The mayor of a town in Mexico has come under fire from members of his community for deploying cutouts of himself at events that he can’t physically be present at.

Moisés Aguilar Torres, the mayor Pichuclaco, a town in the Mexican state of Chiapas, managed to outrage his constituents by sending a cutout of himself to a local health services event that he didn’t bother attending. Photos of actual attendees posing for pictures with Torres’ cardboard cutout have been doing the rounds on Mexican social media for days, sparking both criticism and hilarious comments.

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On September 21, volunteers across the globe, from Thailand to Hawaii, gathered on their local beaches to clean up trash and make a powerful statement about the poor state of our environment? But what about volunteers with no dirty beaches to clean? Well, some of them got a bit of help from local authorities.

Late last month, a South Korean mayor came under fire after revealing that he dumped a tonne of trash on a pristine beach just so hundreds of volunteers could clean it up the next day, in celebration of the International Coastal Cleanup Day. His office later apologized, saying that there wasn’t any trash for people to pick up, and that they only did it to “raise awareness about the seriousness of coastal waste”.

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A 71-year-old man in the UK reportedly spent almost 30,000 pounds ($37,000) fighting a 100-pound speeding fine over several years, but in the end sill lost the case.

Retired engineer Richard Keedwell’s troubles began in November of 2016, when during a day trip to Worcester, he was clocked by police doing 35mph in a 30mph zone. Only he didn’t agree, and recalls having his day ruined by the notice of intended prosecution (NIP) he got in the mail a few days later. He was convinced he couldn’t have been speeding, so he put down “no case to answer” on the document where he was supposed to write how he pleaded to the charges. Furthermore, he hired a video and electronics expert to prove that there must have been something wrong with the police speed camera. Little did he know this was the beginning of a long and expensive legal battle.

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Politicians always make promises they can’t keep during electoral campaigns, but voters hardly ever hold them responsible for lying. Well, residents in a small Mexican town recently decided to teach their mayor a lesson for failing to fulfil his campaign promises by parading him in women’s clothes for four straight days.

Javier Sebastián Jiménez Santiz won the mayoral race in the town of Huixtán on promises of improving the local water system, but failed to live up to the expectations of his constituents. Lat last month, after getting sick of his excuses and promises, locals stormed into the mayor’s office and dressed up Santiz and municipal trustee Luis Ton in women’s clothing. Mayor Santiz had to wear a long dark skirt and white blouse with ruffles and flowery embroidery, while Ton was given a bright pink dress with white polka dots.

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Two British backpackers fishing in Australia can consider themselves lucky to be alive after stupidly playing with a tiny blue-ringed octopus, whose painless bite can kill up to 26 adults in minutes.

A viral video posted on a Facebook group for backpackers shows daredevils Ross Saunders and Johnpaul Lennon dangling a blue-ringed octopus and letting it touch their skin, completely oblivious to the fact that a single bite could result in a painful death. The two adventurers had been fishing in Australia when they caught the yellow and blue spotted octopus, only instead of keeping it as far away as possible, they decided to play chicken with it, dangling the creature against their bare arms while laughing.

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As part of an unusual social experiment, a Mexican mayor disguised himself as a disabled person in need of assistance to test the attitude of local public servants first-hand.

After receiving a number of complaints from disabled and other socially disadvantaged people about the treatment they received from social workers, Carlos Tena, the mayor of Cuauhtémoc, a town in Mexico’s Chihuahua state, didn’t know who to believe, the alleged victims or his co-workers. So he devised a plan to test the attitude of local social workers himself. Tena spent two months putting together a believable disguise and then visited public servants at both the Mayor’s Office and Social Services posing as a disabled man in need of help.

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Lance Wooton, a 32-year-old IT supervisor from Kentucky, has has made a worldwide name for himself thanks to his incredibly luscious, waist-long beard.

Wooton started growing his facial hair in June of 2014 to compliment a pirate costume he planned on wearing for Halloween. By the time October came around, he had already grown an impressive-looking beard, which happened to draw the attention of a friend who owned a local barbershop and invited him to check out some beard care products. He didn’t even know such things existed, but he bought some, used them on his beard and posted photos of the results on social media. That’s how he got invited to his first beard competition, where he was introduced to a tight community of passionate beard growers. He was instantly hooked, and decided to keep growing his beard, even though everyone around him told him to shave it off. Today, his luscious facial hair measures 2.5-feet and reaches down to his waist.

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A Chinese man has been labeled a victim of abuse after being slapped in public a whopping 52 times by his girlfriend, who was apparently upset that he hadn’t bought her a new smartphone for Chinese Valentine’s Day.

