A divorced Russian couple recently made headlines after they split their expensive mansion in half with a brick wall, which left the ex-wife unable to access the upper floors on her half because the stairway is on her former partner’s side.

After their divorce, Margareta Tsvitnenko, 45, and her former spouse, Sergei, were ordered to split the three-storey property in half. They have been in several legal battles since they decided to break up, in 2010, and the woman claims that Sergei has tried to force her and their 12-year-old disabled son out of the house several times, by disabling the heating system during winter time. But recently, he came up with a new, more effective way of causing her trouble. After the court approved his request to separate his side of the mansion with a wall, he quickly brought in a team of workers who bricked up all connecting doors and other access areas including the only staircase to the upper floors.

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If your special wish this Halloween is to have someone fall madly in love with you, making it a reality may be as easy as eating an apple. Not just any apple, mind you, but a special kind of love-granting apple sold by a magic shop in Japan.

The Poison Apples of Love’s Desire may look like ordinary fruit to the untrained eye, but they are actually enchanted apples imbued with the power to make the object of the buyer’s desire fall in love with them. They are sold by the Black Cat Magic Shop and come individually packaged in a beautiful black box which also contains instructions for an incantation that is supposed to enhance the magic power of the apples.

To take full advantage of the apple, buyers are instructed to first clean the apple and recite the included incantation while thinking about the person whose affection they so desperately crave. Then they, or this person must consume the apple, either raw or cooked as a pie or scone. Once that’s done with, all they have to do is wait for love to blossom.

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At first glance, Bella Devyatkina, from Moscow, Russia, is your typical carefree, playful four-year-old, but ask her a question in Russian, English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese or Arabic, and you will be shocked by her articulate response.

Bella made headlines in Russia a few days ago, when she appeared on a TV talent show, where she spoke seven different languages without a prominent accent, stunning both the judges and millions of viewers. Since then, a YouTube video of her performance went viral online, transforming the four-year-old polyglot into on overnight internet celebrity. She has since been invited to appear on a variety of television programs where moderators and other guests conversed with her in several of the seven languages she is fluent in, and she always understood their questions and answered accordingly.

So how does a four-year-old girl learn so many languages in such a short period of time, when most people spend years struggling to become fluent in just one foreign language. Bella’s mother, Yulia, said that she and her father started teaching her English when she was just two years old, and after noticing her interest in the language and the ease with which she picked up everything, they decided to gradually adding more languages to her schedule. They hired native tutors for each new language, and by the time she was three and a half years old, she was already speaking two languages. She mastered two more, in the next six months.

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Dogs, and sometimes cats, have long been used as support animals to help humans deal with a wide range of physical and psychiatric conditions, but ducks, not so much. That’s what makes Daniel Turducken Stinkbottom, the internet’s latest sweetheart, so darn special.

Daniel made international headlines a couple of days ago, after photos of him accompanying his human on an airplane were posted on Twitter and quickly went viral. It’s not every day that you get to see a duck on an airplane, especially one that’s wearing adorable red shoes and a Captain America diaper. So it’s no surprise that he caught people’s eye  – both those on the plane and millions others looking at his photos online. Mark Essig, the man’s whose photos of Daniel got the most attention, says that everyone on the plane was delighted to have a duck on board, and couldn’t stop snapping photos of him. And who could blame them, the little guys is simply too cute!

But it turns out there is more to Daniel than a pretty little head and a funny set of accessories. He is a support animal for his owner, Carla Fitzgerald, who is recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Fitzgerald adopted Daniel in 2012, when he was two days old, as a pet, but being involved in a terrible accident just a year later, he became her support animal. She was a horse-and-carriage driver in Milwaukee, when a driver texting behind the wheel crashed into her carriage from behind, injuring the horse and throwing her a metal-grated drawbridge.

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The aptly-named SkunkLock is an ingenious bicycle lock that blasts would-be thieves with a disgusting cocktails of chemicals that most of the time causes them to vomit uncontrollably.

When San Francisco-based Daniel Idzkowski learned that over 1.5 million bikes are being stolen across the United States, every year, he decided it was up to him to come up with a more efficient means of theft prevention. After six months of work, he came up with the SkunkLock, a hollow steel U-lock system which houses presurized noxious chemical deterrent that’s even detectable through some of the most advanced gas masks. The proprietary formula, known as D_1, was developed by Idzkowski and his partner Yves Perrenoud, and is perfectly legal.

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Every year, in the second week of October, millions of Roman-Catholic devotees from all over Brazil descend on the city of Belem to attend Cirio de Nazaré, the country’s largest religious festival, and to touch a 400-meter-long piece of rope believed to have the power to heal the sick.

