A young English woman is being accused of trying to hire a killer on the dark web in order to have a co-worker and love rival murdered so she could have their boss all to herself.

26-year-old Whitney Franks allegedly tried to have a female co-worker murdered because she had started a romantic affair with her love interest, their boss. Franks reportedly started working at a Sports Direct store in Milton Keynes in 2015, a year after the store manager, James Prest, took over the branch. By 2016, the two had become romantically involved, despite the fact that Prest had a long-term partner and was a father-of-two. Things started going south for Franks in 2017, when another woman, Ruut Ruutna joined the store. By 2018, Prest and Ruutna had also begun an affair, which Franks couldn’t come to terms with. That same year, she left the Milton Keynes store to join another Sports Direct branch in nearby Bletchley, but jealousy just didn’t let her move on…

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Two Japanese companies are teaming up to produce upright ‘nap boxes’ that they claim will help solve the Asian country’s notorious overwork problem.

Tokyo-based furniture specialist Itoki Corporation and Koyoju Gohan, a plywood supplier from Hokkaido, recently signed a license agreement to start production of a bizarre-looking contraption that they claim will tackle the overwork phenomenon in Japan’s offices. It basically consists of an upright wooden pod that will allow users to enter and use as a private space to sleep standing up…

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A New England distillery specializing in bourbon whisky has joined the fight against an invasive crab species by using the crustaceans to create a surprisingly tasty crab-infused spirit.

“When life gives lemons, make lemonade,” the old saying goes, and the folks at New Hampshire’s Tamworth Distillery adapted it to their region-specific problem. New England’s fishermen have been complaining about green crabs devouring their shellfisheries for a while now, but with no natural predators to worry about and increasing sea temperatures working in their favor, there is little anyone can do to stop them. But little isn’t nothing, and Tamworth Distillery has come up with a way to fight the invasive species while expanding its business. They created a crab-infused bourbon aptly-named Crab Trapper.

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A 47-year-old man recently became the envy of every male idol fan on the planet after it became known that he managed to marry his favorite idol.

Let’s face it, we’ve all fantasized about getting noticed by our celebrity crush at some stage in our lives, but deep down we always knew it was nothing but a dream. However, for one Japanese idol fan, that dream became a reality. Not only did he get noticed by his favorite idol, but they ended up having a romantic relationship and eventually getting married, despite a 27-year age difference.

In 2020, Yuki Tomoe debuted as a substitute member of an Osaka-based idol group. The moment he laid eyes on her, Mitsuo, who was 44 years old at the time, knew there was something special about her. She was only 17, but he thought she was very talented and charismatic, so he decided to support her.

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A blood-filled mosquito squashed in a burgled apartment in China’s Fujian Province helped investigators catch the mysterious criminal.

It sounds like the plot of a CSI episode, but according to Chinese news sources, authorities in Fuzhou, East China’s Fujian Province managed to bring a burglar to justice by analyzing the blood stain left on a wall by a squashed mosquito. While examining the crime scene – a burgled apartment in a high-rise residential compound – police noticed that the burglar, who appeared to have breached the home after climbing onto the balcony, may have spent the night there, and after finding a blood stain left by a squashed mosquito on a wall, they decided to have the blood tested for DNA.

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The Richard Mille RM UP-01 Ferrari is the new world’s thinnest mechanical wristwatch, at just 1.75 millimeters thick. But whilst its frame may be diminutive, its price tag is anything but, at a whopping $1.88 million.

Unless you’re a wristwatch enthusiast, you’re probably not aware that there’s an exciting competition between watchmakers to create the world’s thinnest mechanical wristwatch.  In 2018, the world record was set by the Piaget Altiplano Ultimate Concept, with a thickness of 2 millimeters. Earlier this year, Bulgari unveiled the Octo Finissimo Ultra, a mechanical wonder with a thickness of just 1.8 mm. But its reign was shortlived as well, because Swiss watchmaker Richard Mille decided to celebrate its partnership with Ferrari by creating an even thinner mechanical wristwatch, the RM UP-01 Ferrari, at only 1.75 millimeters.

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An international network of scammers was recently dismantled after allegedly creating a fake version of India’s Professional Cricket League, with farmers posing as players, and broadcasting games live to unsuspecting betting enthusiasts.

When it comes to betting scams, the one recently dismantled in Gujarat’s countryside sounds pretty hard to beat. A criminal group coordinated by a “mastermind in Russia” allegedly created a fake version of the Indian cricket IPL, with farmers and unemployed men posing as players of teams like the Chennai Super Kings, Mumbai Indians or the Gujarat Titans in games broadcast live on YouTube to unsuspecting betting punters in Russia. The games looked real, but the players acted on command, hitting a six, a four, or getting out as directed.

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A Chinese woman reportedly spent the last decade of her life writing hundreds of bogus Wikipedia entries on Russian history and contributing to hundreds of others.

