Four Los Angeles-area residents were recently arrested and charged with insurance fraud after allegedly using a bear suit to make it seem like their luxury vehicles had been damaged by a wild animal.

“Operation Bear Claw,” as this ingenious insurance fraud scheme was subbed by California authorities, began in January of this year, when the four suspects claimed that a bear had entered their 2010 Rolls Royce Ghost while it was parked in Lake Arrowhead and caused extensive interior damage. The area is located in San Bernadino, a region famous for its large black bear population, but the video footage supplied to the insurer by the suspects themselves was more than a little shady. It showed a furry animal entering the back seat of the Rolls Royce and scratching it, but something didn’t add up. For one, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife says that the only bears in the state are black bears, and this was light brown, but its movements weren’t very bear-like either.

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A seasonal ice skating rink in Milton Keys, England, has been getting a lot of attention because of a bright pink iPhone stuck under two inches of ice.

Skaters at the Willen on Ice skating rink in Milton Keys will sometimes stop in the middle of the giant ice rink to stare at something under the ice – a bright pink iPhone. It has become a sort of tourist attraction after the BBC and other UK media outlets reported about it online. Apparently, one of the workmen setting up the rink this year lost their smartphone and had to borrow their daughter’s iPhone for a day only to forget it in the middle of the ice rink right before it was flooded with water and frozen overnight. The next day, some of his coworkers spotted it while inspecting the ice, but they could do nothing but laugh at his misfortune, as damaging the ice was out of the question.

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An elderly Thai woman desperate to keep her drug and gambling-addicted son away from temptation installed an iron jail cell inside her home.

After more than 20 years of living in constant fear of her drug-addicted son, a 64-year-old woman from Thailand’s Buriram Province took extraordinary measures to protect herself and her neighbors. She recently had contractors build a jail cell inside her home where she could confine the 42-year-old man when he became violent. She told police that she had tried everything to save her son over the years, including several rehabilitation attempts in over 10 different centers across the country, but nothing worked and he became increasingly violent as time went by. To make matters worse, at one point, the son became addicted to gambling as well, which only made things worse.

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A 12-year-old Massachusetts boy has tragically lost his eyesight to a nutrient-poor junk food diet that caused his optic nerves to atrophy beyond any hope of reversal.

The New England Journal of Medicine recently documented the case of a 12-year-old boy suffering from autism who ultimately went blind because of a junk food diet based mostly on burgers, fries, ranch dressing, donuts, and boxes of sugary juice. The boy had been diagnosed with autism and suffered from an extreme phobia of certain food textures, so his parents found it impossible to introduce vital nutrients into his diet. Earlier this year, the unnamed boy began experiencing vision problems in the hours of the morning and in the evening, but his eyesight was fairly normal during the day. However, his vision started degrading at a rapid pace, and in six weeks’ time he could only move around if his parents helped him navigate obstacles. Then, one night, he woke up screaming that he couldn’t see.

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A Singapore family court recently issued a partial domestic exclusion order against a woman who had allegedly been forcefully entering her adult brother’s room at odd hours of the night to clean.

On October 31st, two Singaporean siblings obtained court orders against each other following a bizarre legal dispute that left the judge scratching their head. A woman managed to get a protection order against her brother who had reportedly physically assaulted her, while he got a domestic order banning her from entering his room, which happens to be why he assaulted her in the first place. A third sibling told the court that tensions between the two had been rising for years, particularly because their sister would come into the brother’s room in the middle of the night to clean it, infringing on his privacy and preventing him from sleeping. One day, the man just snapped.

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A young Chinese woman had the happiest day of her life turned into a nightmare after her husband asked for a paternity test because of their newborn baby’s suspiciously dark skin.

Chinese newspaper China Times recently reported the bizarre case of a 30-year-old Shanghai woman desperate to save her marriage after giving birth to a dark-skinned baby by C-section. The woman took to social media to tell her sad story and ask other mothers for advice on how to handle the situation. She claims that after delivering the baby, when it came time for her husband to meet his son for the first time, he just stared at him with bewildered eyes and refused to hold him. The woman admitted that she too found the baby’s dark skin odd and felt embarrassed when holding it, feeling the need to clarify that she “had never been to Africa and didn’t know any black people”.

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Devotees at a temple in Vrindavan, India, queued to drink the water dripping from an elephant sculpture, believing it was holy water from the feet of Lord Krishna, but is was only condensation from the temple’s air conditioning.

Shocking videos showing dozens of people at the Shri Banke Bihari temple in the city of Vrindavan queuing in front of a wall-mounted elephant statue to drink the liquid dripping from it once again brought into the spotlight the barrier between religious devotion and critical thinking or even common sense. it was reported that all these people believed the liquid to be Charan Amrit (sacred water from the feet of Lord Krishna), when in fact it was merely condensation from the temple’s air conditioning unit. Temple authorities issued a clarification to convince people to stop drinking the dripping liquid.

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A severely sick Chinese man was pushed to a local bank branch on a hospital bed by his family in order to confirm his identity for a money transfer.

