A North Carolina pest control company is offering to pay homeowners $2,000 if they agree to let it release 100 American cockroaches into their households so it can test a new extermination technique.

If you live in the continental United States and want to make a quick couple of grand, go to The Pest Informer website and sign up for their ongoing experimental program. The pest control company is looking to test a new cockroach extermination technique in real-life conditions, so it wants to release 100 roaches into people’s homes, so it can try to exterminate them all for 30 days. The deal requires the written approval of the homeowner to have 100 cockroaches released on their property and to have the entire experiment filmed by technicians.

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An Australian couple is seeing their retirement plans threatened by a 130-year-old deed error that makes it impossible to sell their property.

Peter and Cheryl Plowman have been living in the same house on Bega Street, in Candelo, on the New South Wales South Coast for 20 years. A few years back, they purchased the house next to them from their neighbor with the intention of fixing it up and selling it for a profit to fund their retirement. Now, after investing their savings in it, the Plowman’s were shocked to learn that they won’t be able to sell their property to anyone, because the paperwork drafted over a century ago, when the lots were first registered, states that their new house is built on a different lot.

Mr. and Mrs. Plowman live in the fourth house along their street, which would logically make it Lot Four, only in the original deed it is marked Lot Three. When the lot deeds were originally drafted, sometime in the 1800s, the five lots on Bega Street were numbered ‘one, two, four, three, five,’ but the Plowmans had never bothered to check.

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A Thai man recently underwent emergency surgery to have a spiky fish removed from his throat, after it allegedly jumped out of the water and straight into his open mouth.

It sounds like the plot of a scene in a goofy comedy, but according to Thai news sources that have since been picked up by international media outlets, an angler fisherman almost choked to death after a small fish randomly jumped into his open mouth and got lodged in his throat. The unnamed man was reportedly spearfishing in a river, and just as he came up for a breath of air, a spikey Anabas fish randomly jumped out of the water and straight into his mouth. As he was in the process of inhaling, the fish got all the way into his throat where it became lodged.

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A Brazilian man has been accused of kidnapping his ex-girlfriend and tattooing his name on the side of her face, as revenge for breaking up with him.

Tayane Caldas, an 18-year-old woman from the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo, was on her way to school last Friday, when she was approached by her ex-boyfriend, Gabriel Coelho, who forced her to get into his car. Afraid she would be attacked if she didn’t comply, the young woman got into the vehicle and was taken to her ex’s home in the municipality of Taubaté. There, the 20-year-old Coelho tattooed his full name on the girl’s right side of the face, from her ear, down to her chin. Although he doesn’t deny doing the tattoo, Gabriel Coelho claims that Tayane was more than happy to let him do it.

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A number of Taiwan sushi fans who legally changed their name to include the characters for the word ‘salmon’, as part of a restaurant promotional stunt, have now become stuck with it.

Taiwanese legislators are currently debating the possibility to change a law that only allows citizens to legally change their names a maximum of three times as a way to mitigate the aftermath of an event known as “Salmon Chaos”. In March of 2021, international news outlets covered the bizarre promotion of Taiwanese restaurant chain Sushiro, which offered sushi at discounted prices or totally free to people who legally changed their names to include the characters for ‘salmon’. Over 300 people reportedly took Sushiro up on their offer, and while most managed to switch back their old names days after taking advantage of the promotion, some have been stuck with hilarious names like ‘Handsom Salmon’, ‘Dancing Salmon’ or ‘Salmon Dream’.

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Authorities in the African country of Sudan have allegedly sentenced a ram to three years in prison for hitting and killing an old woman.

If humans had to go to prison every time they killed a goat, we would have to build so many more prisons, but when the roles are reversed for a change the poor animal has to answer for its actions. That’s exactly what allegedly happened in Sudan earlier this month – at least according to multiple national news outlets – after a ram in Rumbek East County charged at an elderly woman hitting her in the ribs and causing serious injuries that later proved fatal. It’s unclear what possessed the animal to attack, but once it was identified as the culprit, the ram was taken into custody and sentenced to hard time.

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Cha Deen, a small tea stall in Lam Phlai, Thailand’s Songkhla Province, recently made national news for its unconventional choice of tea packaging.

In Thailand and other Asian countries, chai is usually sold in clear plastic bags. It looks a bit weird to most of us foreigners, but it’s apparently pretty standard there. Be that as it may, even most Thais raised an eyebrow (or both) when they saw the unconventional shape of the bags used by a chai stall in Lam Phlai. Instead of standard plastic bags and straws, Cha Deen uses a custom bag design featuring an appendage that kind of looks like a, well, see for yourself…

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An Indian man was recently ousted as the cause of frequent power outages in his native village, as he always cut the power in the entire settlement whenever he wanted to see his girlfriend.

