An Indian woman who lost her husband in a tragic car accident years ago has built a small temple in his honor, and worships a marble bust of him.

Padmavathi, a woman living in Andhra Pradesh’s Prakasam district has been getting a lot of attention in her home country of India after it was reported that she built a small temple in honor of her late husband, complete with a white marble statue sculpted in his likeness. The woman claims that her husband, Gurukula Anki Reddy, appeared in her dreams soon after his death, in 2007, asking her to build a temple for him. She honored his wishes and has been worshipping there ever since.

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Doctors performing a colonoscopy on a 59-year-old patient were shocked to discover a small ladybug crawling inside the man’s intestine.

I’m no doctor, but I imagine that one of the last things you’d expect to find in someone’s colon while performing a colonoscopy is a living ladybug. How the insect got inside the man’s intestines is one thing, but how on Earth does a ladybug make it into the colon alive? That was the question puzzling the team that discovered the ladybug during a routine colonoscopy in 2019. While exploring a 59-year-old man’s colon in search of scarring, ulcers or tumors, they noticed a live ladybug crawling on the inside of the man’s intestine.

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Japanese parents are sending bags of rice that weigh as much as their babies to relatives who can’t visit them because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

As is customary in many cultures around the world, when a Japanese couple welcomes a baby into the world, relatives come to visit the family and celebrate, but because of the pandemic and social distancing rules, that hasn’t been possible of late. However, a resourceful rice shop owner in Kitakyushu city, near Fukuoka, found an ingenious way of making money from the humble grain by selling it as replicas of newborn babies.  Rice babies, as the replicas are now known in Japan, are bags of rice that weigh exactly as much as the baby they are replacing, and that have photos of the baby printed on them. They are sent to relatives so they can hug the new human while looking at a picture of their face.

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Romantic relationships between humans can get complicated, sometimes messy or even downright toxic, but if being single isn’t an option, technology now offers a new alternative in the form of advanced AI chatbots that make you feel like you’re interacting with a real person.

Chinese youths are reportedly turning to AI-powered chatbots as an alternative to regular dating, either after going through traumatic relationships or breakups with regular people or simply as a way of keeping things, well, simple. While a real person can sometimes do or say things you don’t particularly like, the chatbots developed by companies like Microsoft-owned Replica or fast-growing Chinese startup Xiaoice are programmed to learn from the conversations you have with it, as well as from your social media feeds and even your writing style. So it’s no wonder that some people aren’t even considering going back to regular dating after using such services.

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Teleperformance, one of the world’s largest call center companies, recently sparked controversy after it was announced that it has been pressuring employees to agree to have AI surveillance cameras installed in their homes.

Call center work has been booming during the pandemic, because many businesses started operating online, and many of them preferred relying on outsourced workers from countries with cheap labor costs, like Colombia or the Philippines. The problem is that most of these call-center operators had to work remotely from home, due to pandemic-related restrictions, which has reportedly been making it harder for managers to monitor their activity. Now, one of the world’s largest call center companies, Colombia’s  Teleperformance, is pressuring its employees to accept being monitored in their own homes by artificial intelligence-powered cameras.

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Indonesian media recently reported the bizarre story of a young man who ended up marrying both his fiancée and his ex-girlfriend at the same time, after the latter crashed his wedding ceremony.

Late last month, 20-year-old Korik Akbar, from the regency of Central Lombok in the Indonesian state of West Nusa Tenggara, was in the process of marrying his betrothed, when his ex-girlfriend burst in asking that she marry him as well, as his second wife, claiming that she couldn’t get over their relationship. Instead of making a scene, Akbar’s fiancée, Kotimah, actually agreed to the proposal and told the young man that she accepted his former fling as his second wife. So he ended up marrying the both of them in the same ceremony.

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For over 120 years England’s Norland College has been known as the most prestigious nanny-training school in the world, with graduates landing jobs with wealthy families and earning upwards of $100,000 per year.

Founded in the late 1800s by Emily Ward, who realized that there was no official childcare training at the time, Norland College soon became the most renowned nanny-training school on Earth, with clients including Royal families and wealthy couples looking for the best service money could by. And indeed, Norland-trained nannies are nothing if not expensive, with some graduates earning as much as $170,000 per year, and even students raking in around 40,000 working during their elite training. That’s more than four times the average salary of a nanny in UK, but somewhat justified by the unique curriculum taught at Norland.

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A young African man was recently placed under arrest after he tried to pass as a woman while trying to pass the graduation exam on behalf of his girlfriend.

22-year-old Khadim Mboup, a student of the Gaston Berger de Saint-Louis University, in Diourbel, Senegal, managed to fool faculty and supervisors at a Baccalaureate (high-school graduation exam) examination center into thinking that he was a female high-school student for 3 days. Mboup wore a long-hair wig partially covered with a traditional scarf, earrings, a dress, bra and even face makeup to pass as his girlfriend, 19-year-old Gangué Dioum. Just when the two lovers’ plan seemed to work, one of the supervisors noticed something odd about Khadim, and his true identity was discovered.

