And the title for the world’s unluckiest diner goes to… A woman in Shenzen, China, who claims to have found sanitary pads in her hotpot, two days in a row, at two separate restaurants.

The woman, known only as ‘Ni’ allegedly found the first sanitary pad while enjoying a hotpot at a restaurant chain called Haidilao, last Friday. In a video that has since went viral online, she can be seen pulling the bizarre object out of her meal and inspecting it. The woman later alerted restaurant staff about her disgusting discovery and asked to talk to the manager, who, after inspecting the object himself, explained that it was probably paper wrapping from the meat. However, the woman dismissed his explanation, claiming that it clearly looked like a sanitary pad. She then proceeded to demand a 1 million yuan compensation from the restaurant.

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Young men in Pu Hong, a small village in Thailand’s Kalasin province, have started painting their fingernails as a way to fend off an evil ghost who they hold responsible for the recent deaths of several locals.

The bizarre trend became popular after the deaths of five residents of Pu Hong over the last three weeks. The first two men, who reportedly came from the same family, simply collapsed and died on the spot, another victim, a teenage girl died in a motorcycle accident, while the details of the other two fatalities have not been disclosed to the media so far. Instead of taking the high number of fatalities in their village as a tragic coincidence, locals believe that supernatural forces are responsible, and have started taking precautions to avoid becoming victims themselves.

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An Indian education organization recently sparked controversy by introducing an optional engineering course that teaches students that modern inventions like aeronautics, batteries, as well as knowledge of gravity existed in India during the Vedic Age, thousands of years ago.

Human Resource Development Ministry (HRD) decided to introduce into the country’s engineering curriculum a controversial book that makes all kinds of bombastic claims, from the fact that the Wright brothers didn’t really invent the airplane, to assertions that ancient Indian ‘scientists’ in the Vedic Age (1500 – 500 BCE) knew about gravity long before Isaac Newton. This book is seen as another attempt by Narendra Modi’s government to promote pseudoscience pushed by Hindu groups.

Entitled Bharatiya Vidya Saar, the controversial book is set to be introduced as part of an optional credit course in engineering colleges and universities affiliated with the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). For some reason, the optional course, called Indian Knowledge Systems, will focus on Indian philosophical, linguistic and artistic traditions, as well as yoga and Indian perspective of modern scientific worldview. Those don’t sound like the kinds of things engineering courses should focus on, but wait until you hear what students will actually be taught.

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Shopping malls in China have come up with an ingenious strategy to attract female shoppers. Many of them now offer attractive ‘shopping’ boyfriends that can be rented by the hour at really affordable rates.

What started as a clever promotion for March 8th, International Women’s Day, has apparently become a year-long strategy to attract female shoppers. Walking through mall galleries in Chinese cities like Hebei or Foshan, you’re likely to spot young, dapper men displayed in giant, doll box-like frames decorated with hearts. They are called ‘shopping boyfriends’ and they can be rented by the hour by lonely female shoppers looking for company. Rates start as low as 1 yuan ($0.15) per hour, up to 2 yuan ($0.30) in some shopping malls.

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You’ll have a tough time finding someone who talks positively about their constipation problems, but one Utah woman is one of those rare exceptions, and for good reason. It was her constipation that inspired her to create a simple stool that now helps millions of people improve their bowel movements.

Judy Edwards has been struggling with constipation her whole life, but the problem only got worse with age. A few years ago, a medical professional advised her to use a foot stool while sitting on the toilet, and that worked surprisingly well for her, so she passed on the same advice to her husband Bill. They were both amazed both about the difference that a little foot stool made and that they had only learned about this trick in their 60s. But it wasn’t until their son Bobby, a self-described gypsy always looking to make a “big splash”, learned about the benefits of the foot stool that the idea of a profitable business started to materialize.

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Samelyn Lafuente, a young primary school teacher from Masbate City, in the Philippines, spent the last three years turning a bland classroom into a little girl’s real-life fantasy, decked in pink and full of Hello Kitty-themed decorations.

Walking into Samelyn Lafuente’s classroom, you would be tempted to think that it’s an obsessed Hello Kitty fan’s shrine to the popular Japanese character. The floor is covered with a Hello Kitty-themed carpet, the walls are all pink, as are the school desks, and there are Hello Kitty decorations everywhere, hanging from the ceiling, plastered on the walls and even in the windows. It would be fair to assume that parents of little girls in Ms. Lafuente’s class must be struggling to pull them away from this real-life fantasy in pink every day, which is just what the teacher planned all along – to create a place where her students would be happy and enjoy their time at school.

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A family in Russia’s Barnaul region was recently taken to court by the local energy company for accumulating a debt of approximately 80,000 rubles ($1,218) in unpaid bills. In their defense, the accused claimed that it was all their cat’s fault, not theirs.

It’s one thing for kids to say “the dog ate my homework”, but you don’t often hear adults trying to lay the blame on their pets in order to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. That’s exactly what this family in Barnaul did, though, and not just anywhere, but in front of a judge. Accused of refusing to pay the local energy company around 80,000 in electrical bills, they claimed that they hadn’t actually used the electricity, but that meter had been tampered with by their mischievous cat.

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Yungar, a remote town in the Peruvian Andes, has been receiving worldwide attention in the past couple of weeks, because of the efforts of a man named Lenin to stop one of the candidates, named Hitler, from running in the upcoming municipal elections.

