A Chinese man whose best friend’s wife had introduced him to his online girlfriend of over a year recently learned that the woman he had fallen in love with had actually been his friend’s wife trying to scam him.

Mr. Zhou, a middle-aged man from Xuchang, China’s Henan province, had been trying to raise money to start a family by growing watermelons in Myanmar. He had been gone for years, but he still kept in touch with his best friend, Xiao Li, to whom he confessed last year that his business was going well and that he wanted to meet a good woman. Li told him that his wife had a girlfriend who was also single and that she could introduce them. Because Zhou was still abroad tending to his fruit business, online dating was the only viable option. The two hit it off and agreed to continue their long-distance relationship until Zhou returned to China.

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A Japanese civil servant in Osaka was recently forced to return 1.44 million yen ($11,000) of his salary after being found guilty of smoking during work hours more than 4,500 times in 14 years.

When people say smoking is an expensive vice, they are generally referring to the cost of cigarretes, but in cities like Osaka, smokers risk having important sums of money deducted from their salaries if caught smoking on the job. A director-level civil servant recently found this out the hard way after being hit with a fine of approximately $11,000 for thousands of cigarettes smoked during work hours for 14 years. The 61-year-old employee who was found to have smoked a total of 4,512 times in the past 14 and a half years while he was at work, the equivalent of 355 hours and 19 minutes spent not doing his job.

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Nottingham’s Haunted Museum is home to many macabre and fear-inducing attractions, but few as disturbing as George, a 1930s doll reportedly made using a dead person’s eyes and hair.

Marrie Wesson, who founded the Haunted Museum of Nottingham with her husband in 2018, recently met antique expert Charlie Ross on BBC’s popular TV show Bargain Hunt. She brought along a couple of her most disturbing exhibits, one of which was George, a bizarre-looking doll dating back to 1930s Texas that managed to freak out Ross with its sulking expression and bright blue eyes. As it turns out, there is more to George’s creepiness than his facial expression. He comes from a time when people made such dolls in memory of their loved ones, only in his case, the person who made him used the loved one’s actual hair and their glass eyes…

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A 60-year-old man who used to work out for 8 hours a day, walking, jogging, and doing hundreds of situps, developed severe degenerative arthritis and is barely able to move because of the pain.

They say too much of a good thing is usually bad for you, and apparently, exercise is no exception. Chinese newspaper Shanxy Daily recently featured the tragic story of a 60-year-old man from Henan who only discovered exercising in his early 40s, only to start overdoing it to such an extent that he pretty much ruined his joints. The Zhengzhou-based man reportedly exercised about two and a half hours every morning, walking, running, and doing pull-ups, then swam for about two hours and then did 800 sit-ups a day, plus hundreds of push-ups, and some badminton to top it all off. Unfortunately, his body eventually gave in and he started experiencing severe pain in his joints.

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A popular Japanese tailor and adventurer recently went viral on social media after climbing Mount Kinabalu, the highest mountain in Malaysia, in a three-piece suit and stylish leather suit.

One of the last things you would expect to see at the top of the 4,095-meter Mount Kinabalu is a Japanese fellow wearing a pristine three-piece suit, classy leather suit, and an office ID tag around his neck and carrying a messenger bag. And yet that was exactly the unusual sight that mountaineers at the top of Malaysia’s highest peak were treated to this week as Nobutaka Sada, a Japanese tailor and adventurer, posed for photos and videos to post on his popular social media accounts. Sada owns his own bespoke suit label and he often pulls this kind of stunt to promote his brand.

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French luxury accessory brand Coperni recently unveiled a limited-edition “meteorite’ handbag that is hand-carved from a meteorite that fell on Earth thousands of years ago. It can be yours for just $40,000 euros ($43,000)

As part of its Fall/Winter 23 fashion collection, Coperni has created a unique handbag that ‘combines archeology, design, as well as classical and primitive art’. The Mini Meteorite Swipe Bag has the general shape of the brand’s iconic swipe bag, but a rougher finish, which makes sense considering that it’s hand-sculpted out of rock. And not just any rock, but a real meteorite, hence the name. The bag showcased on the Coperni online store supposedly contains a piece of meteorite estimated to have fallen on Earth 55,000 years ago, but because each purse is unique, the shape and color may vary slightly.

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A 29-year-old South Korean woman who forged her birth certificate in order to pose as a 16-year-old teenager and enroll at a New Jersey high school claims she did it only out of nostalgia.

In January of this year Hyejeong Shin, a 29-year-old South Korean woman and legal resident of the United States of America, made international news headlines after being caught pretending to be a 16-year-old girl at the New Brunswick High School in New Jersey. Just a few days into her high-school adventure, New Brunswick staff discovered that she had faked her birth certificate in order to gain admission. The discovery was made during the vetting process, but recently revealed information suggests that Shin was also reported by a number of students whom she had started acting weird with. The young Korean woman claims that she never intended to hurt anyone and that she merely wanted to relieve the experience that made her feel the safest growing up.

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On March 24, 2022, the whole of Switzerland was shocked by the unexplainable act of a family of five from the town of Montreux who jumped from the balcony of their seventh-floor apartment.

