A 63-year-old Chinese man who only started learning ballet a decade ago has gone viral on social media as a living example that you are never too old to follow your dreams.

Liu Ziqing has been a fan of ballet for as long as he can remember. He fell in love with it as a little boy, after watching The Red Detachment of Women ballet show in the early 1960s, more than 10 times, but he never really got the chance to practice it himself. Growing up in a poor family in a village near Baotou, the largest city in Northern China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region, his main focus was always on helping his family and putting food on the table. Dancing was a luxury he could not afford. He ended up becoming a farmer but also worked as a street cleaner in order to make ends meet. But he never got over his love for ballet, and at age 53, he decided to become a ballet dancer.

Read More »

Matthew Lani, a young South African man with over 3oo,000 followers on TikTok, was recently arrested for allegedly posing as a doctor and sharing medical advice without having any medical experience.

27-year-old Matthew Bogani Lani rose to internet fame when he started claiming that he was one of the youngest doctors in South Africa. He often told his followers that he was somewhat of a wunderkind, skipping several high-school grades entirely to graduate at age 16, before enrolling at Wits University to study medicine. He often filmed himself patrolling through hospitals dressed in white and wearing a stethoscope around his neck, claiming to be on his way to see patients and even dishing out medical advice to his followers, or selling them medication. He wouldn’t be the first doctor to do this in order to build an online following, but the problem was that Lani wasn’t a doctor at all, he just posed as one.

Read More »

A Chinese woman was recently charged with fraud for allegedly cheating 3 men out of nearly $100,000 by marrying them in staged ceremonies, despite being already legally married.

The 35-year-old fraudster was already married and raising a daughter when she started dating other men with the specific purpose of defrauding them. It is unclear what drove the woman to a life of constant pretending, because, according to Chinese media, her husband had his own business and the family had a good financial situation. One thing is for sure, though, one of the factors that allowed the woman, known only as Zhou, to juggle between four husbands over several years was the fact that her real husband was always busy with work and didn’t pay too much attention to his wife.

Read More »

It’s rare for any dog to reach 100 kilograms, let alone a stray one, but Krugets, a stray dog living in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, has become so fat that he can barely get up.

The Great Dane, the world’s largest dog breed, weighs between 300 (136 kg) and 400 pounds (181 kg), but for a midsize stray dog to weigh just under 220 pounds (100 kg) is somewhat of an oddity. Volunteers in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, recently found a stray dog so fat that he howled in pain every night, and barely managed to get up on all fours because of the unbearable joint pain. The dog had to be placed on a large scale by a number of people, and his weight reportedly stunned everyone. Krugets weighed a whopping 99.9 kilograms (220 lbs) and no one could understand how a stray could become so heavy.

Read More »

Nam Hyun Hee, one of the best female fencers in the history of South Korea, recently found herself at the center of a scamming scandal that continues to rock the Asian country.

Last Monday, 42-year-old former fencer Nam Hyun Hee introduced her fiancee to the world. It had long been rumored that the famous athlete had finally found love again after divorcing her husband of 12 years, cyclist Gong Hyo Suk, in August. The two revealed their relationship through an interview and a photoshoot, but instead of attracting support from her fans and the general public, Nam Hyun Hee was bombarded with allegations about her husband-to-be. She had introduced Jeon Chung Jo to the world as a young chaebol (a term used to describe someone from a wealthy business family) who had competed as an equestrian until an injury forced him to retire, but according to everyone who recognized him, he was nothing but a conman, or rather a ‘con-woman’, because he was actually a woman posing as a man.

Read More »

Self-taught nail artist Vivian Xue Rahey uses tiny brushes to create ultra-realistic portraits of pop-icons and celebrities on acrylic nails.

Looking at some of Vivian Xue Rahey’s tiny masterpieces, you’d think she has been practicing acrylic nail painting for most of her life, but you would be mistaken. She only started doing nail art to decompress while working to launch her own tech company. The trained software engineer had just launched a software startup, when she took the hobby of nail painting as a way to relax but ended up going so deep down the rabbit hole that she decided to abandon her career in the tech world and become a professional fake nail artist instead. And the rest is history!

Read More »

A Kenyan man was recently arrested after it was revealed that he had impersonated an attorney and represented various clients in 26 different cases – all of which he won – despite lacking any formal training.

Brian Mwenda Njagi has been dubbed the ‘real-life Mike Ross’, in reference to the popular character from the TV series ‘Suits’, a bright young man who manages to work at a high-profile law firm and represent clients despite lacking any kind of formal law school education. The comparison is justified, considering that Mwenda managed to represent clients in front of Court of Appeal judges and High Court judges in 26 different cases, winning every one of them. The young man had managed to portray himself as a qualified attorney and none of the judges he had ever pleaded before suspects that he was not really a lawyer. The Law Society of Kenya (LSK) only began suspecting him after receiving complaints from an actual lawyer also named Brian Mwenda who complained that he couldn’t access his account.

Read More »

China’s Qiantag River is famous for a unique natural phenomenon, a wavy pattern tide that was only observed for the first time in 2021 and has come to be known as fish scale tide.