Hitler Alba Sánchez, also known as ‘Hitler of the Andes’ or ‘The Good Hitler’, has already served as mayor of Yungar between 2011 and 2014, and he is now trying out for a second term. However, his candidacy was challenged by a local man called Lenin Vladimir Rodríguez Valverde, who claimed that Hitler wasn’t eligible because of his previous term as mayor. The attempt to sabotage The Good Hitler’s election ultimately failed, but the bizarre coincidence of these two men’s names has become an international news topic.

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Last week, police in the Mexican resort city of Puerto Vallarta reported at least 11 cases of people completely stripped of their clothes tied to lamp posts and with the letter ‘R’ shaved on the back of their heads. So far, no one knows who orchestrated these attacks and why, as the victims all refuse to talk.

Police started receiving calls about naked men being tied to lamp posts in different areas of Puerto Vallarta last Monday. Between 9:26 PM on Monday, and 1:29 AM on Tuesday, four men were discovered in similar circumstances. They had all been stripped naked, had bruises on their buttocks like they had been repeatedly slapped, they were tied to lamp posts at various intersections across the city and they all had the letter ‘R’ shaved into the back of their heads. Authorities announced that they had started an investigation, but little did they know that these four cases was only the beginning.

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A Maine artist managed to carve a unique niche for herself by using moose droppings as the main medium for her artworks.

It’s not clear when or how Somerville resident Mary Winchenbach got the idea to use moose poop to make art, but after showing off her witty-named “Tirdy Works” at the Common Ground Fair, in Unity, Maine, people have been going crazy for them. Her official Facebook page has thousands of ‘likes’ and comments from people wanting to buy some. Her collection of Tirdy Works features clocks, figurines, jewelry, among other things, all made with genuine ‘Maine Moose Tirds’.

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A young system analyst from Brazil managed to save about half the cost of building a two storey brick house, by doing all the work himself, instead of hiring a professional construction crew. With absolutely no construction experience behind him, he turned to YouTube tutorials and advice from family and friends.

33-year-old Evandro Klimpel Balmant and his wife Ane Caroline de Jesus Balmant, 34, live in a beautiful 200 square-meter house that they built themselves, in Almirante Tamandare municipality, a metropolitan area of Curitiba, in Brazil. It took three long years to raise the house from the ground up, and they still have the upstairs to plaster, but they say it was worth the wait, especially since they manage to save around 50% what a house this size would have cost to build with a construction company.

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International media outlets have been reporting the shocking case of a dolphin, dozens of penguins and other wildlife that have been abandoned in a derelict Japanese aquarium that closed down months ago.

The operator of the Inubosaki Marine Park Aquarium in Choshi, a city in Japan’s Chiba Prefecture, closed down in January 2018, citing a steady decline in visitors following the strong earthquake and nuclear crisis of 2011. However, the marine life that used to entertain guests – including a bottlenose dolphin and dozens of humboldt penguins – has been locked inside the abandoned facility ever since and are living in improper conditions. Although someone has reportedly been feeding them regularly, animal activists claim that Honey the dolphin is showing signs of stress due to loneliness and suffered serious sunburns this summer, while the penguins are living in crumbling pens, among debris. Park representatives could not be contacted about the situation and local authorities claim that their hands are tied.

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A man named Valery recently became the star of what may very well be the most epic fail in the history of iPhone launches. After becoming the first person in a monstrously long queue to set foot inside the Apple store in Moscow to buy an iPhone XS, he left empty-handed because he couldn’t afford to buy it.

On the morning of September 28, the Apple store in Moscow finally opened its doors to the crowd of people that had been lining up outside for over 24 hours to buy the new iPhone XS and XS Max. Apple fans have been queuing up for new iPhone launches all around the world for years now, but what made this particular event special was the amount of fail involved. For one thing, the first eight people at the head of the giant queue evaporated minutes before the store opened. It turns out they had never planned on buying a phone, hoping to sell their places in line for absurd amounts of money, instead. But they were actually the smart ones, because the ninth guy planned to do the same thing, only he didn’t have the brains to bail before the doors opened.

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The Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard is mostly known as one of the few places on Earth where people are forbidden from dying, but few know that this place also has a ban on cats, with one exception, a purring feline that’s technically a fox.

Cats weren’t always banned on Svalbard. It was only during the 1990s that Norwegian authorities enforced the ban, after it was decided that they were susceptible to rabies and echinococcosis (a type of tape worm) infections from foxes and rats, which in turn posed a big risk to the human population. Interestingly, rats are not indigenous to the northern archipelago, only arriving here relatively recently on board cargo ships, but being the resourceful creatures they are, they quickly adapted to the harsh conditions. Photos taken prior to the ban on cats show that felines were once popular on Spitsbergen and the other islands that make up Svalbard, but since then, only one ginger cat has been photographed on the archipelago. Her name is Kesha and she has a rather interesting story.

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A 37-year-old woman from Colombia recently shocked her entire country after managing to fake her pregnancy for nine months and then coming up with film-worthy story to explain the absence of a baby on her due date. And she did it all to keep her partner from leaving her.

Antonela Santiago Padilla and her partner Victor had known each other since they were 14 year old teenagers growing up in northern Barranquilla. Life split them apart for a long time, but many years later, Victor called to commemorate the memory of her brother, who had passed away. She started writing to him in September of last year, and soon their relationship became stronger and closer. However, Antonela knew that he was involved in a romantic relationship with another woman and didn’t want to break them up. Victor kept telling her that he and his partner weren’t getting along and that they were going to break up, so they started their own romantic relationship in December 2017. But Antonela wasn’t convinced that Victor had forgotten about his former girlfriend and it was this insecurity that made her create this elaborate farce that left everyone flabbergasted.

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