Betty, a five-month-old puppy found on the outskirts of Bratsk, in Russia, and placed in the care of a local shelter, was initially rejected by families looking to adopt a dog, because of her unusual look.

When caretakers at the Dobrie Ruki (Kind Hands) shelter, in the Russian city of Bratsk, saw Betty’s black eyebrows for the first time they were convinced that someone had played a cruel joke on the poor animal and painted them on. They gave her a good wash, but the eyebrows didn’t go anywhere, and they realized that the white pooch had been born with them. It was a case of natural pigmentation, but a really unique one.

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A 59-year-old man from Moscow risks spending up to five years behind bard for allegedly using a live cat as a weapon against police, last year.

On October 4, 2018, the suspect, Gennady Shcherbakov, was reportedly sitting at the foot of his apartment building’s stairwell. He had been drinking heavily and was causing a ruckus, so some of his neighbors called the police to report the disturbance. However, when police officers arrived on the scene and told Shcherbakov to go home, he refused to comply and instead grabbed a nearby cat and shoved it in the face of one of the police officers. The confused feline allegedly tried clinging to the man’s face, scratching him badly.

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If you’re a Dark Knight fan with money to burn, you may be interested in this cool-looking Batmobile on sale in Russia for just 55,000,000 rubles, or about $850,000.

Batmobile replicas are not that uncommon nowadays, but the one currently being sold on Russian online marketplace Auto.ru, stands out in terms of looks, performance and price. First of all this is  very modern take on the iconic Batmobile, I’d say even more so than the Tumbler featured in the dark Knight trilogy. It has a very aggressive look, complemented by a menacing machine gun that actually comes with realistic sound effects, and measures 4 meters wide, which means you won’t be able to drive it everywhere. Powered by a 5-liter engine, this rear-wheel drive Batmobile has a top speed of 100km/h, and features a bunch of cool accessories – such as bulletproof windows, thermal imaging with 255x zoom, and a night vision camera – designed to make you feel like a real-life Batman.

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Wild animals usually get put down after attacking humans, but a Russian zoo keeper who lost one of her legs to a caged bear has been pleading with authorities to spare the animal, claiming that it wasn’t to blame for the tragic accident.

On September 25, experienced zoo keeper and animal activist Vera Blishch was instructing a new colleague at the Municipal Zoo in Ussuriysk when a bout of vertigo made her lean towards a bear cage for just a split second. Unfortunately, that was just enough time for Manyunya, a 20-year-old female bear, to reach through the bars and grab the zookeeper’s leg. She suffered severe injuries, including multiple fractures, and eventually needed to have her leg amputated below the knee at a Ussuriysk hospital. Knowing that animals that attack people are put down to eliminate the risk of them attacking other humans, Blishch’s first concern upon waking from her surgery anesthesia was for Manyunya’s well-being, insisting that the bear was not to blame.

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Orthodox priests in Russia’s Tver Oblast region, literally reached new heights in their quest to save their congregations from addictive sins like drinking and fornicating. They got in an airplane and doused the whole city of Tver in holy water, in order to cleanse it.

Metropolitan Savva of Tver and Kashinsky, Father Alexander Goryachev and two other members of the Russian Orthodox Church performed the bizarre aerial blessing last Wednesday, in honor of All-Russian Sobriety Day. They boarded a small plane and brought with them 70 liters of holy water and two icons – the “Inexhaustible Chalice,” said to be able to cure people of alcohol and drug addiction, and one of John the Baptist. A married a couple that claimed the husband had been miraculously cured of alcohol addiction in the past was also present aboard the airplane.

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Having armed men wearing combat masks manhandling you and simulating a drug bust hardly sounds like the scenario of a perfect marriage proposals, but it’s apparently all the rage in Russia.

Imagine driving a car, minding your own business, when all of a sudden a black van cuts you off and slams the breaks forcing you to do the same in a split second. That would be scary enough, but it gets worse. The van door slides open and masked men carrying assault rifles jump out and violently pull you out of the vehicle, while they go through your personal belongings seemingly searching for something. And then they find it – a small plastic bag full of white powder that they claim is illegal drugs. You’ve never seen it before, but they claim otherwise and you feel your legs shaking under you as you try to grasp the implications of the situation. Then, all of a sudden, one of the threatening men drops down to one knee, pops open a small case and says “Marry me!”

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Did you grow up wishing the school you went to every day looked more like a fairy-tale palace? No? Well this Russian billionaire sure did and when he became rich enough to afford it, he actually turned his old school into a flamboyant palace, complete with gilded walls, marble floors and even a water fountain.

Walking into the 106 Secondary School in Yekaterinburg after its recent renovation you couldn’t be blamed for thinking you had been magically transported to a French Baroque palace like Versailles. With golden chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, gilded decorations covering the walls and luxurious marble floors, it certainly looks nothing like a Soviet-era school dating back to the 1940s. That’s thanks to the generous donation of a former student named Andrei Simanovsky who grew up to become a successful businessman and decided to fulfill his childhood dream of turning his school into a palace.

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A resident of Chelyabinsk, in western Russia, recently got his five minutes of online fame after his apartment sale ad went viral on social media for featuring renowned film director Quentin Tarantino.