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Buying works of art can become an expensive habit, but what if you didn’t have to buy the artworks and instead lease them for however long you wanted? That’s the premise of an ingenious Japanese business that lets people rent paintings.

Casie is an innovative service that connects painters and art lovers in a whole new way. Instead of brokering the sale of artworks it offers clients the possibility of leasing them by the month. It sounds a bit strange, maybe because it just hasn’t been done before, but if people can rent designer clothes and expensive jewelry, why can’t they do the same with art? Apparently, this model benefits both artists, who are able to generate more revenue from their works in the long term, and clients, who get to keep the paintings until they get bored of them and decided to swap them for new ones.

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A Russian woman is reportedly taking fast-food giant McDonald’s to court for making her break fast during Lent with its aggressive advertising showing delicious burgers.

Ksenia Ovchinnikova, an Orthodox Christian from the Russian city of Omsk, is suing the world’s largest fast-food restaurant chain for allegedly making her break fast for Lent two years ago, with its delicious-looking ad banners. The woman accuses McDonald’s of breaking the consumer protection law and insulting her religious feelings by advertising delicious meat products during a time when Christians attempt to refrain from eating meat and other animal products. She is requesting 1,000 rubles ($14) as compensation for sustained moral damage.

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In what can only be described as the real-life plot of a horror movie script, a homeless man was wrongfully arrested and locked up in a mental hospital for over two years, after being mistaken for a man he had never even met.

Joshua Spriestersbach’s nightmare began on a hot day in 2017, while waiting in line for food outside a homeless shelter in Honolulu. When police woke him up, he thought he was being arrested for breaking the city’s law against sitting and lying on public sidewalks, but little did he know that things were a lot more serious than that. What Spriestersbach didn’t realize was that the police officer had somehow mistaken him for one Thomas Castleberry, who had a warrant out for his arrest for violating probation in a 2006 drug case. The fact that the two didn’t even look similar didn’t seem to matter to anyone, and instead of simply checking photographs or fingerprints of the two men, the homeless man simply became Castleberry.

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Welwitschia is a fascinating plant that can not only survive for several thousands of years, but it can do so in one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet, the Namib Desert.

Named after Austrian botanist Friedrich Welwitsch, who discovered it in Angola in 1859, Welwitschia is actually called ‘tweeblaarkanniedood’ in Afrikaans, which translates to “two leaves that cannot die”. That’s a surprisingly accurate name for a plant that grows only two leaves and can survive thousands of years in the world’s oldest desert. Some parts of the Namib Desert receive less than two inches of precipitation a year, but that’s apparently all Welwitschia needs to survive, thanks to its extremely “efficient, low-cost genome”.

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Someone just managed to sell a small plastic bag they claim contains air from a recent Kanye West listening event for a whopping $7,600 on eBay.

It’s no secret that the Kanye West brand is synonymous with commercial success, but not even that explains how someone can pay almost $8,000 for an empty plastic bag simply because it is in some way related to the popular American artist.  West recently hosted the much awaited Atlanta DONDA listening event on the Mercedes-Benz stadium in Atlanta, and one fan allegedly lucky enough to be in attendance took the opportunity to make some money out of it. He took a plastic zip-lock bag, labeled it as ‘AIR FROM DONDA DROP’ on eBay, set the price at $3,330.00 and waited for the bids to roll in. And sure enough, roll they did…

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A contractor who didn’t receive the payment he was promised rented an excavator and destroyed the façade of an apartment building he himself built.

Tenants were supposed to move into a newly completed apartment building in Blumberg, a small town in Germany’s Baden-Wurttemberg, in the next couple of weeks, but a bizarre incident has delayed their plans by at least three months. Late last month, a man operating an excavator showed up at the building and began meticulously tearing down the façade, breaking glass windows and destroying balconies, ultimately leaving the place looking like it had been in a war. Stranger still was that the man responsible for the devastation was allegedly the contractor who had been responsible for building the edifice in the first place.

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A group of gamers in the Philippines recently made international news headlines for continuing to play their favorite video game despite being waist-deep in floods from a typhoon.

Surreal footage showing the young video game enthusiasts simply ignoring the rising water level was captured last Thursday, at an internet cafe in the town of Cainta in Rizal, which had been heavily battered by typhoon Ying-fa. Despite being half-submerged in muddy flood water and a very real risk of being electrocuted, the kids appear glued to their monitors, ready to engage in multiplayer matches. It was only when the owner of the cafe realized the danger they were in that the computers were shut down and the gamers finally left.

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