A New York woman who posted some not so favorable online reviews of a Manhattan gynecologist she visited last year has been forced to spend close to $20,000 to defend herself in a $1 million defamation suit filed by the doctor.

When Michelle Levine decided to share her negative experience regarding an annual checkup performed by Dr. Joon Song of New York Robotic Gynecology & Women’s Health, she never imagine that she would end up spending tens of thousands of dollars defending herself in court. The woman claims that she was just expressing her opinion about the service she received and trying to help others by sharing her negative experience so they wouldn’t go through the same thing. Dr. Song’s lawyers have a different view, though – they consider the reviews defamation, and are seeking $1 million from Levine.

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In an attempt to raise awareness about the ability to turn wastewater into safe drinking water, a brewery in Stockholm, Sweden has launched a new beer brand made with recycled sewage water.

Aptly called PU:REST, the new beer crafted by Stockholm’s Nya Carnegiebryggeriet (New Carnegie Brewery) in collaboration with the Swedish Environmental Research Institute (IVL) and Carlsberg is supposed to convince people that “second-hand water” can be as clean as normal tap water. IVL claims that the challenge to get people to drink recycled water is not a technological one, but a psychological one, so what better way to convince consumers of the purity of treated wastewater than using it to create a beer.

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Jesse Duplantis, one of America’s most popular prosperity preachers has his eyes on a new $54 million Dassault Falcon 7X private jet, but he wants his followers to pay for it.

Duplantis, who runs a ministry and a church in Destrehan, Louisiana, just outside New Orleans, already owns a private jet, in fact it’s already his third one. All of them have been paid for in cash with donations from his faithful flock, but he now wants them to once again come through for him so he can buy the three-engine Dassault Falcon 7X private jet which would allow him to fly “anywhere in the world in one stop,” increasing his global reach and reducing fuel costs, because he has his own fuel farm…

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Students at the No. 11 Middle School in Hangzhou, China, may want to think twice before dozing off or getting distracted in class as a new facial recognition system will be scanning their faces every 30 seconds to make sure they are paying attention.

Called a “smart classroom behavior management system”, the new monitoring solution recently installed at Hangzhou’s No. 11 Middle School is made up of three high-tech cameras positioned above the blackboard that constantly feed information to an AI-powered software that analyzes the students’ facial expressions and general behavior and assesses whether they are enjoying lessons or if their minds are wandering.

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Thousands of Christians from the state of New Mexico and beyond have been flocking to the city of Hobbs to witness what many are considering a real-life miracle – a statue of the Virgin Mary crying tears that allegedly smell like roses.

Churchgoers at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, in Hobbs, first noticed the scented tears coming out of the statue’s eyes last Sunday, during Mass. Father Jose ‘Pepe’ Segura said that a parishioner informed him about the bizarre phenomenon, and he himself had people wipe the statue’s face clean, only to see the tears flowing down the Virgin Mary’s face again.

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A Dubai couple’s union is a serious contender for the title of shortest marriage in history, after the groom decided to divorce his bride less than 15 minutes after marrying her.

You may be wondering what on Earth could make a man to divorce his wife so fast. Well, in this case, the answer is money, more specifically the dowry payment he had agreed to pay the bride’s father. As per the contract the groom and his father-in-law had signed, the newly-married man agreed to pay the bride’s father 100,000 Dirhams ($27,224) in two installments – 50,000 Dirhams ($13,612) upon the signing of the marriage contract inside the Sharia office, and the other 50,000 Dirhams upon leaving the court building.

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A Kuwaiti female news anchor was recently suspended by the Ministry of Information for jokingly calling a male correspondent ‘handsome’ during a live TV broadcast.

Basima al-Shammar a news anchor for Kuwait TV, was covering Kuwait’s municipal election last weekend, when she made the mistake of jokingly complementing a male correspondent live on air. In a video that has since went viral, Al-Shammar can be heard telling her male colleague, who didn’t know he was already on live TV and was still adjusting his traditional headgear, that he didn’t need to fix his looks because he was already handsome. In the Western world, this would have passed as a simple compliment, but in Kuwait, it was perceived as flirtation on the female anchor’s side.

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Police in Turkmenistan have begun inspecting public and private toilets across the country for evidence of photos of president Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov being used as toilet paper.

It sounds like news you would only expect to read on a satire news website like The Onion, but this is Turkmenistan president we’re talking about here, the same country that earlier this year banned black cars because its president loves white, so this is sadly painfully true. After news started going around that people were using bits of newspaper with the president’s face on them as toilet paper, police and landfill workers were ordered to look for evidence of this unusual offence and issue warnings that such behavior could have serious consequences.

