A young Ukrainian man has managed to successfully avoid compulsory military service by staying married to a woman 57 years his senior for almost two years. Despite widespread criticism online, the man has the law on his side.

In late 2017, Alexander Kondratyuk, a young man from the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsa, received his conscription papers. He was to report to the nearest military commissariat for enlistment in his country’s one year military service. All able-bodied Ukrainian men aged between 18 and 26 are required to undergo military service, with one exception. If such a man were responsible for looking after a disabled wife, he would be exempt from service. So Alexander somehow convinced his cousin’s 81-year-old disabled grandmother to become his bride, and the couple have now been married for almost two years. Kondratyuk is 24, so after two more years he will become too old to undergo military service and probably divorce his octogenarian wife.

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Looking at 22-year-old Ian Francis Manga’s face it’s easy to see why some people have a hard time believing he is a kindergarten teacher, and not a student himself. Luckily, he towers over the children, but his face still looks uncanny.

A teacher in San Jose Del Monte, the Philippines’ Bulacan province, Ian Francis Manga has always looked younger than his years, and that became even more apparent in middle-school, when all the other boys started growing mustaches and armpit hair, but he did not experience any of the changes of puberty. In fact, his facial features remain those of a very young boy, but because he never suffered bullying from his schoolmates, he never felt the need to see a doctor and learn if there was anything wrong with him.

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There’s no denying that parenting can get really tiring sometimes, but you have to suck it up and push on. Well, not this Ukrainian couple who decided to take a break from their kids by abandoning them on the side of a road, near a homeless people camp.

Andrey, 3, and his younger brother Maksim, 2, lived for a week with homeless people and drunkards in Zaporozhye, southern Ukraine, after their young parents abandoned them on the side of a road under pretext of going to buy some food. The boys were placed in the care of total strangers allegedly for a few minutes, but their parents didn’t return for a week, and would have probably taken even longer to retrieve their kids if someone didn’t call the police. When asked why they had abandoned their two children, the young couple said that they felt tired and needed a break.

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Shocking photos of a popular beach in the Mexican state of Oaxaca sinking into the Ocean have been doing the rounds on social media, leaving people scratching their heads in disbelief. It turns out the sinking is being caused by a phenomenon known as “mar de fondo”, or “swell”.

Swells rarely occur at popular seaside destination, which only makes the repeated sinking of the beach at Puerto Escondito, in Oaxaca, that much more peculiar. Swells, also known as surface gravity waves, are created by storms thousands of miles away from the beaches on which they break, and are not influenced by local winds. They cause a rise in sea level, but are different than high tide, eating away at the sand they it, and causing large stretches of beach to simply sink into the ocean. This is what happened at Puerto Escondito last week, but the really strange part is that the exact same thing occurred in the same place, in May of last year.

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This past summer British media reported the bizarre job ad posted by an eco-conscious couple looking to pay a chef £5,000 to prepare a wedding banquet out of roadkill.

The unusual ad, featured on Bark.com, the UK’s leading online local service marketplace, mentioned that the couple had already sourced about 20kg of roadkill, including squirrel, pheasant, rabbit, partridge and deer, and were looking for someone with experience in preparing courses out of wild meats. The ideal candidate would able to skin, butcher and joint the cuts of meat, as well as prepare them in such a way that the guests wouldn’t know what meat they were eating.

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Doctors in Providence, Rhode Island, recently reported the case of a 25-year-old woman whose blood had turned dark blue after using medication containing a common numbing agent.

The unnamed woman reportedly walked into a Rhode Island emergency room complaining of general weakness and fatigue, shortness of breath and a symptom that made even seasoned medical staff do a double take – she was visibly turning blue. Doctors described the patient as “cyanotic,” the clinical term for blue and grey discolouration of the skin, which was attributed to the use of benzocaine, an active ingredient in over-the-counter toothache and cold sore medication.

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A Texas man is wanted on a third-degree felony aggravated forgery charge after police discovered that he was trying to get a divorce from his wife without her even knowing he was divorcing her.

Paul Nixon, 51, of Harris County, in Texas, allegedly forged his wife’s signature as well as that of a public notary to make it look as if his spouse had consented to the divorce. According to court records, Nixon filed for divorce on February 15 – ironically, the day after Valentine’s Day – and a judge signed an order that made the divorce official in April. A Harris County constable told reporters that his ex-wife only learned that Nixon had divorced her in may, when she confronted him about his unusual money spending.

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News on an Indonesia toddler who has been living on brewed coffee for the last eight months, because her young parents were too poor to afford formula or cow’s milk, recently shocked millions in East Asia.

Hadijah Haura, a 14-month-old girl from the village of Tonro Lima Village, in Indonesia’s West Sulawesi province, consume 3 baby bottles of coffee – around 1.5 liters – every day. That’s more than most grown-ups. She’s been consuming the caffeine-rich drink daily since she was just six-months-old, because her young parents couldn’t afford to buy milk for her. Hadijah has been practically living on coffee for half her life, but appears to be growing at a normal rate and hasn’t had any serious medical problems yet. Her parents are aware that coffee is not fit for a toddler, but claims that they had no choice, because they had nothing else to give their daughter.

