A couple of enterprising students from Thailand have come up with an innovative business strategy – sleeping in problematic houses and apartments to certify that they are free of ghosts and paranormal phenomena.

21-year-old Wifei Cheng, a Thai-Taiwanese student at Rajamangala University of Technology Lanna in Chiang Mai province, knew about the problems realtors had selling properties where deaths had been reported in the past, and decided that there was a market for ghost-free home certifiers. And who better for the job that himself and his colleague and associate, 22-year-old Sretthawut Boonprakhong? The pair recently started advertising their services on social media, offering to sleep in problematic houses and apartments and then issue ghost-free certificates to put buyers’ and renters’ minds at ease.

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Mark Boyle, aka The Moneyless Man, gave up on using money in 2008 and has been living a money-free lifestyle ever since. Along the way, he also shunned technology and adopted a more ‘natural’ life.

Having graduated college with a degree in business and economics, Mark Boyle quickly found a good-paying job at an organic food company in Bristol, UK. That had been his plan for years – get a good job and buy all the material things that society (himself included) associated with success. But everything changed one night in 2007, during a friendly philosophizing session with a friend over a glass of Merlot on his houseboat. They were discussing world problems and how to best tackle them to actually make a difference. That’s when he realized that money was at the root of most problems, and remembered Gandhi’s famous quote: ‘Be the change you want to see in the world’.

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An Indian man is currently under investigation for fraud, after allegedly spending a total of 603 nights at a New Delhi 5-star hotel despite only paying for one night.

On May 30th, Ankush Dutta booked a room at the renowned Roseate House Hotel in Delhi. He was supposed to check out the next day, but according to investigators, he ended up living at the hotel continuously until January 22, 2021, without paying a dime for his stay, food, beverages, or any other services he used at the hotel during that period of time. It’s unclear how exactly the Indian man managed this feat, but the hotel has already filed a complaint against one of its employees, whom management suspects of conspiring with the clandestine guest. The exact nature of their relationship is unclear, but investigators believe that the employee may have received some kind of financial incentive for their assistance.

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A Russian man who didn’t want to answer Putin’s call to arms and join his country’s war against Ukraine has been living alone deep in the middle of the woods for almost four months.

Adam Kalinin (alias) was against the war in Ukraine from the very beginning. He was actually arrested for two weeks and fined for displaying a banner that read “No to war” on the outside of his apartment building. But when Vladimir Putin signed a mobilization order calling roughly 300,000 Russian men to war against Ukraine, Kalinin knew he needed to find a way to avoid being sent to the front line. Financial issues, his friends, and the general idea of leaving his homeland prevented the young IT specialist from running to another country, so he did the next best thing he could think of – kissed his wife goodbye and hid in the middle of a freezing forest. He’s been living there for almost four months.

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A 60-year-old man in Thailand recently caused shockwaves throughout the island nation after he stole from a pharmacy so he would get arrested and go to jail because he was too poor to make ends meet.

The unusual incident reportedly happened in the afternoon of July 29, 2022 at a pharmacy in Chonburi province, south of Bangkok. The 60-year-old man, later identified as Phichit by the police, was caught stealing three bars of soap worth THB17 ($0.47) by the staff. The place had very clear warnings against shoplifting, with perpetrators risking fines of up to 30 times the value of the stolen goods and even jail time. However, in this case, the staff was willing to let the old man off the hook, and a bystander even offered to pay the fine for him. But he wouldn’t have it, insisting that the staff call the police on him…

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Hirata, a small village in Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture, has become famous for challenging tourists to try its ultra-spicy habanero-laced ice cream.

Can soft-serve ice cream be hot? It sounds nonsensical, but if we’re talking about the cold treat served in Hirata Village, Fukushima, the shoe definitely fits. Sprinkled with varying amounts of habanero pepper powder – depending on the person’s spiciness tolerance – this special ice cream is nothing to mess with. It’s so hot, in fact, that people need to sign a waiver clearing the seller of responsibility before trying 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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Japanese Shinto shrine sells low-tech IT amulets that promise to keep computers from freezing and restarting randomly, as well as free from viruses and malware.

Kanda Myojin, a popular Shinto shrine in Akihabara, Tokyo sells a variety of amulets and prayers, but none as intriguing as the “computer function amulet”. Consisting of a small, CPU-shaped sticker meant to be stuck onto the gadget in need of divine protection and a larger piece of cardboard meant to be worn by the computer operator, the amulet is one of the most popular items offered by Kanda Myojinm. If used correctly, the amulet will allegedly protect your machine from viruses, malware and random errors, as well as keep it from freezing up.

