Prophet Bongani Maseko of the Breath of Christ Ministries, in Daveyton, South Africa, has come under fire recently for asking congregates to drink motor oil if they want to be “saved, healed and delivered.” Many of them actually took him up on the bizarre offer.

Photos posted on the Facebook page of the Breath of Christ Ministries show Maseko serving mouthfuls of Havoline motor oil to parishioners who seem more than happy to drink the toxic concoction. People were obviously outraged by the bizarre practice, but some argued that it was probably a poorly chosen container for anointed water or wine. After all, who in their right mind would ask people to drink engine oil to be cured? Well, apparently Prophet Maseko would, and actually did. Contacted by various news outlets, he confirmed that the bottle in the photos did actually contain motor oil, but said that it was perfectly safe for consumption because he had prayed over it…

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Mike Eze-Nwalie Nwogu, co-owner of a nightclub in Lagos, Nigeria, was recently arrested for dehumanizing young girls by putting collars around their necks and parading them on a leash in public.

Nwogu, who is known as “Pretty Mike” among the socialites of the African metropolis, has apparently been turning young girls into “human puppies” for at least a year. His first appearance as a human puppy handler was recorded last year, while attending a wedding, but the photos snapped at the event didn’t attract much attention. He must have gotten quite a lot of attention for his stunt, because he has been pulling it regularly ever since. But as his controversial appearances became more frequent, they started causing a stir on the internet, with many users complaining that nothing was being done about his degrading treatment of women. The last straw was a photo of Pretty Mike holding two girls on a leash under the eyes of five police officers who seemed to be laughing at the bizarre sight.

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A 6-months-pregnant Florida student has found a very simple yet highly controversial way of paying her college fees – selling positive pregnancy tests online for $30 a piece.

“Very self explanatory: I am 6 months and I am providing a product in which the consumer is able to purchase positive pregnancy tests or urine for your own use,” the woman’s Craiglist ad states. “Whether you are using it for your own amusement such as a prank, or to blackmail the CEO of Apple who you are having an affair with I DON’T CARE AT ALL.” As if it wasn’t clear enough already, the woman assures potential clients that this is an “absolutely no questions asked type of deal”.

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Emma Tapping, a mother-of-three from the Isle of Man, U.K, first made headlines last year, when she was accused of spoiling her children by getting them 87 Christmas presents each. That didn’t seem to bother her too much, as this year she bought even more gifts for them – 96 each.

After Emma posted a picture of her Christmas Tree buried in a mountain of presents, last year, it went viral and made the rounds online with the caption “Nearly time for all the materialistic parents to compete and broadcast how many presents their kids have on Facebook! Just remember there’s some children’ who don’t get much.” After being approached by various news sites and TV shows about her Christmas shopping habit and the effect it has on her kids, the woman said that she only spoils them on Christmas, because she loves seeing the joy on their faces when they’re opening presents.

“If you ask me if I spoil my kids, I say at Christmas yes I do but I don’t throughout the year. They get the necessities, the school uniform, the things they need but we don’t go on holidays abroad or big shopping sprees,” she said. “Anything they want, they get for Christmas.”

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Japan’s Space World theme park sparked worldwide controversy after it froze 5,000 fish, crabs and other shellfish in the ice of its newest skating rink, aptly-named ‘Freezing Port–Ice Museum’.

On November 12, Space World, a popular theme park in the city of Kitakyushu, south-west Japan, opened its newest attraction – a skating ring embedded with 5,000 frozen fish, crabs and various other shellfish, as well as enlarged photos of larger marine creatures, like stingrays and sharks. It was advertised as the first of its kind in the world, and in the beginning, the reaction of the public was very positive. Space World officials said that since Freezing Port opened two weeks ago, they had an unprecedented number of visitors, but things went south very fast after the bizarre ice rink received coverage on a local TV station, on November 26. Inquiries and criticism started pouring in, and the Space World Facebook page was bombarded with negative comments.

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Pastor Lethebo Rabalago of Mount Zion General Assembly, in Limpopo, South Africa, has recently been accused of endangering his congregates’ lives by spraying them with insect repellent, as a healing method.

This bizarre practice first made news headlines in South Africa after photos showing Pastor Lethebo Rabalago spraying what looked like Doom bug spray in the faces of various congregates, were posted on the Facebook account of the Mount Zion General Assembly. One photo of a woman was captioned: “Mrs Mitala. The Prophet called sick people to come forward. She went to the forth and told the Prophet that she suffers from ulcer. The Prophet sprayed doom on her and she received her healing and deliverance. We give God the glory!”

