Police in Turkmenistan have begun inspecting public and private toilets across the country for evidence of photos of president Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov being used as toilet paper.

It sounds like news you would only expect to read on a satire news website like The Onion, but this is Turkmenistan president we’re talking about here, the same country that earlier this year banned black cars because its president loves white, so this is sadly painfully true. After news started going around that people were using bits of newspaper with the president’s face on them as toilet paper, police and landfill workers were ordered to look for evidence of this unusual offence and issue warnings that such behavior could have serious consequences.

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A Chinese woman recently made international headlines after discovering that the white ball of fur she bought a year ago wasn’t really a puppy, but a white fox cub.

Last year, the woman, surnamed Wang, bought what she thought was a Japanese Spitz puppy from a pet shop in Jinzhong, China’s Shanxi province. She started realizing that something wasn’t quite right about her cute pet after about three months, when it stopped eating dog food and started to grow an unusually long, fluffy tail. She didn’t pay too much attention to these details, and just continued feeding it chicken and fruit, which it seemed to like. But then things started getting weirder.

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Iranian actors dressed as Islamic State fighters recently stormed a shopping mall in Teheran, in an attempt to promote a new film about a father and son who travel to Syria to deliver humanitarian supplies but end up kidnapped by ISIS. Unfortunately, their performance was a bit too good, and caused some shoppers to run for their lives.

It was supposed to be a harmless publicity stunt for Iranian director Ebrahim Hatamikia’s new film, ‘Damascus Time’, with actors dressed as ISIS militants peacefully visiting the Kourosh Complex shopping mall and cinema, in Teheran, and posing for pictures. However, the actors decided to show off their acting skills, and really got into their characters, storming the shopping complex and shouting ‘Allahu akbar’ while waving their fake firearms and machetes around. One of them actually rode through the mall on a horse, while another pretended to connect the wires on a fake bomb.

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A 15-year-old dog in in Chongqing’s Yuzhong district has been dubbed the ‘Chinese Hachiko’ for patiently waiting up to 12 hours a day outside a local metro station until his owner returns from work.

Xiongxiong, which translates as ‘Little Bear’, has reportedly been waiting outside the Liziba metro station, in Yuzhong district, every day for the past eight years, ever since his current owner started looking after him. The pooch is well-known by locals who often stop to pet him, but after a recent video of him patiently waiting for his master recently went viral on social media, Xionxiong has become a national celebrity, with people travelling to Chongqing from all over China, just to see him.

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A 40-year-old man allegedly traveled almost 10,000 miles from England to an art gallery in Aspen, Colorado, where he used a sharp object to slash a $3 million dollar painting by New York artist Christopher Wool, before storming out. It was later revealed that the painting was owned by his father.

The bizarre incident occurred last year, on May 2, when a man wearing sunglasses, black jeans, a black jacket, a hat, gloves and a full beard entered the Opera Gallery in Aspen and walked directly up to a painting called “Untitled 2004”. He then took a knife or other cutting object out of his jacket pocket and slashed the painting twice before running out of the gallery. A one-year investigation recently revealed that the man who carried out the slashing was none other than Nicholas Morley, son of the painting’s owner, one Harold Morley.

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Elizaveta Tkachenko, a 30-year-old woman from Russia, wound up in the emergency room earlier this month, after getting unknown substances injected into her face by an unlicensed aesthetician.

Tkachenko, a resident of Stavropol, had decided that she wanted to enhance certain facial features with the help of cosmetic filler injections, only instead of going to a trained aesthetician, she turned to her friend Irina, an accountant, who did the procedures at home, for cheaper. Tvacheno, who would live to regret her decision, claims that her friend assured her that she only used quality fillers and sterile instruments, and that she had plenty of experience in this field.

The woman had an unknown quantity of filler injected into her lips and near her eyes, and although some swelling is considered normal after such procedures, in Elizaveta’s case it was so extreme that she had trouble breathing, her head would ache terribly and her lips looked ready to burst. A day after the botched injections, she had to be taken to the hospital.

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A mother-of-three from the UK reportedly performed the world’s first DIY breast implant removal at home, because she couldn’t stand her F-cup breasts anymore and wouldn’t get on the health service’s waiting list.

14 years ago, Tonia Rossington, from Skegness, Lincolnshire, underwent a breast-enlargement procedure in Brussels, which increased her bust size from 36B to 36F. At the time, she felt her large breast looked natural, but a few years later, she lost a lot of weight and she began to hate them. She thought they looked ridiculous and couldn’t bare the thought that she was stuck with them for the rest of her life. So she started weighing her options, and somehow eventually decided that the best thing to do was to remove the implants herself.

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In Robert Zemeckis’ 1994 film Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks’ character is supposed to have run a total of 15,248 miles coast-to-coast across America, after being left heartbroken by his childhood sweetheart, Jenny. It seems like an impossible challenge in real life, but someone actually managed to break Forrest’s record by running a total of 15,600 miles in 409 days.

Rob Pope, a 39-year-old veteran from Liverpool, in the UK, spent over a year of his life recreating Forrest Gump’s epic coast-to-coast trek across the United States, an amazing four times. He quit his job in order to complete this monumental challenge in four stages, and has been running an average of 40 miles a day through blistering heat, torrential rain and weather so cold it froze his beard. Despite suffering several major physical injuries throughout his epic run, and repetition and loneliness straining his mental health, Pope says quitting was never an option.