Wikipedia is nothing less of an online treasure! Whether you’re looking up general information out of pure curiosity, or you’re writing an important paper, Wikipedia almost always delivers the best results. But it’s not a perfect system, and this recent story from China is a perfect example of that. According to online reports from several established news sources in China, a mysterious woman is allegedly responsible for one of the biggest hoaxes in Wikipedia’s history – over 200 made-up articles on Russian medieval history, complete with fake locations, events and characters created over a period of 10 years.

This bizarre story began a while back, when Yifan, a Chinese fantasy novelist, started browsing Chinese Wikipedia as a source of inspiration for his new book. Focusing on Russian medieval history, the writer stumbled over the great Kashin silver mine, originally owned by the Tver, an independent state from the 13th to 15th centuries, and then by the Grand Duchy of Moscow, until it closed down in the 18th century, due to its resources becoming exhausted.

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Scientists at the University of Chicago have developed a new algorithm that forecasts crime with up to 90% accuracy by analyzing data and learning patterns.

Minority Report is a very popular sci-fi film about a special police unit that can arrest murderers before they commit their crimes with the help of three clairvoyant humans called Precogs, which can visualize impending homicides. It’s a brilliant film, if you like sci-fi murder mysteries, or you’re simply a fan of Tom Cruise, but the reason we bring it up in this story is that a team of researchers claims to have come up with a real-world, AI-powered system that is also able to predict crimes with an accuracy of 90%. And their systems doesn’t require Precogs, just past data so it can predict the future.

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Police in Nigeria recently released 77 people, including young children, from the basement of a church where they had been waiting for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ for several months.

The raid on the Whole Bible Believers Church in the Valentino area of Ondo Town came after a local mother approached police about the disappearance of her kids and told them that she suspected they had gone to the church. When they entered the place of worship, policemen found 77 people being kept in the basement by the Pastor and his deputy, who had told them that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Authorities claim that the church encouraged people to “stay behind” and wait for the Rapture, and some of them are believed to have lived in the church for several months.

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A so-called ‘career exam taker’ in China was investigated by authorities for allegedly acing the world’s toughest university admittance exam three years in a row and reportedly earning $300,000.

The Gaokao is a notoriously difficult university entrance exam that many Chinese spend years, sometimes decades to pass. The King of Gaokao, for example, has been trying to get into his dream college for 25 years now, but China’s top schools are just too tough to get into for the vast majority of Gaokao takers. Then there are the lucky few that manage to get into these elite learning institutions, like Peking University or Tsinghua University, and finally, there are the ‘career exam takers,’ who earn high sums of money by acing the world’s toughest university exam year after year.

Because the Gaokao is so ridiculously hard to ace, many reputed schools in China offer their students considerable monetary prizes for getting into the country’s top-rated universities. And because there is no limit on how many times a student can take the Gaokao, some exceptionally-gifted individuals get to earn a nice living by simply acing the exam years in a row.

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A Japanese man who spent a whole year fishing small pebbles out of the soles of his sneakers may have inspired a new bobby in his home country.

Neruno Daisuki, an illustrator and manga artist from Japan, recently got his five minutes of fame on Twitter after showing off the collection of pebbles and glass fragments he fished out of the soles of his shoes over the last year. You know, small stones get stuck in the grooves of our footwear soles all the time, but who would ever think of collecting them? Well, this guy did, and after a year of painstaking work, Daisuki showed off his collection of 179 pebbles, 32 glass fragments, and 1 nut.

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A company in Russia’s Leningrad region recently laid a small section of strawberry-scented asphalt as an experiment to help solve the problem of unpleasant odors.

I don’t know if you’ve ever smelled hot asphalt when road sections are being laid or fixed, but it’s not the most appealing odor in the world. Luckily, we may not have to put up with it for much longer, as companies are beginning to come up with solutions to this issue. Just a few months after a Polish company came up with floral-scented asphalt to improve working conditions for the people working with it on a daily basis, a Russian company has successfully laid a 700-meter-long stretch of road using strawberry-scented asphalt.

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A Bolivian woman was recently arrested for throwing hot water on her sleeping husband’s genitals because he was allegedly dreaming of another woman.

The shocking incident happened last week in the Bolivian city of La Paz. According to the scorned wife’s testimony, her 45-year-old husband was sleeping and allegedly declaring his love to another woman in his sleep. Enraged, the woman went into the kitchen, brought a pot of water to a boil and then simply threw it on his genital area for his “transgression”. According to police sources, the man was hospitalized with second-degree burns on his privates as well as on his arm and back.

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In case the name ‘car-jitsu’ wasn’t clear enough, this new contact sport that’s getting a lot of attention on Russian social media is basically jiu-jitsu in a car.

If you were to make a list of the most awkward places to grapple and wrestle in, the car would probably rank pretty high, and that’s precisely what makes car-jitsu so intriguing. Invented a couple of years ago by Vikentiy Mikheev, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu and Judo black belt and a professional mixed martial arts fighter, car-jitsu challenges practitioners to subdue their opponent in the small confines of a car. Everything inside the car – including the seat belts, steering wheel, mirrors and chairs – can be used to gain an upper hand in the match, but, just like in regular jiu-jitsu, hittinh is not allowed.

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