Doom is a popular brand of insect repellent with serious adverse effects if inhaled (vomiting, seizures, or the loss of consciousness) or if it comes in contact withe the eyes, but Pastor Rabalago doesn’t seem too concerned about it. In a telephone interview with enca, the controversial “holy man” admitted to spraying his sick congregates with Doom bug spray as a way to heal them, adding that so far none of them have reported any side-effects following the ritual.

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A couple from Charlotte, North Carolina, has recently been accused of kicking out five of their seven adopted children soon after winning a home makeover on the popular TV show ‘Extreme Makeover: Home Edition’.

Five years ago, Devonda and James Friday applied for a home makeover on ABC’s hit reality TV show. The couple had seven children, five of whom had just been adopted, and had converted their carport into a temporary bedroom in order to accommodate all the kids. They seemed like the perfect choice for a popular show that focused on helping families in need by renovating their home, but according to two of the Friday’s adopted children, who have long left the renovated family home, it was all just a clever and cruel scam.

The five children adopted by Devonda and James Friday prior to being featured on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, in 2011, were all biological siblings. Back then, the couple expressed their commitment to keeping the fragile family together, and the kids, as well as everybody else believed them. “I just felt like I was home,” Chris, one of the five children, remembers. “I felt like they were my mom and dad. I loved them like they were my real parents. I did.”

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A zoo in Dezhou City, east China’s Shandong Province, recently attracted criticism for placing a husky dog in a pen populated by a dozen wolves, as a way to create more fun for tourists.

Chinese animal lovers raised the alarm about the unusual member of the wolf pack after a video shot by a tourist at Dezhou zoo went viral on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. He explained that he happened to be visiting the zoo when he saw a strange-looking wolf limping around in a pen full of actual wolves. It didn’t take him long to figure out that the animal was some kind of Husky-Alaskan-mix canine.

“As we all know, wolves like living with each other and have a strong sense of territory,” the man, surnamed Huang, wrote in the post. “Don’t you think it would be miserable for the dog to live there?” He also mentioned that the dog was obviously wounded, as it was struggling to walk on just three legs. His video attracted a lot of attention, with the vast majority of commenters accusing the zoo for acting irresponsibly.

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Chinese companies have been known to subject their employees to some of the most unusual and degrading punishments imaginable, but this latest one takes the cake. According to recent new reports, a company Hanzhong, Shaanxi province, decided to punish who failed to meet their sales targets by feeding them a disgusting cocktail of baijou liquor and live mealworms.

The degrading punishment was reportedly carried out in in a plaza in downtown Hanzhong, where 60 company employees were summoned for an outdoor meeting. Witnesses took to the internet to report that the group of young workers was approached by a a man carrying bags of live mealworms, who proceeded to pick various numbers of them with chopsticks and drop them in plastic cups full of baijou. Employees who had failed to reach their sales quota were asked to step forward and drink the gag-inducing cocktail.

Five or six poor-performing employees were reportedly asked to drink the worm-infested baijou in front of their colleagues. One of the employees, who chose to remain anonymous, later told the Huashang Daily newspaper that each of the “offending” workers had to swallow four worms for every client they lost.

One of the recipients of the brutal punishment was a pregnant woman, who refused to drink the cocktail for fear of losing the pregnancy. “I can’t eat worms now, I can’t drink either, unless I don’t want my baby,” she reportedly told the sales manager. Eventually, a male colleague received the cruel punishment on her behalf.

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A former math teacher from Camden Town, England, claims betting shops won’t take his bets anymore after he devised a system that guarantees he wins every time without any risk of loss.

Richard Saul, who calls himself the “wizard of odds”, claims that he has bet tens of thousands of pounds on horse races over the last three years, but in the last few weeks, all but one bookmakers in Camden Town have stopped taking his bets. “They should take the bet, but they don’t because I keep winning. I don’t think your average punter would be able to work out how to do it. In Camden Town, only Jennings will take my bet now – and they will only let me do it once, that’s all,” Saul complains. “[Elsewhere] the staff go on the phone, then after two minutes they come back and say, ‘we can’t take this bet’. I’ve gone on accounts online, but they won’t take it there either.”

The math expert believes that his recent ban by bookmakers has to do with his guaranteed-win system. He came up with it when betting shops started introducing higher payouts for “each-way” horse racing bets. Usually, an each-way bet means that the fourth-placed horse pays a quarter of the horse’s odds of winning, but some high street bookies  expanded the offer to include a fifth-place horse, in order to attract punters. That’s when Saul figured out that by betting on every horse with different stakes, he could guarantee himself a win.

