CCTV cameras in Mexico recently recorded one of the strangest street fights in history involving a band of mariachi and a fire-breathing performer quarreling over busking territory.

They say life is stranger than fiction and a short video clip captured by surveillance cameras in the Mexican city of Morelia proves it! Not even the brilliant Quentin Tarantino could have come up with the idea of a fiery street fight between a group of guitar-armed mariachi and a street-performing fire-breather in broad daylight, but that’s exactly what occurred last week, at a busy intersection in the Mexican capital. The viral video shows a man being chased by a mariachi and then put in a headlock until more mariachi arrives. They punch and kick the man, but then he turns the tables on them, as he starts blowing plumes of flames at them, literally setting them ablaze. Not the kind of thing you see every day, that’s for sure!

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Photos and videos of unmanned vending machines selling live animals like cats, small dogs, and rodents installed in various Chinese cities have been going viral and sparking outrage among the general public.

The significant technological developments of the last decade have created a fast-growing “unmanned economy” that continues to spread into almost every sector of the global economy. However, there are still some industries that are incompatible with unmanned, self-service devices. The pet-selling sector has so far been considered incompatible, but things are apparently very different in China, as more and more unmanned vending machines selling live pets are being spotted all around the country. One such video showing a pet vending machine in a busy part of Beijing recently went viral on Chinese social media, sparking a heated debate around the ethics of this controversial business model.

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Muluwork Ambaw, a 26-year-old woman from Ethiopia, claims to have gone the last 16 years of her life without eating or drinking anything.

Most people can hardly last a few hours without munching on something, but Muluwork Ambaw insists that she shunned food forever one day when she was only 10 years old, after her appetite vanished out of the blue. Apart from her complete lack of sustenance, Ambaw reportedly has a normal life, she is in good health and has plenty of energy to perform her daily tasks, which include cooking for others and running various errands. The young woman has undergone several medical tests in Ethiopia, but none could really confirm if she spoke the truth, although doctors at a hospital in Addis Ababa did confirm that there was no evidence of any food in her intestines at the time of the examination.

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A Chinese nanny has been forced to take care of a toddler for months without any compensation after the child’s parents disappeared without a trace with money they had borrowed from her.

Ms. Yu, the victim in this bizarre case that has been making headlines in China for over a month, claims that she was hired by a couple in Harbin, Heilongjiang province, to take care of their newborn son for a monthly salary of 7,000 yuan (around $1,000). Shortly after striking a deal, the parents told Ms. Yu that they needed to travel to Tianjin to receive a sizeable inheritance, including property and luxury goods, and asked if she could help them out with a loan for lawyers and paperwork. As insurance that they would pay her back, the couple showed her photos of the goods they had allegedly inherited, as well as of the ownership papers for a hotel. Furthermore, they decided to leave their child with the nanny while they sorted everything in Tianjin, so Ms. Yu assumed that there was no reason to worry. She was wrong!

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A Japanese food restaurant in Singapore recently attracted criticism online for serving a bizarre-looking dish consisting of a raw octopus egg sack.

Known as tako tamago, the strange dish that landed Singapore restaurant Koji in hot water with social media users isn’t the most appetizing food we’ve ever featured on Oddity Central. It’s basically a large white sack with a very flexible membrane that conceals hundreds of oblong octopus eggs swimming in a viscous fluid. The sack is served raw and melted with a blow torch to release the eggs inside onto the plate. The eggs are usually served with soy sauce and have a taste similar to that of salmon roe.

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A Chinese woman who had an affair with a married businessman who died in a car accident used frozen embryos to conceive a child she claimed was his and then sued his family for inheritance.

In a case that sparked a heated debate in China, a Guangdong woman surnamed Leng sued her deceased lover’s wife for part of his fortune as inheritance for her baby boy, who she claimed was her lover’s heir. The unusual dispute began in 2021, soon after the tragic death of the man, surnamed Wen, in a car accident. Leng claimed to have frozen some of her eggs prior to the accident which were later fertilised using Wen’s sperm at a private fertility clinic. In December of 2021, she gave birth to a healthy son she named Xiaowen, and in August of last year, she sued her former lover’s family, asking for a part of their estate as an inheritance for her son.

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When a three-year-old girl from Charlotte, North Carolina, started complaining to her parents about monsters in the walls of her room, they thought she was imagining things, but there really was something in the walls.

Little Saylor Class had recently watched DreamWorks’ ‘Monster Inc’ animated movie when she started talking to her parents about monsters in the walls, so they didn’t really take her seriously. In fact, they even gave her “a bottle of water and said it was monster spray so that she could spray away any of the monsters at night,” but her complaints only got stronger over the following months. Saylor’s parents started taking her more seriously when her mother Massis noticed bees swarming near the attic and chimney of their old farmhouse. Massis Class thought the daughter could hear the bees buzzing through the ceiling, but things were even worse than that.

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An 18-year-old Chinese girl who became so obsessed with her boyfriend that she tracked his every move and called him 100 times per day was eventually diagnosed with a condition called “love brain”.

Chinese outlet Yueniu News recently reported the case of Xiaoyu, an 18-year-old girl from Sichuan province who became so obsessed with her boyfriend that she made both their lives a living nightmare. The girl’s unsettling behavior began in her first year of university when she became romantically involved with a boy whose name has not been revealed to protect his privacy. According to Du Na, a doctor at The Fourth People’s Hospital of Chengdu, Xiaoyu quickly became unnaturally obsessed with her boyfriend, wanting to know his whereabouts at all times and freaking out when he didn’t immediately reply to her texts. Sounds like your average control freak behavior, but according to the doctor, Xiaoyu suffered from a rare mental disorder called “love brain”.

