A 21-year-old student from Taizhou, China, managed to extort over 60 different hotels for free stays and financial compensation by creating fake hygiene problems and promising to take actions against them.

Jiang, a resident of Taizhou City, in China’s Zhejiang Province, came up with a particularly gross way of funding his traveling habit when he became short on funds. In September of last year, after deciding to put off university enrollment in favor of using the tuition to travel around China, the 21-year-old man quickly saw his funds diminish, which forced him to come up with an alternative way of covering his expenses. After analyzing his expenditures, Jiang realized that hotels were particularly hard on his wallet, so he came up with a creatively devious way of blackmailing hotel staff into giving him accommodation for free.

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China’s Guangzhou Zoo Has come under fire after videos of a shockingly thin crocodile housed there went viral online.

Photos and videos of a crocodile so skinny that you can literally see its spine and count its ribs have been doing the rounds on Chinese social media and sparking a heated debate around the treatment of animals. Reportedly located at Guangzhou Zoo, the reptile looks more like a fossil than a living animal, but one clip shows it moving slowly in its enclosure. The person who shot the video and posted it online expressed concern for the crocodile and many have accused the zoo of animal cruelty for either starving it or just ignoring its condition.

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A 22-year-old man spent three days trapped at the bottom of a 12-meter-deep well because villagers who heard his cries for help thought he was a wailing ghost and wouldn’t approach the well.

It’s unclear what Liu Chuanyi, a young Chinese national, was doing in the forest on the border between Thailand and Myanmar, but he somehow fell into an abandoned well on the outskirts of a small village. Authorities believe he was trekking through the woods when he fell into the 12-meter-deep hole, sustaining serious injuries, like a fractured wrist and cerebral concussion. At first, he started shouting for help as loudly as he could, but as the hours passed, he realized he would exhaust himself quickly and diminish his chances of being rescued. He was right, he spent the next three days and three nights at the bottom of the well, with no food or water, and had he not saved his energy, he would have probably died there.

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The whole of Thailand was shaken by the death of a young singer as a result of getting a neck-twisting massage that left her with a herniated spine disk in her neck.

Doctors in Thailand started issuing warnings against getting neck-twisting massages after the tragic death of Phing Chyada, a young woman from Udon Thani who reportedly died from complications related to neck massage sessions she underwent at a studio in her home city. According to Chyada’s mother, she started experiencing shoulder pain a couple of months ago, and instead of going to a hospital, she opted to visit a local massage studio. She had always loved massages, so she thought it would be a good way to relieve pain. Only two days after the neck-twisting massage session, the young woman started feeling pain in her neck as well, and things only got worse from there.

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A Japanese man was recently admitted to trespassing onto other people’s properties over 1,000 times as a hobby because he found it thrilling and exhilarating.

A couple of weeks ago, Fukuoka Prefectural Police arrested a 37-year-old man on suspicion of trespassing onto a couple’s property in the city of Daizafu. Little did the police know that this had hardly been an isolated incident and the man was a serial trespasser who had done it countless times for his personal enjoyment. During questioning, the man, identified as Yuta Sugawara, not only admitted to trespassing onto the couple’s property when he thought they were away but casually told investigators that this was a hobby of his and that he had trespassed onto other people’s properties over 1,000 times. Sugawara was apprehended by the victims of his latest trespassing attempt, who saw him on their land and chased after him when he ran. The man managed to immobilize the culprit while his wife called the police.

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Viral videos shared on Chinese social media show human law enforcement patrolling the streets alongside AI-powered spherical robots capable of detecting and stopping crime.

A couple of months ago, Chinese robotics company Logon Technology unveiled the RT-G  autonomous spherical robot, a “technological breakthrough” designed to assist and even replace humans in dangerous environments and situations. Capable of operating both on land and in water, the spherical robot can allegedly reach speeds of up to 35km/h and withstand impact damage of up to 4 tons. In a promotional video, the RT-G can be seen operating in water, rough terrain, and mud, but what really caught people’s attention was its urban use, that of a sort of patrol robot capable of identifying criminals and immobilizing them thanks to its suites of advanced AI-powered software. It all seemed like a marketing stunt, but less than two months since the clip went viral, RT-G robots have been spotted patrolling alongside human law enforcement.

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Nigel Richards, a 57-year-old New Zealand scrabble phenom, recently won the 2024 Spanish-Language Scrabble World Championship despite not speaking the language at all.

It’s been almost a decade since we first wrote about the talented Mr. Nigel Richards; He had just won the 2015 French-Language Scrabble Championship despite being completely unable to have a conversation in French. It was a remarkable feat that made international news headlines at the time. Richards was already known as the world’s best scrabble player and had earned nicknames like ‘the Tiger Woods of Scrabble,’ but this was completely unheard of. A person who didn’t speak French at all had run through the world’s best French-speaking Scrabble players to earn the title of world champion. Some thought it was a fluke, but Nigel has repeated the feat since, and he recently proved he could do it in other languages he didn’t speak.

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Gerardo Pontiérr is an innovative Mexican artist who uses thousands of individual LEGO bricks to create incredible works of art, including detailed human portraits.

