Imagine inheriting more money that you and your family could ever hope to carry. That’s exactly what happened to a family in Bremervörde, Germany, who received an inheritance of over 1.2 million coins weighing around 2.5 tonnes. In this particular case, however, counting the money proved a lot more difficult than carrying it.

It all started 30 years ago, when a German truck driver started saving  1 pfennig (0.01 Deutsche Mark) and 2 pfennig (0.02 Deutsche Mark) coins for his family. He managed to collect around 1.2 million coins until his death, earlier this year, all of which were inherited by his family. Now, Deutsche Marks haven’t been in circulation since 2002, but the Bundesbank  – the central bank of Germany – still exchanges the old currency, so the man’s family were still able to collect their inheritance. All they had to do was weight until the coins were all counted by hand. It took a while.

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We’re constantly told that parents know best and always act in the interests of their children. Except when they don’t, like Kaylene Bowen-Wright from Dallas, Texas, who subjected her son to 323 hospital visits and 13 major operations by convincing doctors that he was terminally ill. Now aged 8, Christopher has basically spent his whole life in doctors’ offices, and has undergone over a dozen surgeries that left him with several life-threatening blood infections.

The cycle began days after Christopher was born and continued until 2015, when physicians at the Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston noticed that his mother’s accounts clashed with the test results and overall visible condition of the young patient. They alerted Child Protective Services (CPS) and Bowen was arrested on charges of causing injury to a child. The 34-year-old woman admitted she had lied to doctors that her son was gravely ill, which resulted in numerous medical interventions.

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We trust doctors with our lives and often remember some of them for as long as we draw breath. But how would any of us feel if branded with the initials of a physician who has saved our life, and branded on the inside at that? A renowned English surgeon literally left his mark on the livers of two patients he operated on in 2013 and is now awaiting his verdict on charges of assault by beating. Simon Bramhall, 53, has pleaded guilty to the charges in a case without precedent in the British criminal justice system.

Bramhall carved “SB” on livers he transplanted into one male and one female patient at the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham, where he worked for 12 years before handing in his resignation in 2014. He might have gotten away with the deed if a colleague hadn’t noticed the initials while performing a follow-up operation on the female patient. They were left by an argon beam, which surgeons use to stop bleeding during liver operations. The harmless marks left by the beam usually disappear after a while, but in this case the tell-tale signs were still in place at the time of the follow-up surgery, and Bramhall was exposed, becoming the subject of an internal disciplinary investigation.

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Corporations are in business to make money and being popular is good for business, which is why we have advertising to hammer brand names into our minds and keep us buying and buying. But sometimes along comes a company which loves its product so much that it’s willing to sacrifice some revenue to give more consumers the pleasure of using or tasting its creation. Asahi Shuzo, the Japanese brewer behind the extremely popular Dassai sake, has resorted to a full-page ad in the country’s most read newspaper to kindly ask of people not to pay so much for its sake.

The price of goods and services is dictated by the market demand for them. Dassai has become one of Japan’s best-selling sake brands, and retailers are trying to squeeze as much profit as they can from the drink. However, Asahi Shuzo boss Kazuhiro Sakurai was anything but happy with the price tag of Dassai in most retail stores, so he decided to take a stand by directly instructing people not to spend so much money on their favorite sake. He did id by running a full-page ad in the Yomiuri Shimbin newspaper that read “A request. Please do not pay a high price for our sake”.

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A squirrel that was nearly killed eight years ago by an owl when she was just four weeks old, continues to visit the Greenville County, South Carolina family that rescued, raised and later released her into the wild.

In October 2009 the baby squirrel was left severely injured after being attacked by an owl. She would not have survived for very long in the wild, but fortunately, a wildlife rescue group happened to find her. They rescued her, treated her injuries and eventually placed her in the the care of Brantley Harrison and her family, in Greenville County. The Harrisons were no strangers to rescuing and rehabilitating wild animals, but, for some reason, they formed a very unique bond with this squirrel.

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They say that love brings out the best in people, but there are times when it just makes them commit unspeakable acts, murder included. This was the route taken by two Indian lovers, who hatched a plot worthy of a crime thriller. Swathi, 27, and her lover Rajesh murdered her husband and disposed of his body by throwing it away in a forest. In order to be together and claim the assets of the victim, they took another drastic step: Swathi used acid on Rajesh’s face to disfigure him and pass him off as her murdered husband.

The evil deed was comitted on November 27, when the lovers injected Swathi’s husband, 32-year-old Sudhakar Reddy of Nagarkurnool, with an anesthetic and then killed him with an iron rod. They later transported the body in a car trunk and dumped it in a Nawabpet forest area in the Mahbubnagar district.

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It may sound crazy, but a mere £10.50 ($14) could actually make you the owner of a swanky English mansion in Devon which also comes with a Rolls-Royce, £50,000 in cash and all sorts of extra goodies, including a fully stocked wine cellar, a 3-hole golf course, a tractor and the whole house staff for an entire year.

