A luckless Chinese man who reportedly spent almost two months in his home after being quarantined three times in a row became a trending topic on Chinese social media this week.

Mr Xiong, from the city of Jining, in East China’s Shandong Province, spent almost the whole month of February and half of March cooped up in his home in an unlucky triple quarantine that the media hilariously dubbed “buy one, get two free”. The first time Xiong was confined to his apartment was when Jining went into lockdown on February 8th, two days after returning from the Philippines. He was forbidden from leaving his home for 14 days, which was tough, but not as tough as spending 50 days inside…

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In March of 2018, an 11-year-old girl accidentally dropped an apple from the balcony of her family’s 24th floor apartment in Dongguan, China. This simple act ended up costing a toddler its future and the girl’s parents a fortune in compensation…

On March 9, 2018, the unnamed girl was reportedly trying to feed the family dog while holding an apple on the balcony of their apartment, when she accidentally dropped the fruit. At the same exact time, 3-month-old Tongtong was in the arms of her grandmother, taking a walk around that same apartment building in Dongguan. As fate would have it, the dropped apple plummeted down and landed straight on the toddler’s head, rendering her unconscious. She was rushed to the hospital, where doctors notified her family that she had suffered severe head trauma, skull fractures, ruptured blood vessels in the skull, and traumatic shock. Tongtong underwent surgery to stop the bleeding in her brain, but she remained in a coma.

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Four years ago, Rita Gaviola was a 13-year-old street beggar in the Filipino town of Lucban. Since then she has worked with some of the world’s hottest brands as a fashion model, starred on hit reality TV shows and gained over 100,000 Instagram followers. And it was all thanks to a random photo…

Rita Gaviola’s incredible ‘rags to riches’ story began in 2016. Back then, she was asking for alms on the streets of Lucban, to help her family make ends meet. Her father worked as a garbage collector and her mother stayed home to look after her and her five siblings. None of the children attended school at the time and the family barely managed to put food on the table, so Rita often went out to beg for change or food donations. That’s how she was spotted by Filipino photographer Topher Quinto Burgos, who happened to be attending the Pahiyas Festival in Lucban, in May 2016. He was attracted by her natural beauty and posted the photos of her on the internet, changing the girl’s life completely with a single click of the ‘upload’ button.

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They say you can buy just about anything on China’s leading online shopping platform, Taobao. Well, you can now add “commercial rocket launch” to that list as well.

In what was originally deemed an April 1st joke, Chinese media recently reported that an anonymous online shopper paid 40 million yuan ($5.6 million) for his very own rocket launch. The unique online auction was hosted by Chinese celebrity sales anchor Wei Ya and over two million people tuned in to watch the sale live on Taobao. Bidder swere told that winning the auction would allow them to paint the body of the commercial rocket and the launch platform, as well as the chance to visit the launch site and control the launch.

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Japan’s “Class of Life” is a controversial school project that aims to teach students about valuing their food and the environment by having them raise and then eat animals like fish and chicken.

We first featured the Class of Life a couple of years ago, when a video showcasing its implementation at an agricultural high-school in Japan’s Shimano Prefecture went viral on Chinese social media, leaving most viewers in a state of shock. The footage showed students preparing chicken eggs for hatching, raising the chicks for several months, and finally killing, cooking and eating the chickens. The Class of Life has been a part of Japanese curriculum at certain schools for over six decades, so most Japanese people are familiar with it, but even they were stunned recently when they saw elementary school children taking part in the class.

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A young Chinese dad spent a month converting a cat carrier backpack into a safety pod for his baby. His invention allegedly protects the child from infection and pumps purified air into the pod with an electronic fan system.

30-year-old Cao Junjie, a tech-savvy father from Shanghai, China, wanted something that would allow him and his wife, Fang, to take their two-month old son on walks without worrying that he might get infected with the novel coronavirus. Even though babies and young people in general usually experience mild symptoms, they didn’t want to take a chance, so Junjie came up with a solution inspired by Hideo Kojima’s latest video game (Death Stranding), a carrier pod completely isolated form the outside.

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A popular Japanese cosplayer known for transforming herself into real-life versions of hot female anime characters, recently came out as a man who uses makeup, wigs and various accessories to achieve a shockingly feminine look.

With over 65,000 followers on Twitter, and several other thousands on Instagram, Rei Dunois can safely be described as a fairly popular female cosplayer. But appearances can be deceiving. Despite having made a name for herself by transforming into various female anime characters over the last couple of years, Rei recently left her fans with their mouths wide open by revealing that she was actually a “he”. After keeping the appearances up for so long, the talented cosplayer apparently decided to reveal the truth and convince people that they shouldn’t believe everything they see on the internet.

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Every year, landscaping experts from all over Japan get together to compete in the Key Truck Garden Contest, a unique event that has participants turning the beds of mini trucks into the most impressive miniature gardens they can.l The results are nothing short of awe-inspiring.