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In a desperate attempt to raise money for her sick mother’s cancer treatment, a 19-year-old girl in China recently posted a message on the Asian country’s most popular social media platform, WeChat, saying that she was selling herself to the highest bidder.

In her post, Cao Mengyuan says she was born and raised in a rural home in Gaozhou city, southern China. Her 45-year-old mother, who had worked as a farmer all her life, was recently diagnosed with skin cancer and her health was deteriorating very fast. Doctors told the young girl that the treatment for her mother’s illness would cost about 350,000 Yuan ($51,500) which the family could not afford to pay. And since the woman doesn’t have medical insurance either, the 19-year-old decided that, as the eldest of five children in her family, it was up to her to somehow come up with the money, by any means necessary. So she decided to sell herself online.

“I wish that a kind-hearted person could buy me, so my mother can undergo the operation,” the post states. “After the transaction, I am willing to work at the will of the buyer in return. I will do whatever the buyer asked me to do. I never go back on my word. Everything I said is true. I will sell myself to the highest bidder.”

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It’s hard to let go of loved ones, especially when they pass away suddenly. But thanks to rapidly evolving artificial intelligence, you soon may not have to let go. Well, not completely, anyway. Case in point, Eugenia Kuyda, the co-founder and CEO of a Russian artificial intelligence startup called Luka Inc, who recently brought her best friend back to life as an AI chatbot.

Kuyda lost her best friend, fellow tech entrepreneur Roman Mazurenko, in November 2015, but just three months after his tragic car accident, she sent the first text message to his AI personality, Roman. With no grave to visit, because he had been cremated, the young programmer, decided to use every digital memory of him, including photos, news articles and thousands of SMS text messages he had sent to her over the years, and feed them into a neural network to create an AI chatbot that many of those who knew Roman say sounds just like him.

“It was the first death for me. I didn’t know how to react, so as soon as I could I shoved everything as deep inside as possible and tried not to feel anything. Half a year later I can say that it doesn’t go away. In the last couple of months our team at Luka managed to build a dialogue model using smaller datasets on top of a neural net. I put together all texts we sent each other, photos, articles about him and we built a Roman AI,” Kuyda wrote in a Facebook post. “You can text with him about his life or just chat like you normally would – he will reply like Roman would have.”

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The male boss of a company in Beijing, China, has recently come under fire for forcing female workers to line up and give him a kiss every morning, claiming that it enhances the corporate culture and improves relations between manager and employees.

Women working at a company that sells home brewery machinery, in Tongzhou District, Beijing, are required to line up between 9:00 and 9:30 each morning to kiss their boss. And we’re not talking about a little, innocent smooch on the cheek, although that would be pretty weird as well, but a kiss on the lips. China Press reports that while the women were initially reluctant to accept the bizarre daily ritual, they eventually gave in to the boss’ demands in order to keep their jobs. Only two of the company’s female workers refused to kiss their boss on the mouth and chose to resign instead. According to Chinese media reports, over half the unnamed company’s staff members are women.

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A photo showing a young boy sitting in a busy Kuala Lumpur parking lot has been doing the rounds online, causing controversy. According to the original Facebook post, the boy had to wait all alone in the hot sun for 20 minutes, to save the empty spot for his mother, while she went to bring the car.

The incident took place in a business area on Jalan Kuchai Lama road, in Kuala Lumpur, where it is usually difficult to find a parking spot during peak hours. The mother allegedly had the bright idea to leave her young son sitting in a free parking space, to save it,  while she went back to where she originally left the car. According to a Facebook post that has so far been shared over 8,000 times, the young boy was left unattended for 20 minutes.

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A one-one-of-a-kind handbag fashioned out of the pelt of a dead cat and featuring the feline’s intact head as part of the decor has sparked quite the debate online after its listing on an online auction site wen viral.

Created by Clare Hobbs, a professional taxidermist from Christchurch, New Zealand, the bizarre accessory is currently for sale at a starting price of $1,400. Described as an expression of Hobbs’ “artistic passions and desire to engineer the surreal, particularly using feral and domestic felines,” the cat bag is certainly not for the faint of heart.

Although the product description mentions that no animals were hurt or killed for the creation of the unique piece, and Hobbs herself added that it was made from a feral cat that had been “hit by a car on backwash country road,” it still managed to attract some negative comments.

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