The Qiantang River’s estuary in Zhejiang Province has long been famous for having the strongest tidal bores in the world. At times, they can get as tall as nine meters, which means the area regularly sees trains of large waves moving upstream against the normal current. However, in 2021, during a scientific expedition, researchers discovered another intriguing natural phenomenon unique to this estuary. When certain conditions are met, the tide comes in spiraling waves that look like fish scales on the water’s surface. The phenomenon hs become known as ‘fish scale tide’.

Read More »

Rubiel Mosquera, a.k.a. ‘Neckzilla’, is an IFBB Elite Pro bodybuilder from Colombia known primarily for the size of his muscular neck, which reportedly measures 20 inches in circumference.

Rubiel Mosquera has a pretty impressive physique, but just one look at his neck is enough to explain his popular nickname, Neckzilla. It really is something to behold, and while he doesn’t hold the official title of the thickest neck in bodybuilding, there are many who believe he truly has the most muscular neck in the sport. Seen from some angles, it seems like his traps stretch all the way up to his jawline, but it’s actually his neck that is simply a lot more muscular than most. It is so muscular, in fact, that some bodybuilding fans have expressed concerns that the size of Neckzilla’s neck distracts judges at bodybuilding competitions causing them to miss some of his other assets.

Read More »

Gregory ‘Iron Guts’ Barlow holds the Guinness record for most Carolina reaper Peppers eaten in a single sitting, 160. The Carolina Reaper is the world’s hottest chili pepper, by far.

Melbourne-based Greg Barlow doesn’t even like eating chili peppers or hot sauce, but he loves the attention it earns him, and he’s willing to put his stomach on the line for it. After getting acquainted with the burning sensation of eating one or more Carolina Reapers, Barlow approached the League of Fire, an organization that ranks the most badass chili eaters on the planet in various categories. One of the toughest challenges any competitive hot pepper eater can undertake is eating the most Carolina Reaper peppers in one sitting, but Iron Guts Barlow went straight for it, in his quest to become world champion.

Read More »

China’s online store is becoming increasingly dominated by AI-powered clones that never tire of trying to sell you things and can literally work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The Chinese online shopping scene is very different than what we’re used to in the West. Live streaming is by far the most lucrative marketing channel these days, with popular influencers on platforms like Taobao and Douyin able to close massive deals in just a few hours every day. However, these crazy achievements come at a cost for businesses and brands. It takes time and money to train a great online seller, and there is nothing stopping them from reaching an agreement with competitors, leaving you no option but to restart the process. Having camera crews and assistants around during the live stream also adds to the expenditures, and last, but definitely not least, every top influencer has to sleep at some point. That’s where AI-powered avatars come in…

Read More »

Japanese couple Hiromi and Hidekazu Takeda have been married for many years and even have a child together, but they live an hour apart from each other and have never shared a home.

‘Separation marriages’, aka weekend marriages or living apart together (LAT), have reportedly become very popular in Japan, because they allow couples to experience the best of both worlds- on one hand, they enjoy each other’s love and support, but they also get to maintain an individual lifestyle without worrying about their partner. Basically, a separation marriage allows couples to experience the combined benefits of being married and being single, but it is important that the relationship be based on mutual love and respect.

Read More »

A Chinese woman has been charged with fraud after it was revealed that she was employed by 16 different companies at the same time, but she never really showed up for work at any of them.

The woman, identified as Guan Yue (pseudonym) by Chinese media, had reportedly been juggling over a dozen employers and collecting paychecks for at least three years, without actually getting any work done for any of them. She and her husband, who is also a suspect in this case, allegedly kept a very tight record of employers, her exact role at each company, the date she had started working for each of them, and the bank account details provided for the woman’s monthly salary. Guan Yue would constantly be looking for new employers, and when going to new job interviews, she would take photos and send them to current employers as proof that she was meeting with clients. Believe it or not, the fraud worked flawlessly for years, allowing Guan Yue to buy an expensive apartment in Shanghai.

Read More »

12-year-old Bayleigh Teepa-Tarau has become the talk of the town in his native New Zealand after winning a national golf tournament despite having played just three rounds of golf his entire life.

Playing with borrowed clubs and wearing basketball sneakers, Bayleigh Teepa-Tarau managed to score an impressive 87 Stableford points during his three nine-hole rounds at this year’s Association of Intermediate and Middle Schools (AIMS) Games. His feat is even more impressive when you consider that he had previously only played three full rounds of golf his whole life. A few months back, his teacher-aide noticed that the 12-year-old autistic boy loved swinging a stick all the time, so he suggested he tried golf. Bayleigh said ‘ok’, and despite having only completed three rounds of golf, he managed to beat everyone at the recent AIMS Games and take home the gold.

Read More »

A Ghanaian man living in Belgium became so frustrated with constantly failing the theoretical part of the driving test that he paid a lookalike to take the test in his place.

Serge, a Ghanaian immigrant living in Grammont, Belgium, had been struggling to pass his driving license exam for over a year. The man had already obtained a license in his home country, but he couldn’t use it to drive a car in Belgium, and the theoretical part of the exam had been giving him some serious headaches. Serge had tried and failed the test 12 times, but he couldn’t just give up, as having a driver’s license opened up some very lucrative options for him in Belgium. In the end, he decided that cheating was his best bet, so he started looking for someone with similar looks to take the test on his behalf.

Read More »