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A 30-year-old man from Camillus, New York, was recently ordered by a judge to move out of his parents house, after they sued him for refusing to leave voluntarily.

Parents Mark and Christina Rotondo had been trying to convince their 30-year-old son Michael to get a place of his own for several months, before taking him to court. They reportedly started giving him notices on February 2nd, telling him that he needed to get a job and move out. They even tried offering him $1,100 as an incentive to leave their house, but even though he took the money, he refused to move, saying it wasn’t enough for him to live anywhere else. Left with no other options, they went to their local town court to get him evicted .

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Faced with a choice between their life and their valuables, most people would choose the former in a heartbeat, but one Michigan man showed that he would rather die than part with his beloved designer bag.

On Monday, May 21, Jerad Kluting was out for a walk in Michigan’s Holland Township when a masked robber came out of nowhere, pulled out a gun from his waistband and demanded that he hand over his bag. But this was no ordinary bag. It was a $1,700 Louis Vuitton that Kluting had fallen in love with the moment he saw it. He had saved up the money to buy it for a long time, and he wasn’t going to just give it up to a stranger, even if his life was on the line.

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After being served an official notice asking why he had only been present at work 16 times in the last 8 months, an engineer from the Indian state of Gujarat replied that he was the 10th incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, and had been too busy with divine work to focus on his job.

Rameshchandra Fefar, an engineer at Gujarat government’s Sardar Sarovar Punarvasvat Agency (SSPA), claims he first got an indication of his “divine greatness” in August of 1999, from the newspaper horoscope. He felt his body being detached from his being and getting filled with ‘divya anand’ (divine happiness), but didn’t know exactly what had happened until his wife read the daily horoscope. It mentioned that he would become a leader of men and be supremely intelligent.

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A 71-year-old woman from Mazatlan, Mexico, claims that she is six-months pregnant and will soon give birth to a beautiful girl. This would make her the oldest mother in history.

Maria de la Luz says that she first suspected she was pregnant three months ago, when she started feeling tired and experienced symptoms like dizziness and vomiting. She went to a private clinic for an ultrasound which revealed that she was going to become a mother for the ninth time. The 71-year-old woman admits that doctors at the clinic were even more surprised than she was and claims to have had a total of 10 ultrasounds in the last three months, just to be sure.

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Joe Quililan, a young snake catcher from the Philippines, has been dubbed “Venom Man” for his unusual habit of allowing poisonous snakes to bite him every week and even injecting small quantities of venom into his body in order to boost his resistance to it.

31-year-old Quililan, from Cagayan de Oro City, caught his first Northern Philippine Cobra when he was only 14-years-old. Back then, he didn’t have much experience handling snakes, so one day the cobra bit him, only instead of going to the hospital, the teen just brushed it off and got on with his day as if nothing had happened. Most people would have experience severe breathing problems soon after being bitten, followed by a loss of consciousness and then death, but not Joe. He claims that that first snake bite made him realize that he had an unusual resistance to cobra venom, and spent the following years trying to become completely immune to it.

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69-year-old Xia Boyu recently became the oldest double amputee to conquer Mount Everest. That alone is an amazing achievement, but even more impressive is the fact that he did it on his fifth attempt, the first of which had caused him the loss of both his feet as a result of severe frostbite.

Xia Boyu’s first tried to reach the top of Mount Everest in 1975, as part of an expedition backed by the Chinese Government. With only 250 meters to go from reaching the summit, the team was pinned down by bad weather which didn’t let up for two days and three nights. The long wait took its toll on the climbers, and to make sure that everyone made it back alive, the team decided to turn back and fulfil their dream another time. During the descent, Xia gave his sleeping bag to one of his colleagues who was in a worse shape than him. Unfortunately, this selfless act would cause him to lose both his feet to frostbite.

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Authorities in Hejiang county, China’s Sichuan province, have come up with a controversial method of convincing borrowers to pay up their debts – showing their faces and names during short clips played in cinemas before the main movie starts.

Called “Reel of Shame”, the clip features an animated character who tells the audience “Come look at these laolai” before showing the borrowers’ faces, names and other details on the big screen. The derogatory term ‘laolai’ refers to borrowers who fail to pay their debts on time. To maximize the technique’s effectiveness, authorities show the borrowers’ faces in cinemas in their local area.

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