Manusia Silver, or “Silver Men” is a special type of beggar that has become a common sight on the streets of several Indonesian cities.

Beggars have been around for as long as anyone can remember, and Indonesia is no exception, but the South-East Asian country has recently seen the rise of a new type of beggar, the so-called Silver Men. Inspired by the street performers who used metallic paint to transform themselves into living statues and wow passers-by with their doll-like movements, the Silver Men or Manusia Silver, as they are called in Indonesian, simply adapted the look of these performers to their own skill – begging.

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Think of a toy store, only instead of toys you have every Covid-19 accessory imaginable, from hand sanitizers to no-touch door openers. That’s the COVID-19 Essentials pop-up store in a nutshell.

Located on the second floor of Miami’s Aventura shopping mall, COVID-19 Essentials is described as a one-stop shop for all your Covid-19 needs. From a plethora of hand sanitizers and disinfectants to really niche gadgets like portable UV light sterilizers and shoe cover dispensers, this specialized store really has it all. According to the entrepreneurs behind Miami’s currently most talked about business, the demand was there and all they had to do was give the people what they wanted, but the shop has been getting some criticism online, with people calling it an opportunistic cash-grab.

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An 84-year-old retired farmer from Melbourne, Australia, has been trying to get his own daughter evicted from his apartment for eight years, but despite spending a small fortune on legal fees, he has been unsuccessful.

Peter Grundy, a retired wheat farmer from the Australian state of Victoria, has been trying to sell his apartment so he can move into a retirement home. He isn’t entitled to a pension, so in order to secure his place there he needs to pay up front, but in order to do that he has to sell the apartment. The only problem is Peter has been trying to do just that for the last eight years, only his 49-year-old daughter, Katrina, has been doing everything in her power to stop him. Despite his best efforts to get her evicted from his property, including taking her to court, Katrina hasn’t budged and legal experts say the pensioner has exhausted all legal options.

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A Taiwanese pensioner who once made international headlines for strapping almost a dozen smartphones to his bicycle so he could catch multiple Pokemon in Pokemon GO! faster has now taken his passion for the mobile game to new heights, with a whopping 64 phones attached to his bike.

We originally featured Chen Sanyuan in August of 2018, shortly after photos of him taken by passers-by in Taipei City had gone viral. It was easy to see why photos of the then 70-year-old were getting so much attention – here was this old man riding his bicycle around town with multiple smartphones hooked on to the handlebars. After  reaching the front page of Reddit, Chen was approached by Taiwanese gaming website EXP.GG and he explained that he had come up with the bizarre setup so he could operate multiple Pokemon GO accounts at the same time. He had fallen in love with Niantic’s hit game after being introduced to it by his grandson, and now couldn’t get enough.

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Russian media recently reported the shocking case of a 42-year-old woman who had not set foot outside her family home for 26 years, despite being in perfect health, because he mother didn’t allow it.

Until this month, 42-year-old Nadezhda Bushueva hadn’t left her mother’s house in the village of Arefinsky, in western Russia, since she was 16. The only reason she decided to venture into the village was because her mother, Tatyana, had become ill and needed to be hospitalized. For the first time in 26 years she didn’t have to listen to her mother, who reportedly kept her isolated for all these years to “protect her from the dangers of the outside world”. Nadezhda had reportedly not washed her hair in 12 years, as evidenced by the giant clump on her head, and hadn’t had a change of clothes in even longer. Despite all this, she allegedly said she doesn’t need any help…

According to the women’s neighbors, Tayana had always been very protective of her daughter, but things really got out of control when the woman retired. Nadezhda was in 8th grade when her mother started forbidding her from going out with other teenagers in the village, and in a couple of years the two had become complete recluses. Nadezhda didn’t go to school anymore, and her mother rejected anyone who tried to interfere, telling them that they were fine and that they should mind their own business.

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Father Sergei Romanov, a controversial, ultra-conservative Russian priest, has taken control of the Sredneuralsk convent outside the city of Yekaterinburg and challenged authorities to force him out.

Romanov,  a former policeman who reportedly spent 13 years in a prison colony for murder before repenting and dedicating his life to religion, has been very vocal about the social distancing measures taken in Russia in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, accusing church leaders of “working with the forerunners of the Antichrist” by closing churches. Because of his controversial rhetoric, the Russian Orthodox church suspended Romanov and prevented him from preaching, and in May he was forbidden to wear a cross, after he continued to encourage people to disobey public health orders. Last Tuesday, he entered the Sredneuralsk convent, which he helped found in the early 2000’s, and seized control with the help of several armed militiamen.

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Board shoe racing is the traditional sport of the Zhuang people of China’s Gunaxi province, a unique discipline that has three people sharing the same “shoes”, which requires perfect coordination and concentration.

Board shoe racing can be traced back to the Ming Dynasty, when legend has it that a famous heroine of the Xhuang people used it as a way to train soldiers against invading Japanese pirates. The legendary Mrs. Wa used long pieces of wood to teach the men to march together in perfect synchronization, which greatly improved their combat qualities and boosted their fighting spirit, helping them repel the invaders. The traditional sport has been passed on from generation to generation since then.

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A haunted house tour operator in Japan has announced the world’s first horror drive-through experienced as a responsible way of providing horror enthusiasts with summer scares during the Covid-19 pandemic.

