Fed up with people constantly neglecting self-isolation and quarantine rules, a local politician on Indonesia’s Java Island decided to lock rule breakers in a haunted house to set an example for others.

Kusdinar Untung Yuni Sukowati, the head of Sragen regency came up with the idea of taping into the locals’ fear of ghosts as a way to deal with an influx of newcomers in the area. Because of lockdowns in the capital Jakarta and other major cities, Sragen has started seeing quite a lot of people coming in, many of whom completely disregard the rule to self-isolate themselves for 14 days, in case they are infected with the novel coronavirus. To make sure people started respecting the rules, Kusdinar started putting offenders in abandoned houses locals believe are haunted.

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The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Tasmania, Australia, isn’t the only museum to have shut its gates because of the Covid-19 pandemic, but it stands out because of its unique, human artwork.

As hard as it is to believe, Tim is both a man and an artwork. A former tattoo parlor owner from Zurich, in Switzerland, he agreed to have his back tattooed by artist Belgian artist Wim Delvoye in 2006, and has been exhibiting his body art in museums and art galleries ever since. He has been coming to MONA since 2011, for stints that can last up to six months at a time and see him sitting with his legs crossed on a plinth, in complete silence, showing off Delvoye’s artwork. And even though MONA closed down on March 18, he continues to sit in the empty museum for six hours a day. That is his job…

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A 22-year-old Chinese woman who suffered from a persistent cough was shocked to learn that she had a piece of chicken bone lodged in her lung.

After 14 years of checkups and X-rays to figure out what had been causing her persistent coughing for the last 14 years, a 22-year-old unnamed woman from China recently learned that it had all been caused by a chicken bone. The woman’s problems started after she suffered a serious coughing fit when she was seven or eight years old, and despite numerous hospital visits, no one could spot any anomalies that might be causing her uncontrollable coughing.

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Prickles, a bare-faced merino sheep that ran away from a Tasmanian farm during the 2013 bush-fires, recently returned home, probably after deciding that it was finally time for a sheer.

According to farmer Alice Gray, Prickles was only a lamb when she ran away, seven years ago. The bush fires that ravaged the area back then destroyed a large chunk of her family’s massive property, and the young sheep got stuck in a 200-acre bush block at the back, unable to return after they rebuilt about 50km of fencing. They had spotted her a few times, and even recorded footage of her with surveillance cameras installed to monitor deer activity, so they knew she was alive, but they didn’t expect her to ever return on the farm. They were wrong.

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If you thought America was the only country where a bogus religion like Scientology could thrive, you were wrong. Japan has its own version, it’s called Happy Science, and it apparently offers spiritual Covid-19 cures, for a fee, of course.

Happy Science is the creation of a Wall Street trader turned spiritual leader named Ryuho Okawa, who during the 1990s came to believe that he was in contact with religious figures like Buddha and Jesus. They apparently told Okawa that like them and others throughout human history, he was the reincarnation of a creator god from Venus named El Cantare and had been chosen to save the world from ruin. He wrote a couple of popular books on metaphysical subjects, entitled  “The Terrifying Revelations of Nostradamus” and “The Great Warnings of Allah,” and before he knew it, the former trader had a sizeable following.

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Chinese media recently reported the case of two doctors who got infected with the novel coronavirus while treating patients and suffered a drastic change in skin pigmentation, going from white to dark brown.

Dr. Yi Fan and Dr. Hu Weifeng, both 42, became infected with the coronavirus in January, while treating patients at the Wuhan Central Hospital. They were colleagues of Dr. Li Wenliang, the late whistle-blower who first sounded the alarm about the dangerous new virus and was originally reprimanded by the Chinese Government. They both would have shared his tragic fate too, if not for the valiant efforts of their fellow doctors to keep them alive. The two doctors spent more than a month on life-support and only regained consciousness this month, when they also learned that their appearances had changed drastically…

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Johannes Stötter is a world-renowned body-painter whose artworks are so incredibly realistic most people would never guess they are actually made up of people contorted in just the right positions and photographed from the right angle.

We originally featured the magical body-paintings of Johannes Stötter back in 2014, when he made international news headlines with a mind-blowing project where he turned two of his models into almost perfect Ara macaws. sitting on a branch. He has been keeping busy since then, coming up with all sorts of stunning compositions, from a near-perfect frog made up of several painted human models, to a single person posing as perfectly-detailed butterfly sitting on a sunflower. But, as always, even knowing the secret of Stötter’s art, you still have to squint to make out the people hidden in the artworks.