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Yogi, a one-year-old brown Shih Tzu- poodle mix, has become a social media sensation due to his uncanny, almost human-like facial expression.

Photos of this ‘dog with a man’s face’ have been doing the rounds online, and people can’t stop talking about him. It all started when Chantal Desjardins, from Massachusetts, posted a photo of her freshly groomed pooch Yogi, on Facebook. It wasn’t long before her friends started pointing out that his face looked uncannily human-like, and some even asked her if she used editing software like Photoshop or one of those popular ‘face swap’ apps to create the eerie effect. Chantal insisted that she had not manipulated the photo at all, but after examining the photo again, she understood why people were asking her that.

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N’na Fanta Camara, a healer from Guinea, in Western Africa, was recently arrested for conning over 700 women into thinking they were pregnant by giving them a strange cocktail of plants and medicines that left them bloated for long periods of time.

Women desperate to become pregnant would apparently seek Camara’s help and pay her considerable amounts of money for herbal concoctions that the so-called healer claimed would help them bear children. The con artist would make her clients drink plant mixtures that caused vomiting and diarrhea, but she reassured the women that this was all part of the process. She made it specifically clear that they were not to go to the hospital to treat their symptoms, but rather see Etienne Balamou, a laboratory technician running a clandestine clinic in Conakry, who police say was her accomplice. In time, the strange remedy made some of the women’s bellies become permanently bloated, making them think they were pregnant. Some reported looking pregnant for 12 to 16 months.

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Five years ago, a compassionate Shanghai policeman took on the role of son to help comfort an elderly couple he had never met before. They had lost their own son in a tragic accident 15 years ago, and the policeman’s similar appearance helped comfort them.

In 2003, Liang Qiaoying and her son, Liang Yu, from North China’s Shanxi province, were exposed to poison gas, during a freak accident. The woman survived, but her young son did not. Liang, a former schoolteacher, was left paralyzed and mentally impaired following the accident, and her husband, Xia Zhanhai, could not bear to tell her the truth about their son. Instead, whenever his wife asked to see Liang Yu, he kept saying that he had gone to work in another city.

In 2010, while watching a television show about police work in Shanghai, Xia Zhanhai was stunned to see an officer that looked just like his deceased son. He immediately knew that the young man was the answer to making his wife smile again, but he had know idea how to get in touch with him. He hadn’t caught his name, and all he had to go by was that he was stationed in Pudong, 1,500 km away. But that wasn’t going to stop him.

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The World Health Organisation recently recognised video game addiction as a mental health condition, and while that decision may seem strange to some, stories like the one presented here could serve as an explanation.

Tencent’s insanely popular mobile video game “King of Glory” is once again getting some bad publicity in Asian media, after allegedly getting one 25-year-old Malaysian man so addicted that he decided to divorce his wife of six years because she sold his account in the hopes that he would spend more time with her and their daughter. In the past, King of Glory was linked to the death of a popular Chinese streamer who allegedly spent most of his nights playing the game, and to the blindness of a woman who played the popular MOBA for three days straight.

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An Indian driver has received the Manush Sanman award for not honking once in the past 18 years. It may seem a strange award, but India is well known for the chaos of its roads, and the typical driver’s almost constant use of the car horn. Dipak Das, a Kolkata-based driver, believes that India can change this and eventually achieve peaceful, quiet roads.

Honking is a huge part of the driving experience in India, as people pretty much use them as an alternative to side mirrors. Some cars don’t even have side mirrors, while others have them folded, as to extend them outward could lead to collisions with other vehicles. Instead, Indian motorists honk incessantly to avoid collisions on the road where traffic is chaotic and so dense that cars appear just about to bump into each other at all times. Drivers honk to indicate that they’re about to make a pass or to indicate that another driver is too close. This creates unbearable noise pollution that many consider hugely detrimental to Indian society.

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What was supposed to be a bit of fun turned into a crying game for Arran Maye, a 28-year-old plumber from Leicester. While vacationing with 20 friends in the Spanish city of Benidorm, the Briton invested 9 pounds ($12) in a henna tattoo that left him sporting a handlebar mustache and a chin beard. The idea was to get into the spirit of Benidorm Fiesta, a local fancy dress festival, but things went from bad to worse when Arran experienced an intense allergic reaction to the henna ink, which may leave him with permanent scars.

Adam Lewis, another member of the British partying bunch, got the same tattoos as Arran, but while his tattoos faded within a few days, Arran’s were much more problematic. On top of the excruciating pain he experienced, his face ballooned and started oozing puss. It tuned out that the henna used on Arran was an illegal variety called black henna, which contains the chemical PPD. It caused a severe allergic reaction and ultimately landed him in intensive care, with one of the consequences being potentially permanent scars in the shape of a handlebar mustache and a small beard.

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When it comes to bicycles, tuning options are rather limited, especially in the audio department, but a community of teenagers in Palermo, Sicily, has found a way to adapt car stereo systems complete with speakers, subwoofers, amplifiers and even car batteries on their cycles, allowing them to pump out up to 1250W of sound as they cruise the city streets.

Bike tuning has become a trend among music-loving teenage cyclists of Palermo, on the island of Sicily. They spend anywhere between a couple of hundred euros to over 1,200 euros to have their bikes converted into powerful sound systems on wheels.

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