For weeks, the people of Ganeshpur, a small village in eastern Bihar’s Purnia district, had to put up with frequent power outages that only seemed to occur a few hours after sunset. No one seemed to know what was causing the problems, as the power company had not reported any power grid malfunctions, and none of the neighboring villages were dealing with similar issues. Exasperated, many in the villages started paying attention to the time when the outages occurred and came to the conclusion that power always went down after dark. They started to suspect foul play and came up with a plan to investigate…

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A Japanese man who had always wanted to live as an animal managed to fulfill his dream thanks to a professional dog costume made by a company specializing in special effects and special modeling.

Ever wanted to live as an animal? No? Well, Japanese Twitter user ‘Toco’ had been thinking about it for a while, and he recently decided to follow his dream. He contacted special effects workshop Zeppet and asked them to build him an ultra-realistic dog costume that would conceal his human frame and allow him to live out his fantasy. They reportedly charged him about 2 million yen ($15,000) for it, but the end result was indeed pretty darn impressive.

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A Japanese woman has been compared to The Incredibles’ Elastigirl because of her ability to stretch her earlobes enough to wrap them around things like umbrellas or selfie sticks.

Ayumi Takada, a 37-year-old woman from Tokyo, first noticed that her earlobes were super-elastic when she was in elementary school. It was a rainy day, and her hands were full, so she tried holding the umbrella with her ear as a third hand and it worked. That was only the beginning, as the Japanese woman has since used her unusually stretchy ear lobes to hold selfie sticks, calligraphy brushes, cleaning appliances and others.

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After losing her husband to a heart attack, an Indian woman spent 39 years pretending to be a man so she could raise her daughter alone in a patriarchal society.

S Petchiammal had only been married for 15 days when her husband succumbed to a massive heart attack. She was 20 years old at the time and pregnant with her daughter. Soon after giving birth, she started working various jobs to make ends meet, but raising a child as a single mother in Tamil Nadu’s Katunayakkanpatti village, a dominant patriarchal society, was tough. The young woman worked jobs at construction sites, hotels, and tea shops, but she faced harassment and sexual taunts every day, so one day she decided that she needed to make a big change.

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A South African man recently sparked controversy in his home country for proposing to his girlfriend during her father’s funeral.

When it comes to marriage proposals, location and timing are everything, and it’s fair to say that funerals aren’t exactly the perfect place to pop the big question. But that didn’t stop one South African man from staging one of the most awkward proposals in history, asking his grieving girlfriend’s hand in marriage right at her father’s funeral, with his casket in the background. The shocking scene was filmed by another attendant who subsequently posted it on TikTok, where it immediately went viral, sparking a heated debate among users of the popular video-sharing platform.

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A couple in the Indian state of Uttarakhand has taken their son to court, asking him to either pay back the $650,000 they claim to have invested in him or give them a grandchild within a year.

Sanjeev and Sadhana Prasad filed a highly unusual lawsuit against their own son on the grounds of “mental harassment”. They claim to have invested substantial sums of money into his education and professional training over the years, helped him financially when he couldn’t find a job, and arranged and paid for his wedding in 2016. In return, they were expecting a “grandchild to play with” during their retirement years, only their son didn’t deliver as expected, so now the couple is taking legal action against him.

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Dozens of people taking part in a funeral in Peru were left shocked after the woman being laid to rest allegedly started banging on the casket from the inside.

Late last month, Rosa Isabel Cespedes Callaca, a 36-year-old woman from Lambayeque, Peru, her brother-in-law, and three of her nephews were involved in a serious car accident that claimed the lives of both adults and left the boys with serious injuries. On April 26, Rosa’s relatives gathered in Lambayeque to lay her body to rest. The solemn procession was going according to plan, according to eyewitnesses, but at one point people started hearing faint banging from inside the woman’s coffin. When the lid was opened, the funeral attendees were shocked to see Rosa staring back at them…

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An American family caused quite the scare at Israel’s main international airport last week after presenting an unexploded bomb shell as a souvenir at a security check.

Passengers at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv suffered the fright of their lives last Thursday, when a U.S. family casually presented an unexploded ordinance at a security check. A member of the family, whose names have not been revealed, had reportedly picked up the explosive as a souvenir on a visit to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, and decided that it would be a good idea to take it home to the States as a souvenir. According to eye-witnesses, the man simply took it out of his backpack and showed it to security staff, asking them if it could be put in a suitcase.

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