A video that has been doing the rounds on Chinese social media shows a woman struggling to push a man on a hospital bed in a Shandong Province bank after being told that the only way to access his account was to confirm his identity in person. Despite explaining to the bank manager that the account holder was hospitalized because of severe health problems, the family was told that the only way to access their account was to bring them there in person. The man was so sick that he could not move on his own, but even evidence of his hospitalization failed to convince the bank staff, so they had no choice but to figure out a way to bring him in for identity confirmation.

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A 28-year-old Greek man was recently convicted of causing a disturbance by repeatedly trespassing on his neighbors and smelling their shoes.

The unnamed man was arrested on October 8th after one of his neighbors in Sindos, a small town about 15 kilometers (9 miles) west of Thessaloniki, spotted him in their yard just before dawn sniffing the shoes they had left outside to air. This was not the man’s first time trespassing on private property for the same bizarre reason, so the neighbor called the police. Upon hearing the 28-year-old man’s explanation and the testimony of one of the neighbors, the Single-Member Misdemeanor Court of Thessaloniki issued a suspended sentence of one month in prison, with three years of probation.

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A 19-year-old London woman managed to fulfill her dream of being a doctor without actually going to medical school simply by walking into a hospital and posing as a physician.

Kreuena Zdrafkova, a Bulgarian-born woman living in West London’s Ealing district, had always dreamt of becoming a doctor and recently decided that she wasn’t going to let a minor detail like lacking any medical training stand in her way. Earlier this year, she put on a white robe and rubber gloves, confidently walked into Ealing Hospital and started acting like one of the physicians there. Throughout the day, she was seen examining medical instruments, getting into an ambulance and even administering an unknown substance to a patient, without anyone noticing that she wasn’t really a doctor. She was so confident that she could pull off her dream job long-term that she came back to the hospital three days later, this time with a stethoscope around her neck.

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Scammers in India managed to set up and operate a fake branch of the country’s largest bank, the State Bank of India, for 10 days in order to trick people into paying to secure stable jobs there.

The people of Chhapora, a village in India’s Chhattisgarh state, were surprised to see a branch of the State Bank of India opening up in their modest settlement, but while some were skeptical from the very beginning, many saw it as an opportunity to get a stable, decent-paying job. 25-year-old Pintu Dhurve was one of the six people who managed to secure employment as a cashier at the newly opened SBI branch, for which he paid 580,000 rupees ($6,900). There were some red flags, like the complete lack of work to be done and the absence of ID cards for employees, but the SBI logo at the entrance, the 1000 sq. foot “workspace”, brand-new furnishings, and operational bank counters all convinced him that the bank was legit. It wasn’t!

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An Argentinian woman filed a case in family court to be allowed to stop supporting her 22-year-old daughter financially because she neglected her university studies and didn’t have a job.

The unnamed woman told family court judge María Laura Dumple that her 22-year-old daughter had been enrolled at the National University of Río Negro since 2020 but had only completed 11% of her studies and had no intention of getting a job. She explained that cutting her child off financially was the best way not to allow her to continue doing nothing with her life. Argentina’s Civil Code establishes the obligation of parents to provide resources to their child until the age of 25, provided that the child cannot support himself due to studies or work.

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Doctors at a hospital in New Delhi, India, were shocked to find a live 3-centimeter cockroach in the small intestine of a patient complaining of stomach ache and indigestion.

A 23-year-old man recently came to the Fortis Hospital, Vasal Kunj, to complain about stomach problems that he had been experiencing for about three days. He complained of severe abdominal pain, and difficulty in digesting food which resulted in frequent bloating. The man had consumed street food at a night market a few days prior and suspected that to be the cause of his health problems. Doctors decided that the best course of action was to conduct an Upper Gastrointestinal (GI) Endoscopy, a procedure that examines the upper part of the gastrointestinal tract, to hopefully discover the cause of the man’s symptoms. What they certainly didn’t expect to find was a live cockroach chilling in the man’s small intestine.

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A Chinese man was sentenced to six months behind bars after catching his wife sleeping with another man and accepting money as compensation for the cheating.

In March 2021, Lu, a 33-year-old man from Shandong, eastern China, noticed that his wife was taking unusually long to get ready to take their daughter to her private tutor, so he decided to follow her around. When she went into a local hotel, Lu started suspecting his wife of cheating, and those suspicions were confirmed when he stormed into her room to find her in skimpy underwear next to a naked man. In a fit of rage, Lu beat the other man, surnamed Liu, and kicked his wife, but he eventually accepted Liu’s offer of 25,000 yuan ($3,300) in three online installments as compensation for sleeping with his wife. But during his divorce proceedings, Lu was shocked to learn that Liu had filed a complaint against him accusing him of extortion.

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A 30-something breakdancer who had been practicing head-spinning for about 19 years developed a protuberant and tender bulge on top of his head.

According to a medical case study recently published in the BMJ Case Reports journal, head-spinning as part of breakdancing training can cause hairless bumps on practitioners’ heads. Also known as “headspin holes” among breakdancers, these inaesthetic bulges are sometimes associated with a circle of hair loss and can become painful. In the recently documented case, the patient, a man in his 30s who had been incorporating head-spinning as part of his breakdancing training for the last 19 years, reported spinning on his head for about two to seven minutes, about five times a week. He noticed the bump a while back but told doctors that it had become larger and tender to the touch in the last five years.

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