While most Chinese couples celebrated May 20th, or “520” – one of the Asian country’s three yearly ‘lovers’ days’ – in a romantic way, one pair in Sichuan province decided to cause a shocking scene instead. Videos captured by nearby surveillance cameras as well as passers-by and later shared on social media showed a young woman slapping her boyfriend in the street while viciously scolding him for allegedly failing to buy her a new smartphone as a gift. Although the footage doesn’t show all the slaps, police later confirmed that the man endured no less than 52 of them under the shocked gazes of strangers gathered to witness his humiliation.

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Plougastel, a small village in France’s Brittany region, is offering a prize of €2,000 ($2,250) to whoever can decipher a 230-year-old inscription carved into a nearby rock-slab.

Discovered just a few years ago, the mysterious rock is located in a cove accessible only at low tide. It features 20 lines of writing in a “language” that so far no one has been able to crack, two years  – 1786 and 1787 – as well as carved images of a ship with sails and rudder, and a sacred heart. Local academics have been struggling to decipher the centuries-old images for some time now, but so far all they’ve come up with is theories. Some believe that the writing may be in old Breton or Basque, while others think that whoever carved it into the rock slab may have been semi-illiterate.

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Everyone feels the need to stretch their neck every once in a while, but in rare cases it can cause more than a satisfying pop. A 28-year-old Oklahoma man ended up in the hospital after tearing his vertebral artery by stretching his neck to alleviate neck soreness.

Josh Hader was working from his home in Guthrie, Oklahoma when he felt a familiar soreness in his neck and tried to alleviate as he had done many times before, by stretching his neck a bit. Only this time, as he used his hand to apply a bit more pressure, he heard a loud pop and instantly knew something was wrong. His left side went numb almost immediately, so he quickly checked to see if his face was drooping, one of the most common signs of a stroke. His face looked fine though, so he assumed he must have just pinched a nerve and went to get some ice packs. That’s when he noticed he couldn’t walk straight.

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Fasting for over a year sounds like the stuff of legends and many actually consider it an urban legend, but an old medical journal offers scientific proof that there once was a man who didn’t eat anything for 382 days and lived to tell the tale.

A case study published in the 1973 edition of the Postgraduate Medical Journal documents the unbelievable story of a 27-year-old “grossly obese” Scottish man who stopped eating for a total of 382 days in a desperate attempt to lose weight. He not survived the extreme challenge, but remained in good health and managed to go from 456 to 180 pounds (81 kilograms from 206 kilograms). According to doctors at the University of Dundee School of Medicine, the man’s weight remained stable at 196 pound (88 kilograms) five years after undergoing the unusually long fast.

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CCTV footage showing a 12-year-old boy from the town of Moche, in Peru, doing his homework on the sidewalk, under a streetlight, because his family can’t afford electricity in their home, has been viewed millions of times on social media after being shared by local police.

Staff at the Moche police department first noticed Víctor Martín Angulo Córdoba late last month, while checking security cameras. They noticed a young boy sitting on the sidewalk by himself at night, which they thought was suspicious. It was only when they zoomed in that they realized he was actually reading and writing something in his notebook, taking advantage of the streetlight overhead. Touched by the boy’s dedication to his studies, the police department shared the CCTV video on their official Facebook account and it quickly went viral.

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An Israeli woman in her 40s was recently admitted to the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv with possibly irreversible brain damage after being on a fruit juice and water diet for three weeks.

The unidentified woman, who weighed less than 40 kilograms and was in bad physical shape due to the severe salt imbalance caused by her liquid diet, had reportedly followed the advice of an unlicensed alternative therapist. While the woman’s condition has not been announced by doctors, it is believed that she is suffering from hyponatraemia, aka ‘water intoxication’. It is caused by low levels of sodium in the blood. When sodium levels in the blood become very low, water enters the brain cells and causes them to swell.

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Oleg Omelchuk, the mayor of the Ukrainian city of Olevsk, recently became an internet meme after being tricked into posing for a photo in front of the city hall holding a poster accusing him of infringing on the rights of citizens.

The photo of Omelchuk standing shoulder to shoulder with the people protesting against him and his administration and holding a poster that read “The mayor and his minions infringe upon the rights of society” went viral after being shared on Twitter by journalist Taras Oleinik, an editor of Ukrainian news portal ITC.ua. However, his caption was a bit suspicious. Oleinik claimed that the mayor had been the one trolling protesters by showing up and holding up the poster as a joke, without anyone recognizing him. That would have indeed been some epic trolling by Omelchuk, but in fact he was the one getting trolled.

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Sixteen brave runners recently gathered in the Russian village of Oymyakon, also known as the world’s pole of cold,  to compete in the coldest official race in history.

Oymyakon is the coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth, with temperatures constantly dropping to under -50 degrees Celsius in winter time. This place is so cold that a person’s unprotected face can suffer frostbite in a matter of seconds, and sometimes the mercury in thermometers freezes. Oymyakon can barely be called inhabitable, let alone suitable for a marathon, and yet at the beginning of this year, 16 runners gathered here to take part in a series of extreme races.

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