Cirio de Nazaré has been celebrated intermittently in Brazil since 1793. The event revolves around a small statue of Nossa Senhora de Nazaré (Our Lady of Nazareth), an artifact supposedly sculpted in Nazareth that is believed to have performed miracles in medieval Portugal, before being lost in Brazil. Legend has it that a cattleman found it in a canal during the 1700’s, but every time he took it out of the water, it would disappear, only to be found again in the original place it was discovered. The people of Belem believed that it was Our Lady’s wish to remain there, so they built a church there, which would later become today’s Nazaré Basilica.

The celebration lasts two weeks, but the climax of the event is on the first Sunday, when the small statue is taken from the city’s Catedral da Sé to the Nazaré Basilica, on a flower-bedecked carriage pulled by thousands of devotees. The night before the procession about 15.000 devotees queue in front of the cathedral to secure a place near the 400-meter-long piece of rope used to pull the carriage through the city. Men and women align on two separate lines, and by 10 a.m. on Sunday, the human density around the rope reaches an incredible 10 people per meter.

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A brand new iPhone 7 costs as much as four and a half average salaries in Ukraine, but a local retailer is giving Apple fans the chance to get one for free, by simply changing their names to “iPhone Seven”.

Allo.ua, Ukraine’s largest mobile phone retailer, is currently running a very unusual iPhone 7 giveaway. The company is asking people to legally change their first name to ‘iPhone’ and their last name to ‘Seven’ for the chance to win Apple’s latest handheld. Participants must first visit their State Registry of Civil Status Acts and fill out an application to officially change their name. Once their new ID is issued, they have to take a selfie with it and send the photo to Allo.ua as confirmation of the name change. If they are among the first five people to have successfully changed their name to ‘iPhone Seven’, they qualify to receive an actual 32GB iPhone 7, and will be invited to visit by an Allo store, show their official ID, and pick up their prize.

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Swiss premium writing tool company Maison Caran d’Ache and luxury watchmaker MB&F recently teamed up to create a limited-edition fountain pen that’s shaped like a rocket ship and comes in a launch pad box. Considering the theme, the astronomical price of $19,900 is actually not that much of a surprise.

The Astrograph fountain pen is reportedly the most complex writing tool ever designed in the Caran d’Ache workshops. The companies involved in the project said that it was a massive technical challenge that required four years to develop the concept, plus an extra 12 months to come up with a functional final version. It contains no less than 99 innovative components created specifically for its design, and every unit requires over 500 manual operations to manufacture.

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It sounds like one of those funny news articles you read on sites like The Onion, but this one is sadly true. A man from the United Arab Emirates divorced his young wife just days after their wedding, after seeing her makeup free for the first time.

The bizarre news was reported by psychologist Dr Abdul Aziz Asaf, who claims that the 28-year-old woman contacted his clinic to help her overcome the psychological suffering caused by the swift and unexpected divorce. Asaf did not reveal the woman’s identity for reasons of confidentiality, but told Gulf News that she had been engaged to a 34-year-old man for six months, before marrying him. Apparently, he had never seen her without makeup during all that time, because the first time he did, he hardly recognized her. The man accused Asaf’s patient of deceiving him by wearing so many cosmetics, including fake eyelashes, and not looking as pretty as before the wedding.

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An Israeli entrepreneur who has spent a year designing a product that would make him rich, saw his dreams collapse after putting his product on Kickstarer to raise some extra production funding. Just seven days after the start of the crowdfunding campaign, copycats were already available on Chinese online stores like Alibaba.

With the popularity of selfies growing to epic proportions in the last few years, Yekutiel Sherman felt the infectious trend provided a lucrative business opportunity, so a couple of years ago he started working on an alternative to the common selfie stick. By December 2015, he had created prototypes of his innovative Stickbox – a smartphone case that doubled as a selfie stick – secured some funds from his family and even shot a promotional video of two lovers using the Stickbox to get a selfie with the Eiffel Tower. Everything was going according to plan, but that was until he launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for $40,000.

Just one week after starting the Kickstarter campaign, exact replicas of the Stickbox had appeared on Chinese e-commerce giants like Alibaba, at a fraction of the price set by Sherman. It turns out that even before he had had a chance to look for a factory to mass-produce his product, Chinese manufacturers had stolen his idea from Kickstarter and replicated it in record time. He had become a victim of China’s lightning-fast copycats, and there wasn’t much he could do about it at this point.

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In an attempt to create a special snack to go with their high quality beer, Sweetish brewery St. Erik’s has created the world’s most expensive potato chips.