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Over the course of two years, a black dog turned completely white due to vitiligo, a condition in which the skin and hair lose their natural pigment.

In late 2021, at the age of two, Buster was diagnosed with vitiligo. The condition is caused by an autoimmune disease that causes areas of the skin, hair, muzzle, and lips, as well as the oral and facial mucosa, to lose pigment or color. Buster’s owner, Matt Smith, was told to keep an eye out for skin irritation, but other than that the dog’s health wasn’t going to be affected. At first, Matt noticed small white patches around Buster’s eyes, nose, and chin, but nine months after the vitiligo diagnosis, the dog’s face was peppered with with spots. Today, Buster has gone from completely black to an immaculate white.

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A video doing the rounds on Chinese social media these days has gone viral for showing how easy it is to use AI-powered deepfake technology to transform into virtually anyone online.

App filters and deepfake technology have been around for years now, but the advent of artificial intelligence has elevated them to a whole new level, one which makes it almost impossible to tell what is real on the internet. Take this recent video shared by a Chinese engineer where he demonstrates how easy it is for him to pass as an attractive young girl. All he has to do is put on a wig, enable a piece of software and the AI takes care of the rest. It is able to replace the man’s face with that of an attractive girl but otherwise mimics all of his actions, including eating with chopsticks, pinching his own face, and speaking with the appropriate mouth movement.

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A Japanese boy allegedly spent three weeks piecing back together a 10,000 yen bill like a jigsaw puzzle after it had been accidentally put through a paper shredder.

Japanese Twitter user ‘Tomo’ recently completed one of the hardest puzzles he’s ever done – putting back together a 10,000 yen ($65) bill that had been shredded into thousands of pieces. Apparently, his father accidentally shredded an old envelope at work after forgetting that he had put a 10,000 yen bill in it months ago. Realizing his mistake, the man decided to use his mistake as a challenging project for his son. He took home the entire shredder waste basket and told his son that if he could piece together the shredded bill and exchange it for a new one at the back, he could keep it. It was a daunting project for even the most avid jigsaw puzzle enthusiast, but one the boy gladly accepted.

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An Argentinian man became an overnight sensation in South America after reportedly barricading himself inside a car dealership and refusing to leave without the truck he had made an advance payment for.

Abelardo Usandivaras, aka the “gaucho of Salta’, has been making international news headlines for over two weeks and has become somewhat of a living symbol of the common man’s struggle against the shady practices of car dealerships. The middle-aged man from Metán, in Salta, arrived in Buenos Aires with his family at the beginning of April, and went straight to the dealership that was supposed to deliver his new much-needed truck. After failing to get the answers he needed and finding himself unable to get in touch with the owner, Usandivaras barricaded himself inside the dealership, refusing to leave without the truck he was promised, or at least the downpayment he had made for it. His story quickly went viral, and Abelardo’s struggle became a hot topic in all of Latin America.

Usandivaras, a horse breeder and advisor from Metán, decided to buy a new truck last year, and after getting in touch with a dealership in Buenos Aires, he decided to sell his old truck and make a downpayment for a new one. Everything went smoothly up to that point, but after paying the advance, he never heard back from the dealership. They had a 120-day delivery deadline, but he never got so much as an update, and whenever he got in touch, they just referred him to another department.

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Arshia Goswami, a 9-year-old girl from India’s Haryana state, has been dubbed the female version of Hercules after deadlifting a whopping 165 pounds (75 kg).

Arshia first started attracting attention a couple of years ago when she set a national record as India’s youngest deadlifter, with a personal best of 45 kilograms. She has been training ever since, though, and she recently went viral once again by deadlifting 75 kilograms, more than two times her own body weight. The impressive feat was captured on video and shared on the young weightlifter’s Instagram page, where it went viral. But although most of the feedback was positive, with people praising her strength and form, some comments also expressed concern for her wellbeing, claiming that lifting such heavy weights at her age could have serious health consequences.

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Chinese runner He Jie’s victory at last week’s Beijing Half-Marathon has been overshadowed by a scandal involving three Kenyan runners who appear to let the Chinese competitor win the race.

Sunday’s Beijing Half-Marathon saw 25-year-old He Jie crossed the finish line first, in 1:03:44, under a second ahead of an African trio of runners who collectively claimed second place. It was an impressive achievement for the Chinese runner, especially since one of the runners-up was former 5km world record-holder Robert Keter of Kenya, but his win was quickly called into question on social media after suspicious videos recorded during the race made their way online. The fact that He seemed to be the only one sprinting as he approached the finish line was bizarre enough, but one clip shows Kenya’s Willy Mnangat signaling his countryman Keter and Ethiopian runner Dejene Hailu Bikila to hang back and waving He Jie to overtake them.

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A Chinese woman is being accused of trying to terminate a co-worker’s pregnancy by poisoning her water to prevent her from taking maternity leave and thus avoiding a higher workload.

In one of the most shocking cases of work-related incidents reported in China, a worker at a government-affiliated institution in Hubei Province allegedly tried to terminate a co-worker’s pregnancy by repeatedly poisoning her water in order to avoid the higher workload caused by her maternity leave. The nefarious plan reportedly came to light when the victim noticed that her water kept tasting strange, regardless of its source. At first, she was convinced that it was the office’s water supply, but the taste persisted even after she switched to bottled water. That’s when she decided to investigate further.

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