In 1980, when Robert Shafran arrived for his first day of college at Sullivan County Community College in New York, he was confused and overwhelmed by people he had never met warmly greeting him with hugs and high-fives, and, strangest of all, calling him Eddy. The reason behind the odd reception emerged when he met his new roommate Michael Domitz.

It turned out that Michael’s roommate from the previous year was Eddy Galland, a young man who not only looked exactly like Robert, but walked, talked, and acted like him as well. The two men were exact copies of each other, so after Michael learned that Robert was born on the same day as his old roommate and that, like him, he was adopted, he decided the two of them had to meet.

“He had the same grin, the same hair, the same expressions — it was his double,” Domitz says in Tom Wardle’s new documentary “Three Identical Strangers”, which won a special jury award at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.

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N’na Fanta Camara, a healer from Guinea, in Western Africa, was recently arrested for conning over 700 women into thinking they were pregnant by giving them a strange cocktail of plants and medicines that left them bloated for long periods of time.

Women desperate to become pregnant would apparently seek Camara’s help and pay her considerable amounts of money for herbal concoctions that the so-called healer claimed would help them bear children. The con artist would make her clients drink plant mixtures that caused vomiting and diarrhea, but she reassured the women that this was all part of the process. She made it specifically clear that they were not to go to the hospital to treat their symptoms, but rather see Etienne Balamou, a laboratory technician running a clandestine clinic in Conakry, who police say was her accomplice. In time, the strange remedy made some of the women’s bellies become permanently bloated, making them think they were pregnant. Some reported looking pregnant for 12 to 16 months.

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A newly married Chinese couple has been making waves on the internet for their unorthodox match- she is a wealthy 38-year-old mother of one, and he is a 23-year-old whose mother is only a year older than his bride. The wedding, which was filmed on Jan. 10, took place in Qionghai, Hainan, China, where it first went viral and stirred up controversy.

The woman apparently fell pregnant after a romance with the younger man, after which he proposed marriage. Initially, the groom’s parents opposed the wedding, citing the 15 year age difference between them, as well as the bride’s 14-year-old child from a previous marriage. However, the bride – a wealthy real estate businesswoman – offered them a dowry of 660,000 yuan (USD 104,273) in cash, a real estate lot, and a Ferrari sports car, altogether worth an estimated a 5,000,000 yuan (USD 789,950). The parents gave their blessing immediately following the generous offer.

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Arthur Wagner, a leading member of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a far-right German political party whose slogan is “Islam doesn’t belong in Germany”, recently resigned after converting to Islam.

Originally created as an anti-euro party, the AfD has recently campaigned on an anti-Muslim, anti immigration platform, strongly criticizing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow over a million refugees into Germany, since 2015. Just last summer, Arthur Wagner, who sat on the party’s executive committee in the state of Brandenburg, accused Merkel of “making a big mistake” by allowing so many Muslim refugees into the country, and warned that “Germany is mutating into a different country”. On January 11th, he left the party citing personal reasons, but it was later revealed that he had converted to Islam.

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Police in the Dutch city of Rotterdam is rolling out a new and highly controversial pilot program aimed at reducing crime. The program will target young men wearing designer clothing or expensive jewellery who supposedly look like they’re too poor to afford the items in question. If they’re unable to adequately prove to the police how they were able to purchase their clothes and/or accessories, the items will potentially be confiscated on the spot, with suspects expected to strip down in the street.

The controversial program will run for a limited time, to test its effectiveness, and the Rotterdam police department will be collaborating with the public prosecution department to help them determine what items they can legally confiscate. The main idea behind this endeavour  is to deter theft by sending a signal that perpetrators will not be able to keep their stolen goods.

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200 schools in Germany have begun asking hyperactive children, typically those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), to wear heavy sand-filled vests to calm them down and keep them in their seats during classes. The controversial vests, which weigh between 1.2 and six kilograms (2.7 – 13Ib), have sparked misgivings among parents and psychiatrists.

There are plenty of advocates, however, who claim to have witnessed remarkable changes in behavior among the children who have worn them and insisted that they help curb restlessness. There has been a growing number of ADHD cases diagnosed in Germany each year, and schools that use the vest claim that they are a gentler and less complicated way to tackle the phenomenon than administering psychiatric drugs such as Ritalin.

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A former nanny in China recently confessed to abducting a boy from her employers in Chongqing and raising him as her own son for the past 26 years. He Xiaoping, 48, from Nanchong, in southwest China’s Sichuan Province, confessed the kidnapping to local authorities, last August. Police have been investigating her story ever since, but are unable to open a criminal case based solely on her claim.

Xiaoping claims that after giving birth to two children and losing both in their infancy, she approached elders in her village for advice. They told her that the only way for her to have a child of her own, would be to raise one from another family. In 1992, Xiaoping went to the city of Chongqing with a fake ID card and found a job as a nanny for a 1-year-old boy. She claims that after working for three days, she took the boy back to Nanchong with her. She named the boy Liu Jinxin after her second son.

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A young woman from the Russian Republic of Iacutia who was allegedly assaulted in a local disco went to the hospital to have her wounds registered so she could press charges, but was shocked to discover that the doctor on duty was the same man who had attacked her. Instead of checking her wounds, the doctor started hitting her again.