Apparently, St. Erik’s didn’t think Lays or Pringles chips were good enough to pair with their ale, so they decided to create their own exclusive snack and price it accordingly. “St. Erik’s Brewery is one of Sweden’s leading microbreweries and we’re passionate about the craftsmanship that goes into our beer. At the same time, we felt that we were missing a snack of the same status to serve with it,” brand manager Marcus Friari said in a statement. “A first-­class beer deserves a first-­class snack, and this is why we made a major effort to produce the world’s most exclusive potato chips. We’re incredibly proud to be able to present such a crispy outcome.”

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Mohammed Bello Abubakar is one of the most controversial figures in Nigeria. Despite having no discernible income, the 92-year-old man somehow convinced 107 women to marry him throughout his life, 97 of which are still his wives. He claims that marrying as many women as possible is a divine assignment he has received from God.

Mr Bello first shot to fame in 2008, when a series of articles revealed that he had 86 wives and around 150 children, either living with him on his compound in Bida, Niger state, or in his house in Lagos. Muslim clerics accused him of breaking religious rules, which most scholars agree allow a man to marry up to four women, as long as he can provide for all of them and treat them equally. He was given a very simple choice, either divorce 82 of his wives or face the consequences. He refused, arguing that there was no punishment stated in the Koran for having more than four wives, and that every man should be free to marry as many women as he can support. He was arrested at the request of the local Shariah Court, but subsequently released, on the condition that he only keep four of his wives.

Not only did the ‘superpolygamist’ ignore this requirement, but he has since married other women as well. In total, he married 107 women so far, divorced 10 of them, which brings the total wife count to a whopping 97. And despite his ripe old age, Abubakar says he plans on marrying even more. “What I am doing is divine. It is an assignment and I will keep doing it till the end,” he told Nigerian  newspaper Vanguard.

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An IKEA store in Shanghai, China claims it has been forced to enforce special rules in order to keep elderly freeloaders from virtually taking over the place for hours at a time and engaging in blind dating sessions.

IKEA is very popular in China. Some people love the furniture mega-stores so much that they spend whole days in them without buying a single item. A few years ago we reported on a bizarre trend that involved people simply coming to IKEA and sleeping on the comfortable beds and sofas on display for hours, or just walking around and enjoying the free air conditioning. This kind of thing has been going on in China for the past 15 years, since the chain arrived in the Asian country, and it’s still very popular today. But it’s apparently not the only problem the Swedish retailer has been facing. Recently, an IKEA store in Shanghai has been dealing with a large group of elderly people that frequently spends hours in its popular cafe without buying anything.

Chinese media reports that dozens sometimes hundreds of elderly men and women meet up at the IKEA cafe in Shanghai every week, for long blind-dating sessions. They stay there for hours without buying any foods or drinks, and act like they own the place. According to a notice board put up by the Shanghai store, the group has been seriously affecting the cafe’s operations with their “uncivilized behavior”. Among the cited offences, the notice mentions “taking up seats for long hours, bringing outside food and tea, speaking loudly, spitting, and having quarrels and fights.”

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According to a recently published medical report, a 47-year-old American man who ate a burger smothered in Ghost Pepper puree ended up with a large hole in his esophagus.

The report published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine mentions that the unnamed man ate ‘ghost peppers’, also known as Bhut jolokia, in puree form, smothered on top of a burger, part of an eating contest. Soon after finishing the scorching hot meal, he began to experience violent retching and vomiting, as well as severe abdominal and chest pain. As these symptoms kept getting worse, the man called emergency responders, who took him to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with Boerhaave syndrome, or spontaneous esophageal rupture.

An abdomen and pelvic scan revealed a build up of air, fluid and food inside the man’s body, so doctors decided to perform emergency surgery. They discovered a 2.5cm tear in the left side of his throat and had to insert a tube into the rupture to aid his breathing. The tube remained in place for two weeks, while the man’s wound healed. He ended up spending another nine days in the hospital, before being discharged with a feeding tube in place.

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Having to decide between saving your unborn child or your brother is a choice no person should ever have to make, but it’s exactly what a young Chinese woman recently went through. Her touching story has been doing the rounds online, leaving millions of people wondering what they would have done in her place.

24-year-old Yang Li, from Hangzhou City, was already three months pregnant when she received news that her brother, Yang Jun, 29, was going to die unless he received a bone marrow transplant. He had been diagnosed with lymphoma in September 2015, and had since undergone 5 chemotherapy sessions, 18 radiotherapy sessions as well as an autologous bone marrow transplant. The treatment was deemed a success, but in July of this year, an examination revealed the recurrence of the lymphoma. Doctors told Jun that his only chance of survival was a hematopoietic stem cell transplant, and that his sister was a perfect match.

Having to break the news to his little sister, knowing she was pregnant, was the hardest thing Jun ever had to do. But at the same time, he thought about his own 7-year-old daughter who would otherwise have to grow up without a father, and about his wife. With tears in his eyes, he told Li that she was his last chance.

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