A Japanese man named “Happy” has been struggling with his unusual name for as long as he can remember, claiming that it had attracted bullying as a kid and ridicule as an adult.

When Terauchi Happy’s mother chose his unconventional name, she had no idea the kind of problems it would pose for him throughout his life. The 27-year-old man insists that he bears no grudge towards his mother, as she only named him “Happy” to express the overwhelming joy she felt when he was born. In fact, that is the only reason why he never went through with legally changing his name, despite the misery it caused him. When he was a small boy, the other kids teased and even bullied him because of his name, and unfortunately, things didn’t improve with age. Companies always thought he was joking when he sent in his resume for employment, and the unusual name even ruined his romantic relationship.

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Doctors at a hospital in Jilin, China recently reported one of their most bizarre cases yet – a woman who had gotten her hand stuck in her boyfriend’s mouth while trying to film a funny video.

Clips and photos of a couple walking into the emergency room of a hospital in Jilin Province have been doing the rounds on Chinese social media. The premise doesn’t sound very intriguing but what really attracted people’s attention was that the woman had her hand in the man’s mouth. Apparently, they had tried to shoot a funny video to post online in which they tried to see if the woman’s hand was small enough to fit in her boyfriend’s mouth. She managed to stuff her fist in his mouth just fine, but when she tried to pull it out, his mouth muscles stiffened and the hand became stuck. After repeatedly trying to pull out her hand from the man’s mouth, the young woman decided that they needed medical attention.

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Members of the State Duma (Russian Parliament) and activist organizations in Russia have called for the ban of Turkish soap operas because their perfect male protagonists put Russian men in a bad light.

Representatives of the “Veterans of Russia” movement have appealed to the Russian State Duma and Roskomnadzor (the agency responsible for monitoring and censoring the media in Russia) to ban Turkish soap operas, due to their projection of an “unrealistic image of men,” which makes women lose interest in Russian men, ultimately contributing to the country’s demographic decline. In its petition, Veterans of Russia proposed introducing the concept of ‘destructive propaganda,’ calling Turkish soap operas part of an ‘ideologic war for minds’ that target Russian women and threaten to destroy the institution of family in the country.

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Online scammers tricked a 63-year-old Los Angeles woman into thinking that she was in a romantic relationship with Spanish musician Enrique Iglesias.

Guadalupe Cepeda has been a fan of Enrique Iglesias for over two decades, so when the “Bailamos” singer approached on social media one day, she couldn’t believe it. He apparently found her on an online fan group and she didn’t find it at all suspicious that the man millions of women have been dreaming of for almost thirty years singled her out for a virtual relationship. Their “affair” began two years ago, and despite being married to another man, Cepeda believed that she would one day marry Iglesias. She planned to break up with her husband and run away with the Spanish superstar. Only before they could be together, Enrique needed her to send him some money.

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An Italian man recently had to fight charges of manslaughter after his five-year-old son hit an 87-year-old pensioner while learning to ride a bicycle in a Milan park.

What was meant to be a rite of passage for a young boy, turned into a nightmare for his entire family and that of an 87-year-old woman who had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The woman was strolling through a Milan park with a 74-year-old friend when a boy crashed his bicycle into her causing her to fall and hit her head on the pavement. Although the pensioner claimed to be alright, the boy’s father, who was teaching him to ride a bike and had seen the crash, insisted that he call an ambulance. Unfortunately, the woman’s condition abruptly changed for the worse and, despite the efforts of the paramedics, she tragically lost her life.

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At age 16, Pavel Stepchenko joined the school of Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs as a student, and by age 23, he had already retired, becoming the country;s youngest pensioner.

Retirement is traditionally associated with old age, and while today’s youth dream of retiring young to focus on living their best lives, that usually means retiring by age 40 or so. Well, one Russian youth managed to do something most of us can only dream of – retire with a full pension in his early 20s. Pavel Stepchenko’s story is an unusual one. He enrolled in the educational institution of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs at age 16 and after five years of diligent studies, he began working in the territorial division of the internal affairs system. The young man from Donetsk only worked there for two years, because at age 23, he officially retired, taking full advantage of a special provision stating that for each month of service during a period of martial law, a person received three months of credited length of service.

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Chinese people desperate to get rich by any means necessary are putting their faith in bags of “bank soil” sold online as wealth-bringing talismans.

Bank robberies usually involve cold harsh cash or gold ingots, but several Chinese banks have recently become the target of an unusual type of theft, that of soil from potted plants or from around the buildings housing them. Several online shops in the Asian country are selling small bags of ‘bank’ soil as get-rich-quick talismans that can cost as much as 888 yuan ($120), and demand for the unusual products is steadily increasing. Some sellers boast a “999.999 percent success rate in generating wealth,” while others record the harvesting process to guarantee the authenticity of their bank soil.

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The Murmansk branch of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia political party made the controversial decision of gifting meat grinders to mothers of soldiers killed in the war with Ukraine to celebrate International Women’s Day.

