Outside the Japanese town of Otsuchi, on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, there is a white, glass-paneled phone booth with a black rotary phone connected to nothing and nowhere. Ever since the tragic tsunami of 2010, which claimed nearly 20,000 human lives, thousands of grieving people have visited the booth to “call” their lost loved ones as a way of coping with their loss.

The Wind Phone, as the now famous Otsuchi telephone booth is commonly known, was actually built a year before the 2011 tsunami that ravaged Japan’s Tōhoku coast. Otsuchi resident, Itaru Sasaki, had lost his cousin in 2010 and decided to build a phone booth in his hilltop garden from where he would call his dear relative as a way of dealing with grief. He would dial his cousin’s phone number on an old, unconnected rotary phone, and his words would be “carried on the wind” as he spoke. Even though no one would talk back to him, it made Sasaki feel a deeper connection to his cousin.

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Katya, a 36-year-old brown bear, is the only prisoner at the UK-161/2 penal colony in Kostanay, Kazakhstan, to be serving a life sentence. Ironically, even killers imprisoned here have sentences of no longer than 25 years.

So what could a bear do to end up in prison? Well, Ekaterina, or Katya as most of the 730 inmates at UK-161/2 call her, was put behind bars in 2004, after injuring two humans. Like a lot of her fellow inmates, the brown bear had a troubled life. Katya was abandoned by circus performers visiting Kostanay when she was still just a cub, and then locked in a cage near a popular camping site, as a tourist attraction. It was at the Belaya Yurta campsite that she committed the “crimes” that landed her in the strict regime prison, 15 years ago.

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Xiao Wang was only 17 years old when he decided to sell one of his kidneys in order to buy the iPhone 4 he couldn’t otherwise afford. After the operation Wang was told he was going to have a normal life with just one kidney, but almost eight years on, the 24-year-old is permanently disabled and dependent on dialysis.

Back in 2011, the iPhone 4 was Apple’s flagship smartphone and a status symbol at Xiao Wang’s school in Chengzhou, China. However, he came from a poor family who couldn’t afford to buy him the trendy gadget, so he decided to sell one of his healthy organs in order to get his hands on enough money to buy the coveted device. With help from a middleman, Wang got in touch with shady characters who specialized in trading organs on the black market and agreed to sell one of his kidneys for 22,000 yuan ($3,200), more than enough to buy the iPhone 4 he so badly desired. Unfortunately, this foolish decision would completely ruin his life.

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A primary school teacher in China was recently dismissed for discriminating against a child suffering from cancer, by making him sit alone at the back of the class and not allowing him to take exams like everyone else.

The languages teacher is said to have complained about the boy ever since he transferred to the Liancheng Primary School, in Quanzhou, Fujian province, in September, in order to be closer to his parents while receiving chemotherapy treatment for Non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He reportedly thought that the child’s condition could be contagious, and he wasn’t the only one, as Chinese media reports that several children were withdrawn from the school following the sick 13-year-old’s transfer. Since then, he had gone out of his way to make the boy, named only as Zhou feel like an outcast, making him sit all by himself at the back of the class and even forbidding him to take exams.

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International media outlets have been reporting the shocking case of a dolphin, dozens of penguins and other wildlife that have been abandoned in a derelict Japanese aquarium that closed down months ago.

The operator of the Inubosaki Marine Park Aquarium in Choshi, a city in Japan’s Chiba Prefecture, closed down in January 2018, citing a steady decline in visitors following the strong earthquake and nuclear crisis of 2011. However, the marine life that used to entertain guests – including a bottlenose dolphin and dozens of humboldt penguins – has been locked inside the abandoned facility ever since and are living in improper conditions. Although someone has reportedly been feeding them regularly, animal activists claim that Honey the dolphin is showing signs of stress due to loneliness and suffered serious sunburns this summer, while the penguins are living in crumbling pens, among debris. Park representatives could not be contacted about the situation and local authorities claim that their hands are tied.

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25-year-old Tomasz Nadolski, from Wroclaw, Poland,  suffers from a rare and cruel disease that has not only made his life a living hell, but also left him stuck in the underdeveloped body of a 12-year-old boy.

Tomasz’s health problems began when he was only 7-years-old. He would throw up after every meal and experience excruciating pain in his stomach, hands and feet. Because he couldn’t keep any food down, he lost a lot of weight and kids at school started teasing him about looking like a walking skeleton. For years, doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him, and some of them even claimed that his problems were mental rather than physical. It took 16 years for Tomasz’s condition to finally be diagnosed, but, unfortunately, knowing what he was suffering from didn’t make the young man’s life any better.

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Looking at Xiao Cui for the first time, you could swear he is at least 80 years old, but in fact he is only an 18-year-old high-school student suffering from a very rare health condition that has caused his facial muscles and skin to droop, making him look a lifetime older than he really is.

18-year-old Xiao Cui is a senior at a top high-school in Harbin, China, but you couldn’t tell just by looking at him. He looks more like a pensioner than a young man in the prime of his life, but it’s all due to a mysterious condition that has been causing his facial muscles and skin to sag. In a Pear video that went viral in China at the end of last month, Cui says that he noticed the first symptoms during middle school, and that his face has been getting saggier ever since, to the point where he now looks many decades older than his classmates. Doctors have yet to understand his condition, let alone find a way to stop it or undo its effects, so Xiao has no option but to accept it and stay positive.