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An Indian plastic surgeon is being praised as a hero without a cape after spending much of his life performing over 37,000 free procedures to correct children’s cleft palates and cleft lips.

According to the CDC, cleft lip and cleft palate are birth defects that occur when a baby’s lip or mouth do not form properly during pregnancy. These defects cause a variety of problems, which range from the inability to access milk as babies, to bullying and discrimination later on in life. Both birth defects can be corrected with the help of plastic surgery, but these procedures are, unfortunately, not available to the poor families who need them most. In India, one plastic surgeon has emerged as the benefactor of tens of thousands of babies and children, correcting their cleft lips or cleft palate for free, and thus giving them the chance at a much better life.

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A Chinese art student recently conducted an intriguing experiment in which she spent three weeks living the good life in Beijing without spending a dime, by pretending to be a well-off socialite.

Zou Yaqi, a 23-year-old art student at the University of Beijing has been getting a lot of attention for her unique graduation project which saw her disguising herself as a socialite in order to enjoy special treatment and help her survive for three weeks without spending any money. For most of May of this year, the young student slept on plush sofas in the lobbies of five-star hotels in the Chinese capital, sipping wine at various events and stuffing her face at free buffets. And she did it all just by pretending to be a rich socialite.

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A group of Pakistani police officers are facing suspension after allegedly arresting 19 employees of a fast food restaurant in Lahore for refusing to give them free burgers.

According to local reports, staff at a Johnny & Jugnu fast food restaurant in Lahore, Pakistan, were rounded up and arrested at around 8 PM on Saturday and held in custody overnight for having the audacity to refuse a group of policemen free burgers last week. Employees weren’t even allowed to close down the kitchen, allegedly leaving the fryers running and customers waiting in line for their orders. In an official statement, Johnny & Jugnu representatives offered details about the incident, explaining that it had been caused by staff’s refusal to give policemen free burgers.

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A 23-year-old university student was recently sentenced to two and a half years in prison for swindling KFC out of about $31,000 in fast food, by taking advantage of an ordering loophole.

The student, surnamed Xu first discovered the glitch in 2018, and not only continued to use it to his benefit for the next six months, but he also shared it with friends and even profited financially from it. The Jiangsu-based student accidentally realized that he could order free food by paying for it using coupons in the official KFC app, and then immediately asking for a refund of the coupons using the company’s WeChat account. It was any KFC’s fan dream come true, all the fried chicken you could eat, totally free.

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Almost every morning for the past two decades, Juliet the macaw has been visiting the local zoo in Rio de Janeiro to interact with others of her kind through the metal enclosure. She is the only wild macaw in the Brazilian metropolis, and this is her only opportunity to socialize.

Macaws are social birds, so loneliness is a tough burden to bare for Juliet, a beautiful blue-and-yellow macaw who calls Rio home. She is the only wild specimen seen in city since 1818, and no one really knows much about her. Zoo staff named the bird Juliet, but they don’t even know if she is actually female. It’s really hard to tell with macaws, and to establish her true gender they would need to capture the bird, and either examine her gonads or take blood or feather samples. And there’s really no need to put Juliet through all that stress just to satisfy human curiosity.

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Platonic or elective co-parenting is a new way of having and raising children which involves two people conceiving (naturally or artificially) and taking joint physical, financial and emotional responsibility for raising them, but without being romantically involved.

Whether it’s because they want to raise a child without being involved in a romantic relationship, or because they feel like their biological clock is ticking and they haven’t yet found Mr. or Mrs. Right, a growing number of people are turning to specialized websites like PollenTree or Modamily to find likeminded people to raise children with without any romantic strings attached. The rising popularity of platonic co-parenting is seen by experts as a consequence of many people’s realization that the person you have kids with doesn’t be the person you grow old with, or even someone you live with.

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A Swiss couple has named their baby daughter Twifia after Internet start-up Twifi and won themselves 18 years of free wi-fi internet.

The young couple responded to a Facebook ad from Twifi, a Swiss Internet provider, which dared parents to name their newborn Twifus (if it was a boy) or Twifia (if it was a girl) in exchange for 18 years of free internet. The parents, aged 30 and 35, ultimately decided that Twifia wasn’t that bad of a name, and the thought of getting free internet for 18 years and putting that money in a savings account for their daughter was appealing. So after thinking it over, they decided to make it official, putting down ‘Twifia’ as their daughter’s middle name on her birth certificate.

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