The last thing you would expect to see while looking at photos of apartments to buy is an internationally famous director seemingly inspecting the premises and giving a thumbs up. That’s exactly why Alexander Kainov, from the Russian city of Chelyabinsk thought that adding some cutouts of Reservoir Dogs director Quentin Tarantino to his real-estate photos to make it look like he had actually visited the apartment would be a great way of attracting attention. Making a property stand out among hundreds, if not thousands of similar ones, isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but apparently adding some Tarantino works like a charm.

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The people of Siberia’s Verkhoyansk district got a feeling of deja vu last Friday when they woke up to total darkness at an hour when the sun should have been high in the sky. A similar phenomenon occurred in the region just over a year ago.

This time of year, dawn breaks at around 4 am in Verkhoyansk, but photos taken by locals at around 8 in the morning show no sign of the sun, as entire settlements are bathed in almost complete darkness with a bizarre yellow tinge to it. Luckily, locals were used to such unusual phenomena, as just last year, in July, Verkhoyansk and other Yakutian regions experienced another pitch black morning. In fact some people took to social media to ask if this is becoming some sort of weird tradition.

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The Sixth Sense, a Russian company that allegedly specializes in extrasensory services, fortune-telling, spiritism and astrology, was recently ordered to pay damages to a client after its psychics and magicians failed to bring back his estrange wife.

The unnamed plaintiff, from the Siberian city of Omsk, was left by his wife in August of 2017. He told the court that he was devastated at the time, but found hope in a TV advert that promised to help people win back spouses and lovers, as well as remove various types of curses. With nothing else to cling on to, the desperate man immediately called the company, and was told by the manager that she could bring his wife back to him, as she possessed a certain “magic, sensory knowledge” that had helped her deal with similar cases before.

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Maru, a one-year-old Bullmastiff traveling on train through the Siberian taiga, reportedly jumped off and walked over 200 km trying to return to the owner who had rejected her.

Born at a dog kennel in Novosibirsk, Maru was sold to a family in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, 800 km away, when she was only five months old. However, six months later kennel owner Alla Morozova received a call from the dog’s owners informing her that they were allergic to animals and could no longer look after their pet. The contract stipulated that in the case that the buyers no longer wanted a dog, they should inform Morozova first, so she could make arrangements to retrieve them. She had someone get Maru and accompany her on a train ride back to Novosibirsk, but 200 km into the journey, something went wrong.

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Russian Instagram users in search of the perfect selfie have been flocking to a lake near the Siberian city of Novosibirsk that boasts turquoise water and white sandy beaches similar to those in the Maldives. But unlike the popular Indian Ocean archipelago, there is nothing natural about its beauty.

Dubbed the “Siberian Maldives” or “Novosibirsk Maldives”, the gorgeous lake is actually a man-made toxic dump used to dump ash from a nearby coal plant. The water apparently gets its bright turquoise color from its depth and the calcium salts and other metal oxides dissolved in it. Alluring as it may seem at first glance, the Siberian Generating Company (SGC) warns that its ash-dumping pond has a high pH of more than 8 and cause an allergic allergic reaction in contact with human skin. That hasn’t stopped people from posing for photos on the lake’s beaches and even venturing on the water on paddle boards and inflatable unicorns.

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If you’ve visited a news site over the last couple of days, you’ve probably read this incredible story of a Russian “mummified” man who was found more dead than alive after being attacked by a brown bear and somehow survived for a month. Well, it case you haven’t already guessed, it’s fake.

The story of Alexander, a Russian man who had allegedly spent a month in a bear cave somewhere in Russia’s emote Republic of Tuva before being discovered by hunters, went viral yesterday, after major UK publications like Mail Online, Metro and The Sun picked it up and pretty much reported it as fact. In their defense, the news did originally appear on Siberian Times, a Russian news website that covers national events in English. They all claimed that the emaciated man who appeared in a very short clip was the unlikely survivor of a gruesome bear attack that had left him paralyzed. He allegedly told reporters that the beast had then dragged him to its den and kept him around as “tin-can” food to be eaten later. Luckily, he was found by hunters who ventured into the bear’s cave after being alerted by their dogs’ barking. The story ends with Alexander recovering on a hospital bed. Now let’s talk about how the story began.

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A 62-year-old Russian woman recently learned that the acute pain she had lived with for over two decades was being caused by a surgical clamp forgotten inside her body after a cesarean.

Ezeta Gobeeva, a pensioner from Russia’s North Ossetia region, had been complaining of an acute abdominal pain ever since she underwent a C-section operation in 1996, but doctors always blamed it on liver problems and did nothing but prescribe painkillers. The woman claims that she was only recently granted an X-Ray, after repeatedly complaining that the medication only helped numb the pain. The investigation revealed that the pain was caused by a surgical clamp lodged in her abdomen, which Gobeeva assumed must have been forgotten in her body by doctors who performed a cesarean operation 23 years ago.

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The Russian village of Lazorevy, in Russia’s Urals region, has been invaded by giant swarms of flies after a local farmer allegedly used chicken droppings as natural fertilizer in his fields, which acted as a perfect breeding ground for the insects.

Imagine Albert Hitchcock’s “The Birds”, only on a much larger scale and with flies instead of violent birds. The roads of Lazorevy have become living carpets of flies that rise into horrific swarms every time they are disturbed, locals sweep buckets of dead flies from their homes every day, and some people are even afraid to go outdoors because the tiny insects are virtually everywhere. The recent fly invasion has been described by most as a living nightmare, and despite the best efforts of residents and local authorities to wipe out the unwanted guests, the flies are breeding so fast that humans can’t keep up.

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