A Chinese company has come under fire for installing surveillance cameras above the toilet booths so it could monitor employees during their toilet breaks.

Toilet use during work hours has been a controversial topic in China for quite a while now. In the past, we’ve written about companies that cut employee salaries for spending too much time in the toilet, others that fined workers for using the toilet more than once a day, and even a company that installed timers on its toilet booths. But none of those examples even come close to the “solution” of one technology company in Xiamen, Fujian Province, which reportedly installed cameras above the booths of its employee bathrooms to monitor phone use during bathroom breaks.

Read More »

A Chinese couple who abandoned their daughter when she was only a toddler, suddenly reappeared in her life decades later when they learned she was well off, to ask her for a home for her brother.

Zhang was only 2 years old when her parents decided they couldn’t raise her anymore and placed her in the care of her brother’s sister. They had little to no other interaction with her ever since, and the now 29-year-old woman always considered her aunt’s family her biological one. It was for this reason that she recently used part of her savings to help her cousin, who she considers her brother, buy an apartment. However, she never anticipated that her generosity would suddenly make her biological parents come knocking, asking her to buy an apartment for her biological brother as well…

Read More »

The superstitious manager of a Chinese education company has come under fire for rejecting people with ‘5’ as the last digit of their phone number.

Chinese news outlets have been reporting the bizarre case of an education company in Shenzhen, Guangdong that allegedly rejects job applications of people who have ‘5’ as the fifth digit in their phone numbers, because the boss considers it back luck. Such applicants are advised to change their phone numbers if they are truly interested in working at the company. The bizarre condition, which has nothing to do with competencies or work ethics, has sparked a heated online debate in China, where superstition is still a big part of daily life.

Read More »

Ana di Pištonja, also known as Baba Anujka or the Banat Witch, was an accomplished amateur chemist who used her skills to kill as many as 150 people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Baba Anujka’s origins are shrouded in mystery. Some sources claim that she was born in 1838, in the Banat region of modern-day Romania, but her life was tied to the Yugoslavian village of Vladimirovac, in the Voievodina Province of present-day Serbia. As the daughter of a rich cattleman, she is said to have had a comfortable childhood and good education, but became a misanthropist in her early 20s, after being seduced by an Austrian officer who eventually left her with a broken heart and a syphilis infection. She found refuge in the field of chemistry and became known as a local healer and witch who could make anyone “disappear’ for the right price…

Read More »

A 65-year-old man from Saudi Arabia recently became the talk of the town after it was revealed that he married no less than 53 different women in his search for emotional “stability”.

Abu Abdullah married his first wife when he was only 20 years old. She was six years his senior, and for a time, she was all he needed. They had children together and everything was going well, but then problems started appearing in his life and he decided to marry again. At the age of 23, he informed his wife that he planned to take a second wife and became a polygamist. Then, as problems started arising before his two spouses, he took on a third wife, and then a fourth. However, things only got worse, so he divorced his first and second wives, and then did the same with the third and fourth, as they had also started arguing. But his quest for stability continued…

Read More »

Japanese researchers have created smart kitchenware that relies on electricity to make food saltier and tastier without adding any extra salt.

Salt makes food taste so much better, but it’s also a very dangerous ingredient that, consumed in excess, can cause serious health problems like high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke. But what if we could make food taste salty without using any salt? That’s what scientists at Meiji University and developers Kirin Holdings have been working on for several years now. Back in April, we featured their first breakthrough creation – a pair of smart chopsticks – but now they have a couple of commercial products ready to hit the shelves.

Read More »

The world of contact sports is about to be taken by storm by one of the craziest creations in human history – armboxing, a weird take on the art of boxing.

The world is full of weird and wacky sports, but when it comes to downright crazy inventions, the Russians definitely take the cake. After the insanity that was ‘car-jitsu’ – basically jiu jitsu in a car – the brilliant minds in Mother Russia have come up with something even more insane. Known only as ‘armboxing’, this new contact sport sees two fighters standing opposite each other being chained to a podium with their lead hands glued together and the other hand free to do damage.

Read More »

A 40-year-old man has been dubbed ‘South Africa’s dumbest criminal’ after walking into a police station to get a job there despite being on a wanted criminal list.

Thomas Ngcobo had been on the run for the last seven years, after stealing hardware products worth more than $1,200 while working as a delivery man in 2015. He reportedly diverted deliveries to other addresses without the owner’s consent or knowledge, and went on the run as soon as his manager realized that some invoices were missing and several products had been delivered to the wrong addresses. Ngcobo’s name was added to the police’s wanted criminal list as soon as his employer filed a complaint against him, but he managed to avoid capture for seven years. And then he walked right into a police station like he didn’t even have a criminal record…

Read More »

At just over 200 square feet in size and a yearly yield of 29 bottles of wine, Via Mari 10 is considered the world’s smallest vineyard.

