K-pop culture has been gaining popularity across the globe, but in China it is considered a decadent trend that threatens to destroy the nation’s future. To combat this menace, a former schoolteacher has founded the Real Man Training Club, a children’s boot camp that promises to turn boys into alpha males.

The Beijing-based Real Man Training Club offers members a variety of activities meant to boost their masculinity, such as American football, wrestling and boxing, as well as character-building treks through deserts and mountains. Founder Tang Haiyan leads the boys in chest beating and slogan shouting to build up their confidence, and makes them wear headbands with the words ‘Real Man’. Even their shirts and tracksuits feature English phrases like ‘Anything is Possible’ or ‘Power Leader’. All this is meant to develop the boys’ macho character to fit Tang’s perception of manliness, and make them immune to the taint of K-pop culture.

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While most students can’t leave the class quick enough once the final bell rings, some art students in Japan stick around and pour their creativity into stunning blackboard artworks.

A few years back, Hirotaka Hamasaki, an art teacher and graphic designer from Nara, Japan, went viral for his incredibly detailed chalk drawings. From recreations of famous paintings to anime and cartoon-inspired pieces, his blackboard masterpieces captured the imaginations of millions around the world. But what many people didn’t know wasn’t the only one who specialized in blackboard art; in fact, there’s an actual blackboard art trend that has been sweeping Japanese schools for years now.

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The aptly-named Masterpiece Hospital in Bangkok, Thailand, recently went viral for offering a plastic surgery procedure that gives patients instant six-pack abs.

Despite what many gym-addicts will tell you, getting defined six-pack abs is really hard, and for some of us downright impossible. No matter how much we work out, we just can’t seem to get that layer of fat on our abdomen to go away, so those well-developed ab muscles remain concealed underneath. That’s where the plastic surgeons at Masterpiece Hospital come in. By performing a procedure called abdominal etching, they remove some of the fat on your abdomen to make that hidden six-pack visible. There are no plastic or silicone implants involved, just some abs-focused liposuction.

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Fasting for over a year sounds like the stuff of legends and many actually consider it an urban legend, but an old medical journal offers scientific proof that there once was a man who didn’t eat anything for 382 days and lived to tell the tale.

A case study published in the 1973 edition of the Postgraduate Medical Journal documents the unbelievable story of a 27-year-old “grossly obese” Scottish man who stopped eating for a total of 382 days in a desperate attempt to lose weight. He not survived the extreme challenge, but remained in good health and managed to go from 456 to 180 pounds (81 kilograms from 206 kilograms). According to doctors at the University of Dundee School of Medicine, the man’s weight remained stable at 196 pound (88 kilograms) five years after undergoing the unusually long fast.

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A Chinese man recently took a supermarket chain to court after allegedly being cheated out of 0.04 yuan ($0.008) because the checkout clerk rounded down the change he was owed.

The plaintiff, named only as Xiao, claimed that after shopping at a branch of Yonghui Superstores and offering 55 yuan ($8.16) for groceries worth 54.76 yuan ($8.12), he was given only 0.20 yuan as change instead of the 0.24 yuan he was owed. He didn’t really need the 0.04 yuan, but he considered the supermarket’s rounding off system to be cheating, so he decided to sue them and draw attention to the practice, hoping it would get fixed.

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A 45-year-old man from rural Kenya is being hailed a hero by his community after single-handedly digging a one-mile road through a bushy area in oly six days, using only rudimentary tools.

The people of Kaganda, a small village 80km north of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, had long been appealing to local government officials to start work on a short stretch of road that would shorten their daily trips to a nearby shopping center. Although the bushy area on which the road was supposed to be built had been earmarked by authorities, local leaders kept stalling the project. After a shorter footpath that Kaganda villagers used to get to the shopping center was fenced off because it passed through private property, the people were left with no option but to walk 4km every day. That’s when a local hero decided to take matters into his own hand and dig the much-awaited road himself, for free.

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Heavy metal and knitting doesn’t exactly sound like a match made in heaven, but that hasn’t stopped some truly creative minds in Finland from combining them in the world’s very first Heavy Metal Knitting Championship.

Finnish Marketing Agency Tovari teamed up with Joensuu City Cultural Services and the Joensuu Conservatory in order to bring together two of the most popular things in the northern European country. Heavy metal is really big in Finland, with over 50 heavy metal bands per 100,000 Finnish citizens (more than anywhere else in the world), and knitting not less so, as hundreds of thousands of people out of a population of around 5.5 million are practising some kind of needlework crafts. After brainstorming for the best way to combine the two, the creative minds behind this initiative came up with the World Heavy Metal Knitting Championship.

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Spilling coffee is never fun, but for German designer Stefan Kuhnigk it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. He turned that first coffee stain into a small monster and has been creating Coffee Monsters ever since.

Stefan recalls looking at the stain his cup of dark espresso left on a piece of paper and it looking back at him as if saying “Draw me, draw me, draw meeee!”. So he did just that, and create his very first Coffee Monster. The next day, he thought back on this little accident that had challenged him to get creative, and decided he could replicate the coffee spill every day as an exercise in creativity.

