Made with 400 grams of solid gold and decorated with 152 sapphires, the Louis XIII Fleur de Parme is recognized as the world’s most expensive cigar lighter.

French luxury brand S.T. Dupont started working on the Louis XIII Fleur de Parme cigar lighter at the special request of Steven Hung, a Hong Kong billionaire with a passion for French history. The client had very specific requirements that made it obvious to Dupont that this project could only be carried out by a special designer with an intimate knowledge of French culture and history. Enter Princess Tania de Bourbon Parme, a direct descendant of Louis XIII, but also a renowned designer, who spent six months working with a team of 80 artisans to produce a unique art piece worthy of the title of ‘world’s most expensive cigar lighter’.

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40-year-old Yoshitaka has been happily married to 65-year-old Aki for over eleven years, despite only learning about the age gap between them on the day before their wedding.

Yoshitaka was only 29 when he met the love of his life. Aki was running a Japanese-style bar and after making some small talk, they realized they had very much in common. They had both gone through failed marriages and were raising children alone, and after visiting Aki’s bar a few times, Yoshitaka asked her out on a date. The Japanese man could tell she was a bit older than him, but he never guessed her real age and she didn’t reveal it either, fearing that it would just scare him away. She was 54 at the time, but told Yoshitaka that she was 44, and he never suspected anything. Aki was always cheerful and her smooth skin didn’t betray her age, so she was able to keep her secret for seven years, up until the day before their wedding.

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A 38-year-old woman in China has been living in a nursing home for the elderly after becoming ill due to overwork and looking for a way to slow things down in her life.

Ms. Yang had been working as a screenwriter in the film and television industry for 11 years when the hectic schedule and extreme work volume started taking a toll on her health. Earlier this year, she became sick and needed to be hospitalized. Doctors told her that she needed to take it easy on herself or she would experience even more serious health problems, so the 38-year-old woman decided to find a way to slow things down. Both her parents had passed away and she had no other close family, so she started looking for a place where she could both relax and recuperate. While browsing the internet for answers, she read about a retirement home and about how calm and slow life was there, so she decided to try it for herself.

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A regional beauty pageant in Altamira, Brazil ended in tragedy after the father of one of the contestants started shooting at the judges because his daughter had only gotten fourth place.

The bizarre incident took place on July 28, after the end of the “II Baile da Escolha da Rainha” beauty pageant in the city of Altamira. About a couple of hours after the contest ended, the father of one of the participants, a local rancher identified as Sebastiao Francisco, began voicing his dissatisfaction regarding his daughter’s fourth-place finish in the competition, questioning the judges’ decision and the evaluation criteria. The venue where the beauty pageant had taken place was staffed by private security and military police, but the angry father didn’t seem to care, and at one point took out a gun and attempted to shoot at one of the judges, only to be shot at by police.

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Zhang Sixuan, a 9-year-old girl from China’s Henan province, bested some of the world’s most elite kung fu masters to earn the title of “Shaolin Kung Fu Star” at this year’s World Shaolin Games.

There are millions of Shaolin Kung fu practitioners around the world, and every year tens of thousands of them compete for a chance to be invited to participate in the World Shaolin Games Finals. This year, an international cast of 124 kung fu practitioners was invited to show off their skills at a Shaolin temple in central China’s Henan Province, in front of respected kung fu masters and an audience of kung fu enthusiasts. Among them was a 9-year-old girl whose incredible flexibility and mastery of tong zi gong (a form of Shaolin kung fu) stunned both the judges and the crowd, earning her the coveted title of Shaolin Kung Fu Star.

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A Chinese company has come under fire for posting a job ad and asking potential candidates born in the year of the dog not to bother applying because they would automatically be rejected.

The unnamed company in Guangzhou, China’s Guangdong province, recently posted an ad for a job on its administrative staff. It required work experience, and familiarity with office software, and was compensated with a monthly salary of up to 4,000 yuan. However, what really caught people’s attention was a short line asking people not to submit their resumes if they happened to be born in the year of the dog. The post sparked controversy on Chinese social media, with many accusing the company of discrimination, but a source from inside the organization revealed that the boss was born in the year of the dragon and believes that he is not compatible with people born in the year of the dog.

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A 24-year-old Chinese man who spent the last five months of his life living in the mountains after a painful breakup now looks at least twice his age and is called “uncle” by people older than him.

Remember Brandon Miles May, the 35-year-old man who looks half his age? Well, today we’re featuring his exact opposite, a young man who looks twice his age, not because of some rare genetic disorder, but simply because he has been exposed to the elements in the mountains of northern and western China. The unidentified man rose to fame in his native country after a video in which he showed his ID to the camera to prove he was in his early 20s went viral on social media. When referred to as ‘uncle’ by the person shooting the video, the balding, rugged-looking trekker says that he is only 24, and proceeds to hold up his ID card to the camera to show that he was born in December of 2000.

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Authorities in China are reportedly testing powerful laser installations on motorways in an effort to prevent drivers from falling asleep at the wheel, but drivers’ feedback has been mixed, at best.

