After having its written payment notifications ignored by a client, a utility company in Russia came up with an ingenious way of coercing the debtor to pay his dues – it dumped a three-tonne concrete pyramid in front of his luxurious villa.

Samara Utility Systems Ltd. had long been trying to get the unnamed resident of Zubchaninovka village, in Russia’s Samara region, to pay his 50,000 ruble ($810) debt for unpaid water bills. The company had sent him several written notifications, had contacted him by phone, and even sent people to reason with him in person, but to no avail. So management decided to try something new. They commissioned a 3-tonne-heavy, 1.5-meter-tall concrete pyramid, plastered it with shameful slogans and dumped it in front of his home, to serve as a reminder that he had a debt to bay.

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A woman in Norwich, UK, was recently banned from singing and playing loud music in her apartment, after neighbors complained that her screeching sounded like “a drowning cat”.

48-year-old Heather Webb has reportedly terrorized neighbors in her apartment building with her singing for at least four years. In 2014, her neighbors filled anti-social behavior forms and sent them to the local council, but she only received a community protection warning from the police. Then, in 2016, neighbors again complained to the council about her loud, disturbing singing, but no action was taken against the woman. Finally, in December of last year, a judge issued Webb a Criminal Behavior Order which legally banned her from singing in her apartment. But she didn’t let that stop her.

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Stressed-out students at the University of Utah can now let loose without having to worry about judgmental looks from their peers, thanks to a small ‘cry closet’ that allows them to cry in private.

With homework, tough exams and student debt as high as it is these days, college an get pretty stressful, and sometimes you just need to cry before getting back on the horse. But not everyone is comfortable sobbing in public, so the University of Utah decided to help students let loose their emotions by installing a small cry room in the campus library.

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A female candidate for a local position in Taipei, Taiwan, recently became the butt of social media jokes, after people noticed that she looked nothing like the woman on her campaign posters.

The world of politics is no stranger to image editing software, as many politicians turn to programs like Photoshop to make themselves look better in campaign posters. However, PR people sometimes overdo it to the point where the editing is obvious even to the untrained eye. And then there are cases like that of Wang Zhiya, a politician running for a position on Taipei’s City Council, whose campaign posters look absolutely nothing like her.

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José Arno Appolo do Amaral, the mayor of Alvorada, a city in Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul state, recently became a popular meme in his country after a photoshopped picture of him and his subordinates seemingly inspecting a municipal construction site went viral online.

The photo showing mayor do Amaral, and his deputy Valter Slayfer at a dredging site in Alvorada was originally posted on the official Facebook page of the Alvorada Municipality, along with a long caption detailing the visit. The two officials had allegedly overseen part of the operation and had declared themselves satisfied with the work of the hydraulic dredger. Only people soon became suspicious of the photo, which showed Amaral and Slayfer in the distance, flanking the site supervisor. The two officials’ position in relation to the road they were supposed to be standing on, as well as their color compared to the rest of the photos just seemed odd, so Facebook users started sharing it and questioning its authenticity.

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We all know politicians sometimes say stupid things, they’re only human after all, but sometimes their statements just leave you scratching your head in disbelief. Take Indian minister Biplab Deb, who recently said that the internet existed back in the ancient days of Mahabharata.

Speaking at a regional workshop on Public Distribution System (PDS) in Agartala, in the Indian state of Tripura, Chief Minister Biplab Deb told the audience that the internet was invented “lakhs of years ago”, along with other advanced technology like satellites, and not by Western countries, but by ancient Indians. He argued that some of the events described in the Mahabharata couldn’t have been possible without this technologies, which, in his mind, is proof that they existed thousands of years ago.

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Police inspectors in Pilar, Argentina’s Buenos Aires province, were recently questioned about the disappearance of 540 kg of marijuana from the evidence room, and the best explanation they could come up with was that addicted rats ate it all.

It all started in April 2017, when Commissioner Emilio Portero relieved his partner Javier Specia, as head of the police department in Pilar, a town located 60 km from the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires. Protocol dictates that in the case of such a transfer of command, a sort of inventory of everything left in the hands of his successor by the officer who is transferred to another unit be signed. Although the inventory was allegedly conducted, it was never signed by Specia, which made Portero suspicious. He notified the Division of Internal Affairs of the Police, which in turn tasked the National Gendarmerie with conducting an official inventory.

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An 18-year-old male teen in China recently became a social media sensation after applying to the Women’s University in Beijing and admitting that one of the main reasons for that was to improve his chances of finding a girlfriend.