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A Filipino Catholic man playing the role of Jesus Christ in a yearly Good Friday reenactment of his crucifixion has been nailed to a wooden cross for the 33rd consecutive time last week.

58-year-old Ruben Enaje, from the barangay of San Pedro Cutud, in San Fernando City, has been volunteering to get nailed to a cross on Good Friday since the 80s, but recently announced that next year will be his last impersonating Jesus Christ. He is currently looking for a successor willing to have four-inch nails driven into his hands and feet and get lifted on a large wooden cross for about five minutes, every Good Friday. He also wants that person to be humble and not brag about their special role.

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A Chinese man was recently ordered to pay tens of thousands of dollars in compensation after his firecracker celebration killed over 10,000 of his neighbors’ rabbits to death.

This unusual tragedy occurred at the beginning of 2018, when a man named Cai Nan decided to celebrate the renovation of his home in Xuzhou, China’s Jiangsu Province, with a bang. He and the workers set up dozens of firecrackers on the roof of the house and reportedly fired them off for a period of 3 to 4 minutes. Cai never imagined that the loud bangs they made would affect the rabbits on his neighbors’ farm, let alone scare thousands of them to death.

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Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado is a world renowned social documentary photographer and photojournalist from Brazil, but few people know that he is also the mastermind behind one of the most amazing environment restoration projects in history. Together with his wife, Salgado has nearly completed the recovery of a single uninterrupted section of the Atlantic Forest, planting millions of saplings over the last two decades.

The story of Instituto Terra, the non-profit organization founded by Sebastião Salgado and his wife, Lélia Deluiz Wanick Salgado, began in 1998. The celebrated photographer had recently returned from Rwanda, where he had documented the tragedies of war. The horrors he witnessed during those troubled wars haunted him long after he left Africa, and at one point he completely lost both his faith in humanity and the desire to shoot photos. It was around this time that Sebastião’s parents offered him and Lélia the old farm he had grown up in, and he took the opportunity to return home thinking that the idyllic paradise he remembered would help him heal. However, he found that his home was nothing like he remembered it.

Salgado grew up on a 1,750-acre farm in the state of Minas Gerais 70 miles inland from Brazil’s Atlantic coast. He recalls that, when he was only a boy, the Atlantic Forest covered half his family’s farm and half the Rio Doce Valley, and that the fauna that called it home created a cacophony of sounds every day. But that wasn’t the sight he came home to in the mid 90’s.

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A Thai man recently checked the footage of a hidden camera he had installed in his bedroom and found out that his pet cat loves using his face as a bed when he’s out cold.

Lomphonten Lomphontan originally had the hidden camera set up so he could keep an eye on his pet cat, Achi, when he was at work. In January of this year, he decided to face the camera towards his bed at night, to monitor Achi’s behavior when he was out cold. To his surprise the feline, who loved nothing more than to curl up next to him all the time, became even more affectionate once he fell asleep. After climbing on his chest and pressing his paws on Lomphonten’s face to make sure he was asleep, Achi made himself comfortable on his master’s face, suffocating him (with love, of course).

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A team of Chinese cardboard modelling experts stole the show at this year’s Hobby Expo China (HEC) International Model Expo, in  Beijing, with a 1:1 cardboard replica of the Merkava MK4 Israeli battle tank.

Photos of this awe-inspiring masterpiece of cardboard modelling have been doing the rounds on Chinese social media for the last five days, drawing the admiration of millions in the Asian country. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be much information available online, except for the fact that it is a 1:1 model of the Merkava MK4 made out of over 5,000 cardboard parts and weighing around a ton.

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In a time when the cost of renting a home seems to be getting higher virtually everywhere in the civilized world, the residents of an idyllic housing complex in Germany are living in an inflation-free utopia. The people of Fuggerei, a walled district on the outskirts of Augsburg, pay only $1 a year on rent, the same as the first tenants who originally moved here nearly 500 years ago.

Fuggerei was founded in 1514 by an affluent businessman named Jakob Fugger, as a social housing complex for the poorest people of Augsburg. The Fugger family moved to the bustling German city in the mid-14th century and established a prosperous cloth trading business. By the 16th century, the Fugger family was one of the richest in Augsburg, and their operations expanded to real-estate and banking. Jakob Fugger was the wealthiest banker in the city, which earned him the nickname “Jakob Fugger the Rich”, but he stayed true to his family’s values, and in 1514 he started the construction of Fuggerei as a way of giving back to the community.

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Pattharapol and Lee Puengboonpra, a fashion-obsessed mother and son duo from Bangkok, Thailand, have achieved online and offline fame thanks to their impeccably stylish and perfectly coordinated outfits.

Six years ago, when Pattharapol “Peepy” Lee started posting photos of himself and his 60-something mother wearing flamboyant matching outfits on Instagram, he had no idea they’d soon become fashion influencers and online celebrities in their own right. A long-time fashion aficionado and former editor-in-chief of Hi! Magazine, he acted on a whim, and had no idea he’d one day have legions of fans showering him and “mother Lee” with compliments for their sense of fashion. The @peepy_and_mother_lee Instagram page now has around 130,000 followers from all over the world and the Thai pair are regarded by some in the fashion industry as the “world’s best mother and son style” duo.

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