you’ve been living under a rock in the middle of nowhere for the past three and a half decades, you know the song, and you know just how popular it gets around the winter holidays. It’s so ubiquitous that some people just can’t take it anymore and are trying to have it destroyed.

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Mzee Musa Hasahya, a 67-year-old Ugandan farmer, is one of the most prolific polygamists in history, with 12 wives, 102 children, and a whopping 568 grandchildren to his name.

Even by the standards of his home village of Lusaka, where polygamy is legal, Mzee Musa Hasahya’s family is considered gigantic. Despite growing up in abject poverty, he managed to rise above his condition, accumulating enough wealth and prestige to be appointed village chairperson for several decades and to ensure that whenever he approached a family about marrying their daughter, they always agreed. Hasahya married his first wife in 1971, at age 16, and then kept taking new wives until he reached 12. Because his father only produced two children, which threatened to render his clan extinct, the Ugandan farmer took it upon himself to ensure that his bloodline endured, producing over 100 children.

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An Indonesian woman allegedly posed as a corpse and then had her son upload the photos to Facebook in order to get out of having to pay a $268 debt.

People trying to get out of having to pay their debts is nothing new, but some people go to extreme lengths to accomplish this. Take, for example, this Indonesian woman who framed her own death on social media in order to not have to pay back her IDR4.2 million ($268) debts. According to her creditor, Liza Dewi Pramita had already asked for an extension on the loan because she couldn’t pay her money back, but when the second deadline was about to expire, the woman’s son announced her tragic death on Facebook, along with photos of the woman’s dead body, complete with bits of cotton in her nostrils. Only things weren’t what they seemed…

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A Japanese semiprecious stone processing company is selling a $450,000 yen ($3,400) office chair made out of a giant L-shaped piece of amethyst.

Factory-M, a Saitama-based store specializing in semiprecious natural stones, got a lot of attention after posting photos of its most recent offering on social media. The Japanese company shared three pics of what many mistook for a photoshopped meme or some sort of instrument of torture and needed to put out a statement clarifying that it was indeed a real product. Looking at the photos it’s easy to see why so many people thought it was some sort of meme, rather than an actual office chair, but factory-M insists that you can actually sit on it if you can afford to buy it.

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Taiwan’s Chiayi County is home to a temple so slanted that it has been dubbed Taiwan’s version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

In August of 2009, Taiwan was ravaged by Typhoon Morakot, the deadliest typhoon to hit the island in its recorded history. It produced copious amounts of rainfall that resulted in enormous mudflows and severe flooding throughout Taiwan. The typhoon caused enormous damage and hundreds of human fatalities, but it also produced one of Taiwan’s most unusual tourist attractions – The Taihe Zhenxing Palace (振興宮舊址), a place of worship tilted at about 45 degrees.

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A Michigan mother was recently arrested for allegedly cyberbullying and catfishing her own daughter and her boyfriend for more than a year.

Cyberbullying is one of the leading social problems of our era, but it’s usually teenagers harassing their peers, often with tragic consequences. However, in one of the most bizarre cases of cyberbullying ever reported, a girls’ basketball coach from Michigan allegedly harassed her own teenage daughter through texts and social media messages for over a year, sending her up to 12 texts and messages a day. When the daughter came to her for help with the constant cyberbullying, the woman was the one who reported it to authorities but tried to place the blame on her peers.

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The Wind Wall of Rozenburg is a unique installation designed to block strong winds from hitting the large ships passing through a narrow canal on their way to the port.

After World War 2, the Dutch port city of Rozenburg grew both in size and prosperity, and in order to cope with the ever-growing maritime traffic a new canal parallel to the already existing Nieuwe Vaterveg canal was built in the 1960s. The Qalandia Canal, named after the civil engineer who built Nieuwe Vaterveg was a massive success, but it wasn’t long before it too became overwhelmed by the ships using it, primarily because of their size. These giant cargo ships were so big that the strong wind blowing from the sea threatened to alter their course as they passed through the narrow canal and leave them stuck. So local authorities started looking for solutions.

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A Christian pastor has come under fire for claiming to miraculously shrink a woman’s waist by two sizes through prayer during a live sermon.

There’s a controversial video doing the rounds on Latin Twitter these days. It shows a Christian pastor speaking to an audience and asking an “overweight lady” to join him on stage. When a brave young woman decides to honor his request, the pastor asks her if she is a true believer, then tells her that “for those who truly believe, anything is possible”.  The pastor tells the woman to raise her hands and asks God to shrink her waist by two sizes. A woman is called to touch the woman’s abdomen, and the pastor orders two sizes off the woman’s waist, declaring a miracle…

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A Chinese man was recently arrested after it was discovered that he had posed as a senior colonel in the Chinese army in order to impress women.

A couple of days ago, police in Ji’an County, China’s Jianxi Province, put out a statement regarding the apprehension of a man who had been posing as a senior colonel in the army’s rocket division for over four years. The man, identified only as ‘Zhu’, had apparently turned up for Covid-19 testing at a medical facility in Ao Township dressed in an official uniform that featured all the insignia of a high-ranking officer. He even had genuine-looking identification documents on him, but when the staff ran his name through a database, they found no one with his title in the Chinese army, so they called the police.

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A South African pastor recently sparked controversy online after it was revealed that he was charging people serious money for real-life miracles, like seeing God in heaven.

If you’ve always wanted to see your maker without actually ending your mortal life, MS Budeli, one of the many shady pastors in Africa, claims he can help, if you can pay his fee, of course. According to a promotional poster that has been doing the rounds on social media, Pastor MS Budeli has the power to help people see their future in their smartphones, cancel all their financial debt and even see God. All people have to do is show up for his “Worship Conference” and pay the special prayer fees.

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