If you want to make it as a glamour influencer on social media, you have to look the part, and one way to achieve that is by using fake books as decorations.

French Instagram superstar Maddy Burciaga has come under fire for allegedly promoting fake expensive books are the perfect props to decorate one’s home. In an Instagram story, the 27-year-old shows off fake copies of Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent books, adding that the real books are quite expensive in bookshops and boutiques. But if you’re not actually interested in reading the books, but just want to show off to your followers, you can just get these blocks of cardboard that look like books, for just a fraction of the price. Her promotional campaign didn’t go as planned.

Burciaga, who rose to fame after appearing on a number of French television shows, like “The Angels”, or “The Villa of Broken Hearts”, commands a following of over 2.4 million people on Instagram alone, so her Insta story quickly went viral, and garnered generally negative reactions.

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A 70-year-old woman from Queens, New York, was recently arrested after her husband caught her lacing his coffee with boric acid.

Robert Baron first noticed that the food his wife cooked for him tasted funny back in September 0f last year. He also started feeling sick after meals, and on some occasion he would get so tired that he slept for 15 hours at a time. Suspecting that something fishy was going on, the 63-year-old man installed a small surveillance camera in the kitchen, without telling his wife of 11 years, Suncha Tinevra. That’s how he caught his partner lacing his coffee with a chemical used to kill cockroaches.

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A young Australian woman is scared to sleep in her own home after discovering that an intruder had been living in her attic.

Monica Green, a mother-of-three from Rockhampton, Queensland, had noticed weird things around her house for a while, but she never really worried, dismissing them as coincidences or figments of her imagination. But on Monday, after coming home with her kids from a doctor’s appointment, Monica couldn’t ignore the obvious anymore. The backdoor was wide-open, the air-conditioning and the TV were on, and there was a half-eaten plate of chicken nuggets in the kitchen. She immediately called the police, and later learned that whoever had broken into her home, had probably been living there a while.

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It’s hard to believe that elephant dung could be the main ingredient of a premium spirit drink, but it’s true. South African gin Indlovu is made with botanicals harvested from the pachyderm poop.

Paula and Les Ansley, both former professors in different fields of biology, decided to moved from the UK to South Africa, after retiring, and come up with a way to contribute to conservation efforts in the region and support the local community. Neither of them had any idea that elephant dung would play such a big part in their plan, it just sort of happened. Today they run a distillery that uses “botanicals foraged by elephants” and harvested from their poop to create Indlovu gin, a unique spirit that doesn’t taste anything like you’d imagine.

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A California man who had traveled to Chicago but was allegedly to scared by the Covid-19 pandemic to fly home, lived inside O’Hare International airport for three months without anyone noticing.

It’s unclear why Aditya Singh, a 36-year-old unemployed man traveled to Chicago in the first place, but authorities say he managed to hide in a secured area of O’Hare International Airport for three months, before he was arrested, this weekend. Singh had been living in the airport since mid October, and would have probably been there for a lot longer, had he not been approached by airport staff on Saturday and asked to produce some identification.

Singh reportedly lowered his face mask and showed the two United Airlines employees an ID badge that he was wearing around his neck. Only the badge belonged to an operations manager who had reported it missing on October 26, a week after Singh’s airplane landed at O’Hare. The police were called, and the suspicious man was taken into custody.

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South-Korean tech giant LG recently made international news for using a virtual influencer as a co-presenter to introduce its innovations to the world, during the first ever all-digital CES 2021 tech show.

Reah Keem’s bio on Instagram describes her as a songwriter, DJ and virtual musician. She has over 6,000 fans on the popular social network, which may not seem too impressive, but is actually quite a lot, considering Reah isn’t real. She is part of a growing number of human-like virtual influencers created by AI and CGI companies and designers, some of which have proven massively successful. Keem seems on her way to social media stardom as well, especially after being “hired” by LG Electronics to present its newest tech innovations during this year’s CES event.

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Photos of a giant bladder stone that a young woman recently had surgically removed have doing the rounds on Vietnamese social media.

Several Vietnamese media outlets have been reporting on the case of a 34-year-old woman who showed up at the emergency room of Phu Binh General Hospital, in Thay Nguyen, complaining of severe pain in her abdomen. After running some tests, a CT scan revealed that the woman had a massive, round mass in her abdomen. She was scheduled for emergency surgery, and a stone over 10-cm-long and weighing 400 grams was extracted from her bladder.

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Sick of the skinny bodies and perfect faces of K-pop boybands like BTS? Looking for something more ordinary? Check out Produce Pandas, China’s first chubby boyband.