If you consider yourself a lucky person, and have a few bucks to spare why not enter the “Win a Millionaire Mansion Competition” launched by an actual English millionaire looking to make a profit and have some fun in the process. The owner, who prefers to remain anonymous, sees this offbeat lottery as a way to sell the property without too much hassle and make a lucky someone’s dreams come true.

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One of India’s largest coal reserves, the Jharia coalfield, situated in the Dhanbad district of Jharkhand, is the site of one of the longest-burning fires in the world. The area has been burning continuously for over 100 years.

Mining in the Jharia coalfields, which cover over 100 square miles, began in the late 1800s, under British rule. The first detected fire broke out in 1916, but by the 1980s over 70 blazes had sprouted up, and none of them could be contained, let alone extinguished. As they were often deep underground, they were left to smolder in the hope that they would eventually burn out on their own. Unfortunately, a new mining operation in 1973 smothered that hope.

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YouTube has become the new breeding ground for celebrities. We’ve got fitness gurus, product pushers, comedians, gossip peddlers, gamers, you name it. Some of these people make quite a lot of money, but one of them is worthy of special attention because he happens to be a six-year-old boy. His name is Ryan and he has earned an eye-popping $11 million this year by doing something all kids love: playing with toys. The difference is that Ryan works (sort of) for his money by reviewing the toys on his channel, “Ryan Toys Review.”

Forbes magazine has just released its 2017 list of the 10 YouTubers with the highest income and young Ryan rank at number 8, tying for the spot with comedy channel Smosh. The estimate covers the period from June 1, 2016 to June 1, 2017, during which time Ryan’s videos clocked up more than 8 billion views in total and earned his family a cool $11 million in ad revenue. The boy is so popular worldwide that other kids have started imitating him and launching their own channels.

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It seems that these days people will go to any lengths for some attention on social media. Take YouTube, for example: it abounds in clips that will certainly make you go “Wow!” but also question the sanity of the uploaders. One guy enjoying his 15 minutes of fame right now is 22-year-old Jay Swingler from the UK, who made headlines for cementing his head inside a microwave oven for some YouTube views.

In hindsight, it looks funny and Jay certainly got the attention he craves. However, it may have gone horribly wrong: his friends couldn’t free him for an hour and a half, and emergency services had to be called. As relieved as Jay was to be rescued, he is absolutely unrepentant, saying the whole thing is hilarious and he is thrilled with the attention his video has garnered.

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Everybody is talking about cryptocurrencies these days, but very few actually understand the concept and the technology that underpins digital money. The latest craze in this space is a game called CryptoKitties which has players spending insane amounts of money on…well, virtual cats. According to some estimates, more than 6,000 people are trading in electronic cats, with the total transaction volume exceeding $7 million as of last week. And these are figures for a game that debuted as recently as November 28!

CryptoKitties is the creation of Axiom Zen and runs on the Ethereum platform. Ethereum, the second-most popular cryptocurrency after Bitcoin, is having a bit of an infrastructure problem because the kitty mania is putting a severe strain on its network. The rabid interest in CryptoKitties has led to a spike in traffic, accounting for more than 11% of the total at present. And some of the cartoon-like felines are changing hands for eye-popping amounts, the record belonging to one that sold for the digital equivalent of over $117,000.

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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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The city of San Diego, California is set to pay its former Mayor Roger Hedgecock’s wife almost $85,000 for a fall on a damaged sidewalk in Pacific Beach that allegedly caused one of her breast implants to rupture.

Cynthia Hedgecock, 70, claims that she tripped and fell onto her chest while walking on Morrell Street toward Grand Avenue, on July 31, 2015. She testified that she was carrying folders in one hand, and her phone in the other, which prevented her from adequately breaking her fall, after tripping. She landed on her chest, which caused severe damage to her breast implants. Now, a judge has ordered the city to pay her $85,000 as compensation.

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A 29-year-old man from Guangzhou, China experienced sudden paralysis of all four limbs after spending two consecutive days playing on his mobile phone. The man reportedly spent a lot of his time looking down at his handheld, but this latest gaming marathon was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Late last month, the yet unidentified gamer spent two consecutive days trying to advance as much as possible in the mobile video game he was so passionate about. In the early hours of the third day, he felt a sudden pain and stiffness in his neck. Within moments all four of his limbs went numb, and he found himself paralyzed. His family rushed him to the emergency department of Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital, where, after an MRI and other tests, Shen Huiyong, the orthopedic specialist, diagnosed him with cervical spondylosis hematoma. That meant that his paralysis was caused by blood clots in his cervical spinal tube pressing against his spinal cord.

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Humans have been riding horses for thousands of years, but one Ukrainian strongman proves that horses can sometimes ride us too. Champion powerlifter Dmytro Khaladzhi has been making quite a name for himself by carrying live, fully conscious horses on his back to prove his incredible strength.

Like most strongmen, Dmytro Khaladzhi does a lot of crazy stuff, like letting trucks drive over him, bending steel rods with his teeth, or driving nails through wood with the palm of his hand, but his horse carrying routines are by far the most impressive. Several videos doing the rounds online show him grabbing full-grown horses, lifting them on his back and taking a few steps with the incredible load, all while the confused animals enjoy the ride.

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