Over the past three years, the meat grinder has become a symbol of the Russian military’s high casualty rate in its assault on neighboring Ukraine, so the decision of the United Russia party in the northern Murmansk region to celebrate mothers whose sons died in the war by gifting them meat grinders on March 8 can be considered questionable, at best. Photos published on the party’s social media account last Wednesday show the executive secretary of the Polyarnye Zori United Russia branch, Anna Makhunova, alongside Maxim Chengaev, representative of the “Defenders of the Fatherland in the Murmansk Region Foundation” posing next to women who lost their sons in the war against Ukraine, smiling and holding meat grinders.

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Chilean-born artist Marco Evaristti has come under fire for trying to starve three little piglets to death as part of a controversial art installation meant to raise awareness about animal welfare.

Marco Evaristti sparked controversy when he originally announced plans for his “And Now You Care?” exhibition, but he really attracted criticism both from animal rights activists and the general public when it actually became a reality. Located in a former butcher’s warehouse in the Meatpacking District of Copenhagen, “And Now You Care?” featured three little piglets on a pile of hay, trapped in a cage made up of two metal shopping carts and surrounded by paintings of slaughtered pigs and the Danish flag. It was already an unsettling display, but it was his plan to only give the piglets water and let them starve to death that really shocked everyone.

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A 19-year-old Chinese girl has gone viral after posting a video demonstrating her unusual ability to pop her kneecaps out and then back in painlessly because of a condition she was born with.

The unnamed girl from Jiangssi claims that she never even knew her kneecaps were special until schoolmates saw her popping them out of their sockets randomly and then casually popping them back in. Some of them freaked out and told her to see a doctor, but her knees had been like this for as long as she could remember. Nevertheless, she decided to follow her friends’ advice and see a doctor, who confirmed that she had congenital “patella dislocation”, which caused her patellas (kneecaps) to pop out randomly and pop back in just as easily. The physician said that the condition was rare in girls, but reassured the youth that, as long as it didn’t cause her pain or impede with day-to-day activities, it wasn’t a problem.

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A Chinese man reportedly needed emergency surgery after rupturing his facial artery by incessantly picking his nose.

The man’s bizarre case was shared online by his wife in the form of a short clip documenting his experience in the hope that it may dissuade other avid nose-pickers from indulging in their favorite pastime too much. Hailing from Xianyang City, Shaanxi Province, the unnamed man had reportedly always loved picking his hose. Whether he was standing, sitting down, or lying in bed, he would always be exploring his nostrils with a finger. Only recently, his obsession with nose-picking came back to bite him. One day, while picking his nose as usual, the man triggered a serious nosebleed that simply couldn’t be stopped, despite his and his wife’s best efforts.

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The HR manager of a Shanghai technology company was imprisoned for defrauding his company of millions of dollars by “hiring” dozens of fake employees and collecting their salaries.

The People’s Procuratorate of Minhang District, Shanghai recently released a “White Paper on the Prosecution of Duty-Related Crimes by Company and Enterprise Personnel in Minhang District” featuring a list of duty-related crime cases involving enterprise personnel handled in 2024, one of which attracted the attention of newspapers all over the country. Back in 2022, employees in the finance department of an unnamed Shanghai technology company discovered something strange: Xiao Sun, an employee who had been with the company for half a year and had perfect attendance throughout that whole period, seemed to be a complete mystery to everyone. No one had ever seen them in person or knew anything about them for that matter. The investigation that followed uncovered a massive fraud orchestrated by a single HR manager.

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A Russian man has allegedly been trying to force his neighbors into selling their share of a communal apartment by playing the national anthem and other patriotic songs from early morning until late at night.

Several tenants and apartment owners in an apartment building in Volgograd, Russia, have been complaining of insufferable loud music playing on repeat in a communal apartment there, but so far, no one has been able to do anything about it. It all started on February 5, when Maxim (pseudonym), the owner of a room in a communal apartment in building No. 2A on Volgograd’s Engels Boulevard, installed a pair of powerful speakers and started playing the Russian national anthem, other patriotic songs like “I Am Russian”, and the sound of dogs barking. The entire building has been subjected to this musical torture every day since, and despite contacting the police, no one has been able to stop it.

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Russian media outlets have been hailing a Russian soldier as a hero for allegedly continuing to fight in the Kursk region for a week after getting shot in the head.

The unnamed man, reportedly a member of the 155th Marine Brigade of Russia’s Pacific Fleet, was fighting Ukrainian troops in Kursk when he got shot. At the time, his helmet was blown off of his head, but he thought the bullet must have ricocheted from it. He developed a hematoma above his right eye which eventually caused his eye to swallow shut, but he just went about his business, thinking the swelling would heal on its own. It was only after suffering another shrapnel-related injury that the man ended up in the hospital and learned that the bullet that had knocked his helmet off had actually pierced his skull and was lodged in his brain.

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What began as a broken water pipe in Havana’s El Cerro neighborhood is now a small banana plantation, after local authorities forgot to fix the pothole.

Cuba’s infrastructure crisis is a well-known fact, with around 70% of the country’s roads deemed in “regular” or “poor” condition, but some streets are in such a bad state that they can hardly be considered functional. For example, a street in the El Cerro district of Havana, has become famous for having a veritable banana plantation square in the middle of it. The large pothole housing this urban oddity began as a broken water pipe that was eventually fixed by the local authorities three years ago. The asphalt, however, was never replaced, and at one point, plants began taking root in the massive pothole. One of these plants was a banana tree which gradually turned into a small plantation that residents tend to religiously.

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