While restaurants remain the most affected business by the devastating coronavirus, haunted house attractions and events aren’t fairing much better either. It’s hard scaring someone out of their wits without getting up close and personal, but some companies are starting to adapt to the situation and trying out new things. Case in point, haunted house design company Kowagarasetai, which has created what it calls the world’s first haunted house drive-through experience.

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Scientists at Johns Hopkins University recently reported the strange case of a man’s whose rare degenerative brain disease left him unable to distinguish basic numbers from 2 to 9.

After studying an engineering geologist diagnosed with a rare degenerative brain disease called corticobasal syndrome for eight years, researchers published a study which they claim suggests that a brain response to a picture or a word does not necessarily mean that person is aware of it. The protagonist of their research had suffered neurological damage to such an extent that he could not distinguish or reproduce numbers between 2 and 9, nor pictures or words with such digits embedded in them. And yet, electroencephalography (EEG) results showed that his brain was able to properly identify all pictures and words, even id he wasn’t aware of it.

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A 40-year-old man in China reportedly suffered three bladder tears after drinking ten beers and then holding pee in for a shocking 18 hours.

Earlier this month, the man, referred to only as Mr. Hu, had reportedly consumed 10 beers during a night on the town, before coming home and crashing into an inebriated sleep. Somehow he never woke up to urinate after drinking that many beers. He just went to sleep and didn’t empty his bladder once for a total of 18 hours, which doctors later explained could be tied to alcohol’s capacity to suppress the nervous system. It is possible that Hu just didn’t feel the sensation of needing to empty his bladder while he slept. That all changed when he woke up, though.

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A 40-year-old Indian man tragically lost his life recently after his visiting family allegedly unplugged the ventilator keeping him alive in order to plug in an air cooler, after the hospital turned on air conditioning to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

The unnamed man was suspected to be suffering from COVID-19 and admitted to the ICU at Maharao Bhim Singh (MBS) Hospital in Rajasthan, India, on June 13. Two days later, after another patient there tested positive for the virus, he was moved to an isolation ward as a safety precaution. That same day, the man’s family came to visit, and because it was extremely hot in the Kota district of Rajasthan (41 degrees Celsius), they brought an electrical air cooler. Under normal circumstances, the hospital’s air conditioning would have made the air cooler redundant, but because of the Covid-19 threat, the air conditioning system had been turned off to stop the spread of the virus.

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Emil Egan was born and raised in Essex, United Kingdom and speaks no foreign language, but hearing her speak you could swear she is a Russian immigrant or tourist, because of her Eastern European accent. But the funny thing is that she sometimes sounds French, Italian or even Polish, depending on how tire she is.

31-year-old Emily’s life changed dramatically in January, when a mysterious condition left her unable to speak for two months. She had complained about headaches for two weeks before one day developing a deeper voice out of the blue. Her colleagues at a children’s home she was managing in Bournemouth then noticed that her speech had become slow and slurred, both indicators of a stroke. By the time she was rushed to the hospital Emily had lost her ability to speak completely, but after running some tests, doctors ruled out the strike, instead blaming her voice loss on some sort of brain injury.

After spending three weeks in the hospital, Emily Egan was still unable to speak and relied solely on basic sign language she had picked up at work and a text-to-speech app on her phone to communicate. Emily was discharged to a neurologist who encouraged her to go on a vacation in Thailand she and her partner Bradleigh had already booked, and to try and relax as much as possible. She did just that and a few days into the vacation, she started to speak again.

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Thai social media has been abuzz about a particular skin whitening cream after a number of online promoters published before and after photos which suggested that the cream worked a bit too well.

Skin whitening creams are big business in South-East Asia, with many brands competing to attract the millions of people obsessed with having a fairer complexion. One of the best ways to do that is social media promotion, only some so-called influencers often try too hard when pitching a product to their audience, as was recently the case with a whitening cream called Milk Lotion Whitening Skin. Before-and-after pictures doing the rounds online this past week showed some pretty dramatic changes, with users’ skin going from light brown to a macabre white.

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Wouldn’t it be great if you could just get rid of that unattractive double chin without dieting, exercising or going under the knife? Well, it turns out you can, all you have to do is wear a weird-looking ‘face bra’ for a while and the double chin magically disappears.

Similar to the chin straps used after plastic surgery to keep the tissue tight during recovery, the Face Bra relies on compression to allegedly sculpt wearers’ faces and help them get rid of drooping facial fat. It works for “slimming down your face” or getting rid of a double chin, and the Australian company selling it claims that even a one-time use can help you lose up to one centimeter of fat…

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A financially-burdened businessman from Delhi, India who wanted to end his own life, but was too scared to do it himself hired four hitmen to kill him so his family could receive a considerable insurance policy.

40-year-old Gaurav Bansal supported his family by operating a ration shop, but because of he Covid-19 lockdown, he was under immense financial burden. The poor state of his business had taken a toll on the man’s mental state, and he was plunged in a deep depression. Unable to see hope at the end of the tunnel, Bansal took out a personal loan of RS 6 lakh ($7,900) and planned to have himself murdered. He originally intended to end his own life, but couldn’t muster the courage to do it, so he contacted four other people to do it, for a price.

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