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Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja lived among wolves for 12 years in the mountains of Spain’s Cordoba province, before being discovered by the Civil Guard at age 19 and brought back into civilization. But even now, at age 72, Pantoja still hasn’t completely adjusted to life among humans.

Born in Añora, Cordoba, in 1946, Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja lost his mother when he was only three years old, and soon after, his father abandoned him to live with another woman in a neighboring town. As a young boy, he was taken to the mountains to replace an old sheepherder and look after a heard of 300 sheep. He remembers that the old man taught him to make a fire and use various tools, but in 1954, when Marcos hadn’t even turned eight years old, the sheepherder died, living him all alone.

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Wang Mingqing’s daughter went missing 24 years ago, but even if the chances of finding her became lower with each passing year, he never gave up hope. After decades of tireless searching, the nearly-impossible happened – Wang received confirmation that his daughter had been found thousands of miles away, on the other side of the country.

Wang’s life was forever shattered on January 8, 1994. He and his wife were serving customers at their their fruit stall in Chengdu, China’s Sichuan province, and their 4-year-old  daughter Wang Qifeng was playing nearby. All the man remembers is that they both lost site of the girl for a little while, and she was gone. When they realized she was missing, both parents started looking for her, calling out her name and asking passers-by if they had seen her. They spent all day searching for Qifeng, but when they finally went home at 1 a.m., all they could do was weep.

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The story of a nameless mongrel that has been patiently waiting outside a hospital in Sao Paolo Brazil four months after his owner was admitted there following a stabbing has been making headlines around the world.

The dog first showed up at the Santa Casa de Novo Horizonte hospital in Sao Paolo on the same night that the ambulance brought in his owner, a 59-year-old homeless person who had been stabbed during an altercation. Ambulance staff would later tell their colleagues that the dog ran after their car all the way to the hospital, stopping at the entrance and patiently waiting for his master to return.

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Ever wonder what a cross between a bear and a large dog would look like? Well, if you can’t even imagine it, maybe these pictures of a bear-like dog rescued by a shelter in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk will give you an idea.

Named Medvebaka, from the Russian words for ‘bear’ (Medved) and ‘dog’ (Sobaka), the unusual-looking canine was recently rescued by the Nash Dom animal shelter, whose volunteer staff have been working hard to find him a forever home. Photos of the animal, with a head resembling that of a brown bear and the body of a large dog have attracted a lot of attention on Russian social media, and even abroad, but as it turns out, this in not some mythical creature, but the result of poor mixed breeding.

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Sometimes, when you tuck into your favorite meal, you may go, “Wow, I could eat nothing else for the rest of my days!” Could you really? What if you never, ever get to taste anything else? This might be the case with Micah Gabriel Masson Lopez – a two-year-old boy from Montreal, Canada who lives only on peaches.He suffers from a serious condition called food-protein induced enterocolitis syndrome (FPIES), which causes a severe allergy to virtually any food other than peaches.

Little Micah has hardly ever had a pain-free day. In addition to FPIES, he suffers from an immunodeficiency called DiGeorge syndrome and a rare genetic condition known as 15Q13.3 micro-duplication. Every month, his parents have to take him to nine different specialists, and the medical costs are taking a heavy toll. So is the cost of ensuring a steady supply of peaches, which can be a problem to find off-season in Quebec. His parents are so desperate that they have launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money that will help them with all the expenses.

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A poor dog has reportedly “died of a broken heart” after being abandoned by her owner at an airport in Colombia. She spent the last month of her life wandering around the airport in search of her master and eventually stopped eating as a result of severe depression.

The distressed dog, named Nube Viajera (Traveling Cloud) by the veterinarians who rescued her from Palonegro airport, near Bucaramanga, and looked after her until the very end, was only about two years old, but after a month of wandering around sniffing passengers and refusing to accept food and water, she had become so weak that she was barely able to stand. Witnesses said that in the last days of her life, the animal gave up her daily search and crawled into an isolated corner, refusing to accept any food that passengers and airport staff offered her. She was finally taken to a veterinarian clinic after someone alerted the Friends of Animals and Nature Foundation of Bucaramanga, but despite their best efforts, she died within 48 hours of being rescued.

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A mysterious condition has left a 30-year-old man in rural eastern China looking and behaving like a small child. He cannot speak, can only stand for short periods of time and needs round-the-clock care that his loving mother is happy to provide.

Looking at Wang Tianfang, you would swear that he couldn’t be a day over 4-years-old, but he was actually born in 1987, which makes him 30. His mother, Chu Xiaoping, says that both Wang’s physical and intellectual development stopped when he was between 2 and 3-years-old, and that despite being consulted by several doctors, the reason for his stagnation remains a mystery. The 30-year-old man is only 80-cm-high and is unable to speak or feed himself.

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A small dog’s loyalty recently melted the hearts of millions of Koreans, after the media reported that it had been waiting for his owner to return home for three years, not knowing that she never would.

A few years ago, an old lady from Busan, South Korea, adopted a cute little stray dog that she named Fu Shi. The two lived happily for a while, but tragedy struck three years ago, when the old lady suffered brain hemorrhage which eventually led to dementia. She had to be taken to a nursing home to be under constant special care, and the small pooch found itself all alone again. But he had no idea that the old lady was never coming back, so he spent the last three years waiting for her.

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