The Kei Truck, or “kei-tora”, is a small yet practical utility vehicle invented in Japan, but used throughout Asia, primarily in construction and agriculture. It’s been a part of Japanese culture for decades, and people love it because it provides plenty of space and it’s easy to maneuver on narrow streets. But once a year, Key trucks take center stage as canvases for ingenious landscaping masterpieces, during the Key Truck Garden Contest, a special event sponsored by the Japan Federation of Landscape Contractors. As you can see in the photos below, these mobile miniature gardens are something else!

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An Indian man was recently arrested after bringing home a human hand that he had allegedly taken from a crematorium and asking his wife to cook it for dinner.

The disturbing episode unfolded last week in Tikkopur village, India’s Uttar Pradesh and sent shock waves through the entire area. The accused, known only as 32-year-old man named Sanjay, reportedly brought home a human hand and casually handed (pun intended) it to his wife to cook for dinner. The horrified woman reportedly lost consciousness and fell to the ground, only to wake up to an even more macabre sight – her husband getting ready to cook the human appendage himself. All she could do was run out of the house, lock her husband inside and call the police.

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A Japanese man is facing serious charges for allegedly causing serious financial losses to his favorite baseball club after reserving and then cancelling nearly 1,900 seats for two of their league games, so he could have more space and stand out on TV.

41-year-old Kiyoshi Shibamura, a fan of the Orix Buffaloes baseball club from the Japanese city of Osaka, came up with an ingenious-yet-costly plan to watch his favorite team compete against the SoftBank Hawks at Osaka’s Kyocera Dome on the 28th and 29th of September, last year. To make sure he stood out on TV and enjoyed some serious privacy, he went through the trouble of creating 1,873 fake names and reserving the same number of stadium seats online. He then cancelled all but his own reservation right before the end of the reservation period, making sure than no one else managed to snatch the seats.

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A Chinese migrant worker who lost his memory in 1990 due to brain injuries recently remembered his hometown while watching a news report about the coronavirus outbreak.

Thirty years ago, Zhu Jiaming, a young man from Guizhou Province in south-western China, left his home to work construction in the central province of Hubei. Unfortunately, that same year he suffered a serious work accident that left him with brain injuries and long-term amnesia. Too make matters worse, the migrant worker also lost his ID and ended up living on the streets until a kindhearted couple offered to let him live with them. Despite trying very hard to remember his past life, he could not remember much, including anything about his home and family.

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This is a somewhat older story that was originally reported by media primarily in Indonesia and other East-Asian countries back in 2018. It got a lot of attention because it touched on a very taboo topic – the romantic relationship between an adult male teacher and a 13-year-old schoolgirl.

Erwin Pangaila was 27 when he fell in love with a junior high school student at the SMP Negeri 2 Tenga school, in Sulawesi Utara, Indonesia. In fact, it was 13-year-old Vinda Virginia who first noticed and approached him. She happened to walk by his classroom saw him writing on the blackboard and immediately fell for his broad shoulders and athletic physique. She wasn’t the only girl in school to have a crush on Erwin, but she was determined to be the one that won his heart. She started staying behind after classes to ask him questions and eventually, their student-teacher relationship turned into a romantic one.

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Chinese schoolchildren in Wuhan and other areas where school has been suspended because of the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak have apparently been trying to have a homework app taken down from the App Store so they could enjoy their vacation.

The threat of Covid-19 is no joke, but for Chinese students the shutdown of schools in affected areas has been met with excitement as it basically meant an extra holiday period. Sure, they couldn’t hang out or even leave the house for weeks, but at least they didn’t have to attend classes and, most importantly, they din’t have any homework. At least that’s what they thought, because soon after schools closed, teachers started using an Alibaba-owned app to both hold classes online and issue homework to their students. But somehow the schoolchildren managed to coordinate a massive campaign to hopefully have the app taken down from the App Store so they could enjoy their time off.

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Indian doctors recently reported the curious case of a young woman who underwent a double hand transplant almost three years ago and whose hands have changed color to match her skin tone.

21-year-old Shreya Siddanagowder lost both her hands in a freak road accident in 2016, when travelling from her hometown in Pune to her college in Karnataka. Doctors had no choice but to amputate both her hand and forearms, and she needed about a year to recover. As soon as she did, she visited the Amrita Institute to register for a double hand transplant, and doctors there miraculously managed to find a donor for her on that same day, August 9, 2017. There were almost 200 other people on the waiting list, some from foreign countries like Afghanistan or Bangladesh, but she was lucky enough to be compatible with the donor. Doctors called her at the hotel after her visit, and the transplant was carried out that same day.

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Since late last month, Indonesian social media has been buzzing with news of a controversial wedding in South Sulawesi, where a 103-year-old Dutch colonial war veteran recently married a 27-year-old woman.

Photos and videos of the unlikely couple on their wedding day have been doing the rounds online for over a week now, sparking both outrage and humorous comments. There are also those who can’t believe the wedding was for real, but several Indonesian news outlets have confirmed that 103-year-old Puang Katte married a 27-year-old woman named Indo Alang in the District of Siwa, South Sulawesi. The groom, who is reportedly a widower, fought in the Dutch colonial war (1945 – 1949).

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