A year ago, in the span of about five minutes, Nasrine Feraoun, 41, her twin sister Narjisse, her husband Eric David, 40, and their two children – an 8-year-old girl and a 15-year-old son – all jumped from the balcony of their 7th-floor apartment on Rue du Casino street, in the town of Montreux. Only the 15-year-old son survived, but after spending months in a coma, he has no recollection of the tragic events of March 24, 2022. After investigating this bizarre case for a year, Swiss authorities recently revealed that the family had planned and even rehearsed their jumps beforehand, which explains how they could jump one after the other without making so much as a sound.

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A young couple in France is currently engaged in a legal battle for the right to name their baby ‘Hades’, a name made famous by the god of the underworld from Greek mythology.

Kristina Desgres and Rodrigo Velasquez, a young couple from the historic French port city of Saint-Malo, which happens to have the highest and most spectacular tides in Europe, had their first baby in September of last year. However, they still don’t have their ‘livret de Famille, a mandatory document obtained when a child is born or adopted by an individual or a couple, because the public prosecutor of Saint-Malo refuses to accept the baby’s name. Baby Hades is a little angel, but to anyone familiar with Greek mythology, his name is synonymous with the god of the underworld, the realm of the dead.

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The Holme, a 205-year-old London mansion is currently on the market for an eye-watering £250 million ($300 million), which makes it the world’s most expensive mansion.

Known as the “White House of Regent’s Park”, because of its massive scale and similar style facade as that of Washington DC’s iconic presidential residence, The Holme features 40 bedrooms, eight garages, a tennis court, a sauna, a library, and a “grand dining room”, as part of its 29,000 sq ft of living space.  Built in 1818 by Georgian property developer James Burton, The Holme served as a residence for the Burton family, before being used by Bedford College for several decades. It became a private residence in the 1980s and has been on the market several times since, fetching astronomical prices every time. Today, it is being sold for £250 million ($300 million), the highest price set for any mansion, ever.

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A Colombian woman who lost her husband at the hands of a local crime boss, spent years planning her revenge, seducing him and gathering evidence to have him arrested for multiple crimes.

In what sounds like the script of a Hollywood blockbuster, a Colombian woman managed to do what the police and the military could not – avenge the death of her husband and bring a dangerous criminal to justice. The unnamed woman was hailed as a hero by police and journalists in Cordoba, Colombia, after spending years getting close to a cunning criminal and gathering enough evidence to have them prosecuted. But she was no crime fighter, just a grieving widow getting revenge on the man who had had her husband assassinated years before…

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A Thai man is taking his ex-wife to court, accusing her of concealing a lottery win of 12 million baht ($352,000) from him before breaking up with him over the phone and marrying someone else.

Narin, a 47-year-old scorned man from Thailand’s Isan region, recently hired a lawyer to help him wage a legal battle against his wife of 20 years who allegedly left him to marry another man after winning the lottery. The man claims his ex-wife, 43-year-old Chaweewan, with whom he has three daughters, took advantage of the fact that he was working in South Korea to support the family and simply broke off with him over the phone last month without so much as an explanation. He returned home at the beginning of his month to confront the woman only to learn that she had already married another man, a local police officer, just days earlier.

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A Florida University professor plans to spend 100 days 30 feet under the ocean’s surface, in an underwater lodge, as a scientific experiment to find out how the constant increased pressure affects his body and mind.

The current world record for time spent living underwater was set in 2014 by two Tennessee biologists who managed to live submerged for a total of 73 days, but if University of South Florida professor Joseph Dituri meets his set goal, he will beat that record by a whopping 27 days. At the beginning of this month, Dituri, who also goes by the nickname ‘Dr. Deepsea’, moved into Jules’ Undersea Lodge in Key Largo, an underwater hotel 30 feet under the surface, where he plans to remain until June 9th. During this time, he and a team of physicians and scientists plan to conduct a series of tests to see how living underwater for prolonged periods of time affects the human body and mind.

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Chinese state media outlet People’s Daily recently unveiled the newest member of its news anchor team, Ren Xiaorong, a virtual, AI-powered anchor that can allegedly provide 24/7 news coverage.

In a video published last Sunday by People’s Daily, a virtual young woman called Ren Xiaorong introduced herself to the world as an AI-driven chatbot that has learned the skills of ‘thousands of news anchors’ and that can constantly evolve based on viewers’ feedback. Beautiful and smartly dressed, Ren certainly looked like an agreeable news anchor, and if not for the synthesized, out-of-synch dubbing, you could hardly tell she wasn’t a real person. Using an app, anyone can ask the news anchor questions on a variety of topics, including education, epidemic prevention, housing, employment, environmental protection, and many others, but she can currently only deliver generic answers in line with the rhetoric favored by the Chinese Communist party.

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90-year-old Jim Arrington got into bodybuilding when he was 13 years old, and he has been keeping at it ever since. At 90 years old, he holds the Guinness World Record for “oldest active male bodybuilder”.

Jim Arrington discovered bodybuilding when he was 13. He walked into a drug store and saw these big, bulky guys on the cover of a muscle magazine. He immediately ordered a copy of a 25-cent book by George Jowett, a Canadian strongman, and started doing the exercises detailed in it using his father’s three-pound steel balls. They certainly weren’t the most useful bodybuilding tools, but they helped him put on more than 10 pounds of muscle in a few months, so he kept going. He has been going at it ever since, and even though his body is much more fragile now, at age 90, he has no plans of ever stopping weight training.

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