Due to a preference for boys during the time that the one-child population planning policy was enforced in China (1979 – 2015), the Asian country now has the world’s second most distorted sex ratio. In some of its provinces, there are as many as 130 boys for every 100 girls, and some specialists estimate that tens of millions of Chinese men will be unable to find a wife in the coming decades. Unable to deal with those odds, an 18-year-old teen decided to improve his chances of finding a female romantic partner by applying to a women’s college.

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You may want to check the expiration date the next time you’re out shopping for groceries. One Colorado family failed to do just that and ended up eating cereal from 1997.

On Monday, March 5th, the Carlese family, from Littleton, Colorado, bought a box of Quaker granola cereal, without knowing that they had actually picked up an edible relic that had expired way back in February of 1997. It wasn’t until Josiah and Anthea Carelse sat down for a serving of cereal that they realized something wasn’t right about it.

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Russian senator Valentina Petrenko’s political career stretches back to the days of the former Soviet Union, and she’s since held various senior official jobs, but the thing she is most known for is her hair. Already the subject of countless memes on Russian social media, Petrenko’s glorious hairdo recently went viral internationally, and people just can’t stop talking about it.

Speculation regarding Valentina Petrenko’s bizarre hairstyle has been running rampant on Twitter ever since Alex Bruce-Smith, an associate news editor at Pedestrian Daily, shared some photos of the Russian senator representing the Republic of Khakassia. There’s just so much people want to know about her hair. Is it real or a wig? How does she make it stay up like that? Is that where all the Russian top-secret information is hidden? Unfortunately, all anyone can do at this point is speculate, as the Russian politician doesn’t seem very eager to talk about it.

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A couple visiting Singapore had a somewhat unusual request for the hotel they had booked their stay at – to have a photo of actor Jeff Goldblum placed next to their bed. I don’t know how many hotels would take that sort of thing seriously, but the Mariott Tang Plaza, in Singapore, definitely does.

The hotel received the unusual request in an email confirming the couple’s arrival, and even though the staff didn’t use the specific image attached by the client, they made sure that the couple was satisfied when they entered their room. When the visitors finally arrived, they found not one but several photos of actor Jeff Goldblum, both in the room and even in the bathroom.

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Can you imagine going a whole month without taking a dump? One suspected drug dealer in Harlow, England has gone a record-breaking 34 days without passing stools for fear of providing police with evidence after allegedly swallowing drugs right before his arrest last month.

24-year-old Lamarr Chambers was arrested on January 17, after failing to stop his car when police put their lights on. Officers claim that during the chase, the suspect was “moving his head towards his hand and his hand towards his head as if he was eating something”, but when he finally pulled over, Chambers casually told them that he had been eating fried chicken. Police have reason to believe that he actually swallowed crack cocaine and heroin that he intended to sell around Harlow, so they have been holding him in custody and waiting for him to take a number two. But he simply refuses to do it.

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A woman from San Luis Potosí, Mexico came up with an ingenious way of notifying the man who allegedly got her pregnant and then cut off all contact, even blocking her on Facebook, that her pregnancy test came out positive.

Photos of a bizarre advertising billboard on top of a building between Mariano Jiménez Street and Salvador Nava Avenue, in San Luis Polosi, have been doing the rounds on social media over the last couple of weeks. It features the photo of a man in a cowboy hat, along with his full name and a very personal message from the woman who rented it – she’s pregnant and this was apparently the only way to let him know, as he had blocked both her phone number and her Facebook account.

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Guido Grolle, a lawyer from Dortmund, Germany, was recently forced to file complaint with the local police, because someone keeps sending him pizzas to his workplace. Over the past two and a half weeks, the man has received over 100 pizzas he never ordered, and he just wants the madness to stop.

By the time he gets out of the shower in the morning, Grolle sometimes receives several emails letting him know that the pizzas he ordered will be delivered to his office at lunch. On some days, you can actually see several pizza delivery guys crossing the street to bring the lawyer the lunch he never asked for. This has been going on since late January, and Grolle really has had enough of it.

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A woman traveling from Dongguan, in southern China, recently made international news headlines after climbing into a train station X-ray machine with her luggage, to make sure no one tried to steal it.

One of the millions of Chinese traveling home for the Lunar New Year holiday, the unnamed woman reportedly had a lot of money in her bag, so when staff at Dongguan East Railway Station told her that she needed to put into the X-ray machine for scanning, she got on all fours and went through the scanner herself, to make sure it didn’t get stolen.

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