Gerardo Pontiérr has been using LEGO for as long as he can remember. He first started playing with the colorful plastic bricks when he was only two years old and developed such a passion for it that by age 10 he was already a World Champion LEGO Builder. His interest and love for the Danish-invented building system only grew with age, allowing him to use LEGO to create some truly incredible things. Pontiérr may not be the first to use LEGO as an artistic medium, but he can be credited for taking LEGO art to a whole new level of mastery.

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Sister Anna Donelli, a respected nurse from northern Italy, was recently arrested under suspicion of having colluded with a powerful clan of the ‘Ndragheta mafia family.

The arrest of 57-year-old Anna Donelli, a respected nun and recent recipient of the Golden Panettone, an annual Milanese civic award, for her volunteer work in prisons and in the troubled outskirts of cities like Milan, Rome and Brescia, came as a shock for the whole of Italy. On Thursday, Sister Anna and 24 other people were arrested following an investigation into the activities of the ‘Ndragheta in Brescia, with authorities claiming they had strong reasons to believe the nun had been working with the mafia crime family for a long time. As part of her work in several prisons where ‘Ndragheta members were being held, the nun is suspected of facilitating communication between prisoners and the clan’s leaders and solving conflicts and disputes between inmates.

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A Chinese man bored with his daily life recently got detained for posting a “wanted order” in his name on social media and bragging about the countless crimes he had allegedly committed.

Can you imagine being so bored that you start posting made-up crimes online and posting as a criminal mastermind, hoping to get some kind of attention? That’s exactly what a man from northern China did last month, taking to social media to spread lies about himself, including that he had recently extorted 30 million yuan ($4million) from a company, that he owned a firearm and ammunition, and challenging people to find him if they wanted a 30,000 yuan ($4,000) reward. His post went viral, but it also caught the attention of Chinese law enforcement monitoring social media, and he ended up behind bars for his unusual stunt.

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Death Clock is an innovative app that uses artificial intelligence to accurately predict a person’s life expectancy based on a number of factors like diet, exercise level and sleeping habits.

We’re all going to die someday, but wouldn’t it be nice to have an idea of when that will be? Many people would probably answer ‘no,’ but for those curious when their demise will occur, there’s Death Clock. Launched in July, this AI-powered app uses a dataset of over 1,200 life expectancy studies and 53 million participants to provide personalized death predictions to its users. It’s a dark premise, to be sure, but financial planners have been paying a lot of attention to Death Clock because of its potential to motivate people to more carefully plan their finances for retirement.

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An Argentinian man was wrongfully imprisoned after police mistook 18 containers of talcum powder for cocaine and it took three weeks to analyze the true nature of the substance.

In early October, Maximiliano Acosta got on a bus in the town of Mendoza towards the capital, Buenos Aires. Shortly after, the bus was stopped in La Paz for what was supposed to be a routine check by a team of gendarmes. Upon checking the passengers’ baggage, the gendarmes discovered that Acosta had 18 containers of talcum powder and questioned him about it. Despite the man’s explanation that the containers actually contained talcum powder for personal use, the gendarmes detained him on suspicion of drug possession. The tests that followed the arrest, allegedly showed that the 18 containers were full of cocaine, and Maximiliano was put behind bars without so much as alerting his family about his situation.

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Shikoku Bank’s leadership has come up with a bizarre way of reassuring clients of its commitment – promising to pay with their lives if found guilty of ‘financial irregularities’.

Banking executives are always held to high ethical standards, considering that they handle the wealth of thousands, sometimes millions of people, but while they face serious punishment in case of fraud or embezzlement, they aren’t quite expected to pay with their lives. That is not the case with the management of Shikoku Bank, a financial institution whose top 23 executives, including President Miura, signed a blood oath requiring them to commit seppuku if found guilty of engaging in financial irregularities, embezzlement or other fraudulent activities. Rooted in the code of honor of Japan’s samurai era, the bizarre pledge posted on Shikoku Bank’s website went viral sparking reactions varying from admiration to disbelief.

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Chinese robotics company Robot Era recently unveiled Star1, the world’s fastest bipedal robot capable of reaching and maintaining speeds of up to 8 mph (12.98 km/h).

Photos and videos of a sneaker-wearing robot running through the Gobi Desert went viral on Chinese social media last month, inspiring all sorts of humorous comments from the public, but few people realized they were watching the world’s fastest humanoid robot in action. Developed by Robot Era, a Chinese robotics company, STAR1 is powered by high-torque motors and AI algorithms and can tackle all sorts of surfaces and environments, including sand and grassland. Its advanced motors help the robot move efficiently, while high-speed sensors and communication modules let it process information about its surroundings in real-time, but what really helps put it above other bipedal robots in terms of speed is old-fashioned human footwear.

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A 26-year-old South Korean man was recently sentenced to one year in prison for deliberately binge eating in order to become obese and be declared unfit for mandatory military service.

Military service is no trivial matter in South Korea. It doesn’t matter if you’re a globally-known singer, a successful actor, or a billionaire; if you’re a healthy adult male between the ages of 18 and 35, you have to spend at least 21 months in the army. The most you can do is postpone the compulsory service, but you’ll have to go through it at some point. However, if you are declared unfit for service because of health issues, you’re off the hook. One young South Korean man allegedly tried to avoid serving in the military by binge eating and becoming obese. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out quite as he had planned and he now has to spend a year behind bars.

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