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In what could be described as a very expensive social experiment, a young IT professional has created a website that allows people to upload a picture if they pay at least $1,000 for the privilege. Think of it as a status symbol, a way to show the world you have money to burn.

The “Golden Price Tag” brand has been doing the rounds online for the last couple of weeks, and for good reason. The controversial website and its corresponding Instagram page are proposing something that most people would consider outrageous – paying obscene amounts of money for the opportunity to upload a photo just so anyone could see that you did and exactly how much you paid for it. So basically, if you pay a minimum of $1,000 the site will upload your photo and display how much you paid for the feature. It’s a concept so extreme that it puts even social networks like Rich Kids to shame.

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Looking at the gray-haired, frail looking man in the picture below, you’d never guess he was only 32. Well, don’t worry about it, his disguise managed to fool security at Delhi airport as well, and they’re paid to spot these things.

32-year-old Jayesh Patel was arrested at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport by India’s Central Industrial Security Force for attempting to board an airplane bound for the United States while wearing a disguise meant to make him look much older than his years. Wearing a white tunic, turban and pants, and faking disability by being pushed around in a wheelchair, the man managed to get past the airport’s initial security checks and even got his immigration cleared. His white beard and thick glasses seemed to match the age in his fake passport, 81, but his makeup artist neglected one crucial detail – the lack of wrinkles on his face.

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Most female fashion models start their careers in their late teens and retire in their early 30’s, but 96-year-old Alice Pang is not your ordinary fashion model. She started modelling at 93, so you could say she’s still a beginner.

A resident of Hong Kong, Alice always liked dressing well and looking elegant, but never actually considered a career in modelling. But her granddaughter always thought she had it in her, so when she saw an online ad for senior models of 65, she sent in Alice’s pictures and she was chosen for a photo shoot. Never one to back away from a challenge, Pang decided to give it a shot and even though she knew noting about modelling, she had all the natural qualities to succeed at it. Today, she is recognized as one of the best senior models in Asia, as well as the oldest.

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A young copywriter for an advertising agency in New Zealand recently made international headlines for bringing a professional clown as a support person to a company meeting in which he he expected to be fired.

Employers in New Zealand are legally required to offer employees the chance to bring a “support person” to so called pink slip meetings, to help them cope with being laid off. But while most people opt to bring a close friend or a family member, one young copywriter decided to bring a professional clown. Upon receiving an email from management regarding a discussion of his role in the company, and the mention of a support person, Josh Thompson expected the worse, so he prepared for it. Only instead of asking a someone close to accompany him, Thompson spent $200 to hire a professional clown. It turned out to be one of the most awkward pink slip meetings in history.

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We’ve featured several heartbreaking stories of faithful canines waiting for their owners in the same spot for years at a time, never to see them again, but this is one of those rare stories with a happy end. After spending four years waiting for his human masters, a lost dog in Thailand was finally reunited with them thanks to social media.

The story of Leo, a stray dog who has spent the last four years of his life waiting at an intersection in the Thai city of Khon Kaen, went viral at the beginning of this month, after a Facebook user uploaded photos of the canine, sharing that he had seen the animal sitting in the same spot every day, as if waiting for someone. They originally thought the dog had been abandoned, but then realized that he looked well-fed, so he asked around about him. It turned out that the dog had indeed been spending most of his time around that intersection, but a woman had been coming around regularly to bring him food and water. The plot thickened…

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A California woman who dreamed about swallowing her engagement ring during an apparent robbery woke up to find that the said ring was missing from her finger in real life as well.

Last Tuesday night, Jenna Evans dreamed that she was on a high-speed train with her fiancé, when some “bad guys” appeared. In her dream, the fiancé told her that the only one way to make sure she didn’t lose the 2.4 carat diamond engagement ring she had waited so long for – swallow it. She quickly popped it in her mouth and washed it down with a sip of water. Then she woke up, relieved that it had only been a vivid dream. But then she looked at her left hand and noticed that her ring was gone in real life too…

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We’re no strangers to weird stories here on OC, but this one’s a bit too weird even for us. A French burglar intentionally left traces of DNA all over the crime scene just so he would end up in prison and watch encrypted TV channel Canal+ for free.

A monthly subscription to French premium television channel Canal+ costs around 10 euros ($11), but inmates in French prisons can apparently watch it for free, which was apparently a good enough reason for an ex-con to commit a crime and get himself caught. Over the course of the summer, the unnamed 25-year-old man committed a series of burglaries in the Toulouse suburb of Colomiers, but there was something about his modus operandi that left investigators scratching their heads. He left traces of saliva over the crime scenes, as if he wanted his DNA to be identified.

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