The backbend is considered a crucial move in Chinese folk dancing, but it is also the main cause of severe spine cord injuries in children as young as five, leaving thousands of them paralyzed for life.

Ironically, the vast majority of parents pushing their beloved children towards folk dancing have their offspring’s best interest in mind, hoping to improve their physical fitness and overall health, but studies have found that one particular move taught in folk dancing schools is putting children’s lives at risk. Data analyzed by the Chinese Orthopaedic Association showed that the percentage of spinal cord injuries caused by the backbend exploded from just 4% between 1992 and 2002 to a whopping 33.9% of all pediatric spinal injuries between 2015 and 2019. Other reports show that, since 2005, over 1,000 children have been left paralyzed after doing backbends in dance classes, making this move the single greatest paralysis threat for young Chinese children.

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A homeless Michigan woman was found living in the rooftop sign of a Family Fare supermarket in Midland. She had been staying there for about a year without anyone noticing her.

The 34-year-old unnamed woman was found living inside the business sign when contractors curious about an extension cord on the roof of the Family Fare supermarket in Midland decided to follow the wire. It led them inside the rooftop advertising sign where the clandestine guest had set up a cozy nest complete with flooring, a computer, and a coffee maker. Police officers were called, and the woman told them that she had a job elsewhere but had no home and had been living there for about a year.

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Muluwork Ambaw, a 26-year-old woman from Ethiopia, claims to have gone the last 16 years of her life without eating or drinking anything.

Most people can hardly last a few hours without munching on something, but Muluwork Ambaw insists that she shunned food forever one day when she was only 10 years old, after her appetite vanished out of the blue. Apart from her complete lack of sustenance, Ambaw reportedly has a normal life, she is in good health and has plenty of energy to perform her daily tasks, which include cooking for others and running various errands. The young woman has undergone several medical tests in Ethiopia, but none could really confirm if she spoke the truth, although doctors at a hospital in Addis Ababa did confirm that there was no evidence of any food in her intestines at the time of the examination.

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During the month of May, camel riding is such a popular pastime at the Mingsha Mountain and Crescent Spring scenic spots in China’s Kumtag Desert that local authorities use camel traffic lights to avoid traffic jams.

One of the last things you would expect to find in the middle of a desert is a functional traffic light, but you can find several of them in the sand dunes of the Mingsha Mountain and Crescent Lake Nature Park, in northwestern China’s Gansu Province. During the annual holiday at the beginning of May, thousands of people flock to these natural tourist spots and engage in a variety of activities, the most popular of which is undoubtedly camel riding. In 2023, there were around 2,400 camels available for riding, as well as tens of thousands of tourists per day at the Mingsha Mountain and Crescent Spring scenic spots alone, which resulted in serious traffic congestion problems. Luckily, local authorities came up with an ingenious solution – camel traffic lights.

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A Chinese nanny has been forced to take care of a toddler for months without any compensation after the child’s parents disappeared without a trace with money they had borrowed from her.

Ms. Yu, the victim in this bizarre case that has been making headlines in China for over a month, claims that she was hired by a couple in Harbin, Heilongjiang province, to take care of their newborn son for a monthly salary of 7,000 yuan (around $1,000). Shortly after striking a deal, the parents told Ms. Yu that they needed to travel to Tianjin to receive a sizeable inheritance, including property and luxury goods, and asked if she could help them out with a loan for lawyers and paperwork. As insurance that they would pay her back, the couple showed her photos of the goods they had allegedly inherited, as well as of the ownership papers for a hotel. Furthermore, they decided to leave their child with the nanny while they sorted everything in Tianjin, so Ms. Yu assumed that there was no reason to worry. She was wrong!

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Topi Amma, the mysterious ‘Hat Mother’ of Tiruvannamalai, a Hindu pilgrimage city in Tamil Nadu, is a controversial religious figure that has divided Indian society.

India has no shortage of mystics and real-life incarnations of Hindu deities that people flock to worship, but even in this context, Topi Amma is an unlikely religious figure. The hat-wearing woman is often referred to as a ‘siddha’, an enlightened being who has attained perfection, but to those with a more secular view of the world, she is just a mentally disabled woman in need of medical help. Where believers see a mystic walking through the streets of Tiruvannamalai and speaking in an ancient Tamil dialect that no one understands, others see a homeless woman wandering aimlessly and mumbling jibberish. It’s all a matter of perception, but considering Topi Amma doesn’t even seem to realize the religious craze she has inspired, the latter is probably true.

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A young Indonesian man recently got the shock of his life after learning that his wife of 12 days was actually a man disguised as a woman.

Earlier this week, Indonesian media reported the strange case of a 26-year-old man referred to only by his initials, AK, who ended up calling the police after finding out that the woman he had married only 12 days prior turned out to be a man in disguise. The man allegedly met his bride-to-be on the internet and after hitting it off, the two decided to meet in person. AK admitted that he fell in love with his future wife the moment he saw her for the first time, and after meeting cordially a few times, he got the courage to ask her out on a proper date. In hindsight, the man admits that his fiancee had some quirks, but he never suspected her of being a man in disguise.

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A Chinese woman who had an affair with a married businessman who died in a car accident used frozen embryos to conceive a child she claimed was his and then sued his family for inheritance.