Located on the rooftop of a 16th-century palazzo in the heart of Reggio Emilia, Via Mari 10 – named after the name and number of the street – is not your average vineyard. Not only is it incredibly small in size, it also has an extremely modest yearly yield of wine. However, the most peculiar thing about the Via Mari 10 wine is that you’re not supposed to drink it. The owner of the vineyard considers the 29 or so bottles of wine produced every year as works of art that should be collected and admired rather than consumed. That’s kind of a problem, considering that you are expected to pay 5,000 euros ($5,000) for a bottle of wine you’re not even supposed to drink.

Read More »

A woman in India is accusing her husband of stealing and then selling one of her kidneys on the black market without her consent.

Ranjita Kundu, a middle-aged woman from Kodameta, a village in India’s Odisha state, claims that her husband stole and sold one of her kidneys four years ago. She only recently came to know about his actions, after seeing a doctor for abdominal pain and learning that she only had one kidney. The woman claims that in 2018, under the pretext of taking her to a hospital to undergo an operation to remove kidney stones, her husband arranged for one of her kidneys to be removed so he could sell it on the black market.

Read More »

A Spanish woman was recently arrested on the Spanish island of Tenerife after conspiring with her boyfriend’s family to trick her mother into thinking she had been kidnapped and paying a sizeable ransom.

Earlier this week, Guardia Civil, one of Spain’s two national law enforcement agencies, released a disturbing video that appears to show a blindfolded woman with blood stains on her face, strapped to a chair, and with a large knife at her throat. The young woman is sobbing and telling her mother that she has been kidnapped and that she needs to pay a 50,000 ransom to the kidnappers if she ever wants to see her alive again. However, not everything is as it appears to be…

The ransom video described above is very real, but the kidnapping itself is not. According to Spanish police, the “victim” shown in the footage faked her own kidnapping with the help of her boyfriend’s family solely to trick her own mother into paying the 50,000 euro ransom.

Read More »

A 25-year-old woman from Madhya Pradesh, India, is being hailed a hero after she reportedly fought a tiger with her own hands in order to save her toddler son.

They say a mother’s love for her child is like nothing else, and Archana Choudhary a young woman from rural Madhya Pradesh, recently proved it when she risked her own life to save that of her 15-month-old son. The two were walking through a field on the outskirts of the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve on Sunday, when a full-grown tiger leaped out of the bushes, sunk its teeth into the boy’s head and started dragging him away into the jungle. Completely disregarding her own safety, Archana attacked the large feline with her bare hands in order to save her son.

Read More »

An Indian woman was recently arrested after allegedly spiking a soft drink and offering it to one of her daughter’s classmates as payback for performing better than her in school.

In a shocking case that recently rocked Indian society to its core, a 42-year-old woman is being accused of poisoning a 13-year-old boy purely out of jealousy that he was outperforming her in school. The disturbing events took place last Friday, after a rehearsal for an annual day function at a school in Karaikal, India’s Puducherry territory. Upon returning home at around 12.30 pm, the victim told his mother that he started feeling sick after drinking a soft-drink offered to him by the school guard. He said that he had assumed the drink came from her, but in reality, it had been given to the guard by the mother of a classmate and wasn’t really meant to quench his thirst…

Read More »

Chinese metaverse company NetDragon Websoft recently made history by appointing an AI-powered virtual humanoid robot as its CEO.

The new AI-powered CEO, known as ‘Ms Tang Yu’, will reportedly be at the forefront of  Fujian NetDragon Websoft’s “organizational and efficiency department”, overseeing operations at the technology company valued at almost $10 billion. The board of NetDragon Websoft apparently believes that artificial intelligence is the future of corporate management, and the appointment of Ms. Tang Yu is a symbolic commitment to embrace the use of AI and change the way the company does business.

Read More »

A Japanese beverage company launched a controversial dumpling-flavored soda that many are calling the worst soft drink ever created.

Gyoza traditional pan-fried dumplings are a staple of Japanese cuisine, but they are also the inspiration for one of the world’s most bizarre refreshments. “Gyoza cider”, or “Gyoza soda”, as some Japanese news outlets have been calling this abomination, is the creation of Nagai Garden, a refreshments company based in the city of Nikko, Japan’s Tochigi Prefecture. Originally launched in 2019, gyoza cider has been making news headlines and going viral on social media ever since, due to its unusually faithful dumpling taste.

Read More »