A short video that has been doing the rounds on Russian social media for the past couple of days shows doctor Vladimir Naumov threatening and physically assaulting 20-year-old Anastasia Dmitrieva, at the hospital in Neryungri, eastern Russia. The woman had allegedly come to the hospital to have the wounds she had sustained a few hours earlier, at the local disco, looked at, only to find that doctor Naumov was the same man who had inflicted them.

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On January 6 the Portuguese village of Vale de Salgueiro celebrated the traditional Epiphany festival, also known as the Feast of The Three Kings. While the holiday involves such benign traditions as eating cake and singing carols, there is one tradition that causes an outcry every year – parents allow and even encourage their children to smoke cigarettes.

Locals defend the practice, claiming that is has been passed down for centuries as part of the Epiphany and winter solstice celebrations, but no one is sure exactly what it is meant to symbolize. In Portugal, the legal age to purchase tobacco is 18, but there is nothing to stop parents from giving their children cigarettes, and the authorities have yet to intervene and put an end to the tradition.

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Despite being a hub for technological advancement, California’s bay area is also notorious for absurd anti-science health trends such as the movement opposing vaccinations which, in 2014, lead to the most significant measles outbreak the state had seen in decades. Joining the absurdity of the “anti-vaxxers” is a new and equally ridiculous trend – “raw water”. That’s actually unfiltered, untreated, raw spring water, which, even when from the seemingly cleanest of sources, can spread diseases like cholera, E. coli, Hepatitis A or Giardia.

To add insult to potential injury, this unsterilized water, bottled and marketed by startups like Live Water, is priced at $36.99 per 2.5-gallon containers and $14.99 per refill at the co-op Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco. The water is often out of stock and typically sees a price hike with every restock.

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A Taiwanese dentist was recently ordered to pay $1 million to his mother in order to honor a contract that he had signed growing up, in which he agrees to pay 60 percent of his net profits until he can cover the cost of his upbringing and education.

The mother, known only as “Luo”, had to raise her two boys by herself, after divorcing her husband. At one point she became worried that despite all her sacrifices, her children would fail to look after her in her old age, so she decided to get some insurance. In 1997, when her sons were studying to become dentists, she asked them to sign a contract which clearly stipulated that they agreed to pay her part of their earnings until they covered the sum of roughly $1.7 million, as compensation for the money she had spent on their studies and upbringing. They both did, but one of them failed to honor the deal, so the mother took him to court.

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Greek eco-terrorists claim to have started injecting hydrochloric acid, a highly corrosive substance, into supermarket foods and drinks. The anarchist group even posted photos of themselves injecting soda, milk, and meat with acid, on social media.

Several Greek supermarkets were forced to withdraw specific products from their shelves after the threats of contamination. Authorities urged citizens in Athens and Thessaloniki not to buy or consume Coca-Cola, a local milk brand, and packaged meat for fear of them being contaminated with the dangerous substance. The two cities have a combined total of about 1 million residents affected by these precautionary measures.

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Cryptocurrency is all the rage right now, but while most people wish they that they had invested in Bitcoin and other altcoins in the early days, dozens of men are mining crypto and simply giving it away to a woman they’ve never met.

Theodora is a financial dominatrix, which basically means she receives money and other “tributes” from male clients who experience pleasure by being financially exploited. These tributes can range from a few dollars to tens of thousands. Some clients go so far as to give her complete control over their bank accounts, a.k.a becoming human ATMs. Theodora claims that she also runs crypto slave farms in which clients use their own cryptocurrency mining rigs to mine cryptocurrency 24/7 and then hand it over to her.

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Wealthy residents of an elite neighborhood in Bristol, England have installed ‘anti-bird spikes’ on trees  in an attempt to protect their expensive cars from bird droppings.

The spikes, which are commonly used to prevent birds from roosting and nesting on building ledges over public sidewalks, were nailed to two trees in the exclusive Clifton area of the city, near the wildlife-rich Downs and the Avon gorge. The use of these spikes in trees has outraged locals and environmentalists alike, with one Twitter user calling it a war on wildlife. The affected trees have been described by a local Green Party councilor as uninhabitable to birds. A spokesperson for Bristol city council, however, said that the trees were on private property, so there was nothing that the local authorities could do to stop them. The spikes had apparently already been in place for several years.

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We’re constantly told that parents know best and always act in the interests of their children. Except when they don’t, like Kaylene Bowen-Wright from Dallas, Texas, who subjected her son to 323 hospital visits and 13 major operations by convincing doctors that he was terminally ill. Now aged 8, Christopher has basically spent his whole life in doctors’ offices, and has undergone over a dozen surgeries that left him with several life-threatening blood infections.

The cycle began days after Christopher was born and continued until 2015, when physicians at the Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston noticed that his mother’s accounts clashed with the test results and overall visible condition of the young patient. They alerted Child Protective Services (CPS) and Bowen was arrested on charges of causing injury to a child. The 34-year-old woman admitted she had lied to doctors that her son was gravely ill, which resulted in numerous medical interventions.

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