In a case that sparked a heated debate in China, a Guangdong woman surnamed Leng sued her deceased lover’s wife for part of his fortune as inheritance for her baby boy, who she claimed was her lover’s heir. The unusual dispute began in 2021, soon after the tragic death of the man, surnamed Wen, in a car accident. Leng claimed to have frozen some of her eggs prior to the accident which were later fertilised using Wen’s sperm at a private fertility clinic. In December of 2021, she gave birth to a healthy son she named Xiaowen, and in August of last year, she sued her former lover’s family, asking for a part of their estate as an inheritance for her son.

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A 33-year-old Florida man suspected of stealing a boat was recently arrested while trying to avoid police by wearing a blonde wig, a dress, and oversized sunglasses.

Joshua Kolotka was arrested last Wednesday in the Florida Heartland by police officers investigating a boat theft at the Old Caloosa Lodge area in Lakeport. While canvassing the area for the man identified as a suspect in the case, investigators noticed a blonde woman wearing a white cardigan over a light blue dress and large sports sunglasses exiting a house. They stopped her and immediately realized the woman was actually a man wearing a disguise. He turned out to be Kolotka and he was quickly taken into custody and arrested on two warrants, along with charges for the theft of the boat and the theft of a John Deere Gator.

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When a three-year-old girl from Charlotte, North Carolina, started complaining to her parents about monsters in the walls of her room, they thought she was imagining things, but there really was something in the walls.

Little Saylor Class had recently watched DreamWorks’ ‘Monster Inc’ animated movie when she started talking to her parents about monsters in the walls, so they didn’t really take her seriously. In fact, they even gave her “a bottle of water and said it was monster spray so that she could spray away any of the monsters at night,” but her complaints only got stronger over the following months. Saylor’s parents started taking her more seriously when her mother Massis noticed bees swarming near the attic and chimney of their old farmhouse. Massis Class thought the daughter could hear the bees buzzing through the ceiling, but things were even worse than that.

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A young Moscow resident was recently fined and prosecuted by police for dyeing his hair yellow and blue, the colors of the Ukrainian flag.

On the night of April 27, Stanislav Netesov was attacked by unknown assailants at a bus stop in the center of Moscow as he was returning from work. He had his phone stolen and a tooth knocked out, but when he went to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the Tverskoy district the next day to report the crime he was shocked to learn that, instead of providing him assistance, the authorities were more interested in the color of his hair. Netesov had his hair dyed yellow, blue, and green which the police considered a symbol of Ukraine and an offense to the Russian army, which is punishable by law.

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In many cultures, ears protruding too much from the skull are considered a physical defect, but in China, people are more than happy to go under the knife to attain this physical trait known as “elf ears”.

China’s ‘elf ears’ cosmetic craze received worldwide attention in 2021 when it was covered by some of the world’s largest news outlets after becoming a trending topic on Chinese social media. It all started with a before-and-after photo posted on Weibo, China’s version of X (Twitter), by online influencer Chen Jianan who had recently undergone a procedure to make her ears more visible from the front. Chen was of the belief that this minor change made her face look slimmer and younger, and judging by the number of Chinese cosmetic clinics offering the ‘elf ears’ procedure, she is definitely not the only one. Many people are willing to go under the knife and pay big money to get protruding ears.

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An 18-year-old Chinese girl who became so obsessed with her boyfriend that she tracked his every move and called him 100 times per day was eventually diagnosed with a condition called “love brain”.

Chinese outlet Yueniu News recently reported the case of Xiaoyu, an 18-year-old girl from Sichuan province who became so obsessed with her boyfriend that she made both their lives a living nightmare. The girl’s unsettling behavior began in her first year of university when she became romantically involved with a boy whose name has not been revealed to protect his privacy. According to Du Na, a doctor at The Fourth People’s Hospital of Chengdu, Xiaoyu quickly became unnaturally obsessed with her boyfriend, wanting to know his whereabouts at all times and freaking out when he didn’t immediately reply to her texts. Sounds like your average control freak behavior, but according to the doctor, Xiaoyu suffered from a rare mental disorder called “love brain”.

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Ohio-based flamethrower manufacturer Throwflame recently unveiled the Thermonator, a remote-controlled robot dog with a functional flamethrower mounted on its back.

Robot dogs have been getting more and more popular in recent years, with news reports from China suggesting that they are replacing real dogs because they require less attention and maintenance. However, one American company is using the robotic quadruped as a platform for its flamethrowers. The Thermonator is an advanced flamethrowing dog equipped with Throwflame’s ARC flamethrower which has a firing range of 30 feet and can be used for a variety of tasks, including wildfire management, agricultural burns, snow and ice removal, and special effects. And you can buy yours for just $9,420.

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Scammers are always finding new ways of taking advantage of gullible people, and apparently selling seeds of fake flowers generated by artificial intelligence is one of their latest techniques.

Artificial intelligence is touted as the next big thing in technological evolution, but right now it also seems to be a perfect tool for scammers looking to take advantage of people who can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not. Forget the elaborate scams where AI is used to fake actual people’s faces and voices, or the perfect-looking digital avatars posing as virtual girlfriends for hire, these days people are using artificial intelligence to create fake flowers that look like cute cat faces and selling seeds to clueless plant lovers online. Seeds of non-existent plants with named like “Cats Eye Dazzle” are currently being sold on various legitimate-looking websites, as well as popular e-commerce platforms like eBay or Etsy.

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