As their band name suggest, the five members of Produce Pandas all resemble cute pandas – “huggable, chubby shape, relaxed and happy attitude. At least that’s lead dancer Mr 17 claims. Although their mission is very similar to that of the hundreds of cookie cutter boybands in China – to promote positivity and act as good role models – they have adopted a very different look. Instead of the anime-inspired looks and eyeliner usually associated with Asian boybands, Panda Produce members just look like average joes, and that’s apparently by design.

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You’ve probably experienced foul smells before, but as bad as you remember them stinking, scientists say it’s nothing compared to the stench of thioacetone, the world’s smelliest chemical compound.

Trash left in the can too long on a summer day, sewage, or the smell of public toilets uncleaned for multiple days, we can all agree that they stink, but their stench is not classified as dangerous to human life. However the foul aroma of the rare chemical known as thioacetone, is. This simple molecule is somewhat tricky to produce, as at temperatures above -20°C it will clump together to form a solid called trithioacetone, but on the rare occasions that humanity did create it, thioacetone managed to make its presence felt, quite literally.

The most famous story about the stench of thioacetone dates back to1889, when workers at a factory in the German city of Freiberg attempted to produce the simple yet potent chemical, and accidentally created panic among the city’s residents. Their success led to “an offensive smell spreading rapidly over a great area of the town, causing fainting, vomiting and a panic evacuation”.

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Japanese artist Kotetsu blends illustration photography and kirie (Japanese traditional paper cutting) to create beautiful works of art that bring anime heroines into the real world.

Instead of using ink or colored pencils to color the outfits of his illustrations, Kotetsu cuts out the paper canvas and juxtaposes his creations against various backdrops, thus letting Mother Nature do the coloring for him. The result is stunning, often-times bordering on breathtaking. From autumn foliage, and fields full of flowers, to picturesque sunsets and starry night skies, Kotetsu uses nature’s most beautiful elements to complete his artworks.

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A former beauty pageant winner from Guinea has taken a Swiss skin-care product company to court for allegedly ruined her once healthy complexion and ruining her modelling career.

25-year-old Mariama Diallo, who previously won Miss Guinea, Miss West Africa and participated in the Miss World pageant, had a successful modelling career until three years ago, when trying a new skincare product left her face full of blemishes and scars. She has been struggling to find work since 2018, as the healing process has been very slow and no company would hire her. Diallo has now taken the manufacturer of the product she claims ruined her career to court.

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Touching your girlfriend isn’t generally considered a punishable offence, but things change considerably when your date for the day is a rental.

A Taiwanese university student learned that the hard way, after getting a bit too close to a girlfriends he had rented by the hour, and getting sentenced to jail for it. In July of 2019, the boy, identified only as ‘Chen’, paid 7,200 Taiwanese dollars ($260) to rent a girlfriend for three hours, from a company called “Love Acting-Extra”. The service had very specific rules detailing what the client was allowed to to with his rented girlfriend, but also what was forbidden. Unfortunately for Chen, he got carried away, and paid a steep price for it…

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44-year-old Niel Kenmuir suffers from aphantashia, a rare and strange medical condition that prevents him from visualizing things in his head.

Niel first realized that there was something different about his brain when he was in primary school. He had trouble falling asleep at night, so his step-father told him to close his eyes and visualize a flock of sheep and count them as they jump over a fence, one by one. The problem was he couldn’t see anything when he closed his eyes, no sheep, no fence, nothing. Later on, he would discover that he had a blind mind’s eye, which means he cannot visualize anything, not even the face of loved ones.

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Doctors recently reported the strange case of a 30-year-old man who injected magic mushrooms into his bloodstream, only to find that they had started growing in his veins.

The Journal of the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry published a case report about a man who sought to self-medicate for opioid dependence and depression by injecting magic mushrooms directly into his blood. Referred to as “Mr. X”, for anonymity purposes, the man had reportedly been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had stopped taking his prescribed medication. Instead, he had started researching the therapeutic effects of psilocybin, a naturally occurring psychedelic found in over 200 species of mushrooms, as a way to treat his condition and decrease his reliance on opioids. The compound had been shown to be effective in treating symptoms like depression and anxiety in numerous medical trials, but only when consumed orally. Mr. X had other plans…

The protagonist of this strange story reportedly managed to get his hands on psychedelic mushrooms, which he boiled to obtain a “tea”, which he then proceeded to filter through a cotton swab, and then inject directly into his bloodstream.

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A 58-year-old French woman has been fight to get her life back, after being wrongfully declared dead by a court, during a long-running dispute with a former employee.

Jeanne Pouchain has been trying to prove she is alive and well for three years, ever since a labor court declared her dead, allegedly acting on information provided by one of her former employees, who she was in a legal dispute with. The verdict not only ended a decade-long lawsuit between Pouchain and her ex-employee, it also ruined her life as a citizen. Her name was wiped from official records, she lost her ID card, her driver’s license, medical insurance, bank account, everything. It was like she didn’t exist anymore.

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