Last year, clips of colorful light beams being projected from motorway signs in China started going viral on social media, leaving people scratching their heads about their purpose. What looks like a light show at an open-air rave is actually a trial method of preventing drivers, especially truck drivers, from falling asleep at the wheel. The most popular clip of the bizarre installation was shot on the 1,600-km-long Qingdao–Yinchuan Expressway, which is reportedly mainly used by heavy trucks from the capital city of Ningxia traveling to the port city of Qingdao.

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Enzo, a 4-year-old boy from Aubervilliers, France, miraculously survived a 43-meter fall from his 16th-floor apartment with only a scratch and no fractures, and no one understands how.

The unusual incident took place on May 26, in a high-rise apartment complex in Aubervilliers, central France. Enzo, a 4-year-old boy diagnosed with autism was in his room when his father, Ji, heard him crying. As usual, he hurried to check on his son and calm him down, but as he tried to enter Enzo’s room, he realized that the door was locked. This had never happened before, and the parents suspect that the boy accidentally locked himself inside which caused him to panic. By the time Ji managed to break down the door, Enzo’s crying had stopped and the room seemed empty. Seeing the window open, the man horrifyingly realized that he was too late.

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Doctors at Hanoi’s Viet Duc Hospital recently saved a young man’s life by performing emergency surgery to remove a live eel that had bitten through his intestines and entered his abdominal cavity.

On July 27, a 31-year-old Indian national was brought to the emergency room of Viet Duc Hospital in Hanoi with severe abdominal pain. Through moans and screams of agony, the unnamed man told hospital staff that he had inserted a live eel into his body through his backside shortly before he began experiencing excruciating abdominal pain. The Vietnamese doctors on duty had seen a lot of things in people’s bodies, but a live eel was new, even for them, so they didn’t believe the patient at first. However, X-ray imaging and ultrasound exams showed a horizontal radiopaque skeleton in the man’s abdominal cavity which turned out to be an actual live eel.

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A Vietnamese woman has been dubbed a “sleepless mutant” because of her alleged ability to shun sleep completely. She claims to have remained awake continuously for the last three decades.

49-year-old Nguyen Ngoc My Kim is known as “the seamstress who never sleeps” in her home province of Long An, a nickname she gladly accepts because it apparently suits her. Every time Miss Kim’s reputation attracted the attention of the media, she confirmed that she hadn’t slept in several decades, adding that the complete lack of sleep hadn’t affected her health at all. However, the Vietnamese seamstress has always been quick to point out that she wasn’t born with the ability to function without sleep, she conditioned herself to stay up late ever since she was a little girl. At first, she would lose sleep because she loved reading late into the night, and later, when she started working as a seamstress, she worked late in order to complete her orders. At one point, she didn’t feel the need to sleep at all, so she didn’t.

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A New Zealand woman was sentenced to two months behind bars for overfeeding her pet dog Nuggi to the point where he could hardly walk 10 meters without needing a break.

When Nuggi was resued from his Auckland owner in October of 2021, he weighed a whopping 53.7kg and his small legs struggled to support his enormous body. SPCA officers said that he needed to pause three times to catch his breath walking just 10m from where he was kept to the rescue car. He had so much fat under his skin that doctors could barely detect a heartbeat when they performed a checkup. Nuggi also suffered from conjunctivitis and had wounds on his elbows and belly, most likely due to the time he spent lying on his stomach because he couldn’t move. His owner fed him eight to ten pieces of chicken a day, plus plenty of doggy biscuits, seemingly ignorant to the fact that he was killing the poor animal.

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A group of Peruvian women known as the “Phoenix Squad” have become famous for specializing in catching unfaithful people throughout Lima and the entire South American Country.

For the past 20 years, the Phoenix Squad has been working hard at exposing unfaithful partners in their home country of Peru. According to founder Jessica Melina, the group has solved over 10,000 cases in the last couple of decades, using a variety of tools and techniques, from old-fashioned detective work to drone surveillance and tiny hidden cameras. Although the Phoenix Squad does not discriminate between men and women when it comes to cheating, they do have one particularity – from the very beginning, its members have been exclusively female, because Melina believes they are most suitable for this type of work.

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A Japanese man’s personal life has recently become the talk of the internet after he revealed that he is perfectly ok with his wife of three years having a boyfriend and even bringing him into the family home.

Prince Soy, a young Japanese chef and blogger who promotes and sells additive-free okara granola online, has recently been drawing a lot of attention for very different reasons. On July 8th, he took to X (formerly Twitter) to announce that his wife Seira would be returning home after spending six months studying abroad and that she would be bringing her new boyfriend along. The controversial post quickly went viral, sparking a heated online debate about Prince Soy’s marriage and the three-way relationship. The controversy didn’t seem to bother the married man who actually documented the visit of his wife’s boyfriend through short clips and multiple social media posts.

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A Chinese man needed to have his left eyeball surgically removed to prevent a bacterial infection from reaching his brain after swatting a drain fly on his face.

Flies can be very annoying during the summer months. They fly around our sweaty bodies, landing on our heads and faces, but while the first instinct is to smack them dead right then and there, doctors advise against it, and for good reason. Flies carry dangerous bacteria and swatting them on our skin leaves us exposed to some very serious consequences. Take this man from Shenzen, China, who recently lost his left eye after swatting a small fly on his face and suffering a bacterial infection that doctors couldn’t treat.

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