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A California woman is being praised for going above and beyond to ensure that a cracked duck egg she found in a park hatched, by incubating it in her bra for over a month.

Betsy Ross, an independent contractor from Visalia, California, was walking with her family in a public park when her kids noticed that someone had maliciously smashed up all the duck nests that were there. Miraculously, one of the duck eggs had survived the massacre with only a small crack. It wasn’t leaking, so the kids begged her to save it and try to help it hatch. She had never hatched and egg before, and she didn’t think she could save it, but the children were already upset because of the nests, so she said yes. That was the start of a remarkable journey that saw the young mother of three carrying a duck egg with her everywhere she went for 35 days.

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An Indonesian fashion designer/Instagram ‘rich kid’ recently found himself at the center of an online controversy because of a fashion handbag he allegedly created from alligator tongues and an “ethically sourced” human spine.

Arnold Putra originally showcased the controversial fashion accessory on his Instagram account back in 2016, but it went relatively unnoticed until a a few days ago when a tweet about it went viral, sending thousands of people flocking to the young designer’s Instagram, to check if the bag is real. Scroll down Putra’s page to content from 2016 and, low and behold, the creepy bag shows up complete with a description that reads “alligator tongue and human osteoporosis spine bag by me”. Obviously, people started asking questions…

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A very popular video content creator from South Korea has come under fire for making “horrifying” videos of herself feasting on live seafood like octopus, squid and prawn.

Ssoyoung is a popular youtuber whose content can be described as a mix of ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) and ‘mukbang’ (online videos in which a host consumes large quantities of food while interacting with an audience). So she basically records herself eating all sorts of stuff and using high fidelity audio equipment to enhance the sound of her chewing for her viewers’ pleasure. Ssoyoung has been sparking controversy online through her edgy videos for a long time, but a series of videos of her eating live seafood and enjoying every minute of it has really made the criticism wave rise recently.

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Honey, dubbed by activists and animal lovers ‘the world’s loneliest dolphin’, died last month, after almost two years spent by herself in a small pool at an abandoned aquarium in Japan.

We originally featured Honey’s tragic story back in October 2018, when footage shot by Japanese animal rights activists showing a single bottlenose dolphin floating in what appeared like an abandoned pool went viral online. It turned out that the video had been shot with a drone at the Inubosaki Marine Park Aquarium in Choshi, Chiba Prefecture, months after it had closed down. The dolphin, named Honey, and some penguins had remained behind and were being fed by an employee every few days. Still, the dolphin suffered from skin burns under the hot summer sun, as well as stress and loneliness. The story made international headlines at the time, but that did nothing to change Honey’s fate. After almost two years spent in that pool alone, she died last month…

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A Vietnamese social media influencer and minor TV personality claims to has suffered severe muscle atrophy in one of her legs after getting filler injections to remove mosquito bite marks.

Instagram “hot girl” Mai Sương recently took to the internet to denounce a beauty salon for having caused her serious harm by injecting Botox filler into her leg to supposedly help remove bruise-like mosquito bites. The young influencer told her Instagram followers that she had started noticing the skin color changing to blue, then concave gaps forming around the injected mosquito bite mark, and finally one of the legs becoming weaker than the other. Concerned about her health, Mai went to the hospital and was shocked to learn that she was suffering from severe muscle atrophy because of the filler injections.

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Joe Bagley, a 20-year-old self-confessed “jungle boy”, has turned his one-bedroom apartment in Loughborough, UK, into an indoor jungle with over 1,400 potted plants.

From cacti and succulents to tropical flowers and vines, you can find all sorts of plants growing in Joe Bagley’s home. They are everywhere, on the dining table, on bookshelves, even in the bathroom, pretty much wherever there is any spare space that hasn’t been occupied by something else. There isn’t that much space available, s cramming 1,400 potted plants into it has made it look like a sort of indoor urban jungle. As you can imagine, looking after so many houseplants takes a bit of time, and Joe admits that he spends most of his free time watering them and making sure they are healthy.

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As countries around the world struggle to come up with ways of keeping people from going outside and slow down the spread of the novel coronavirus, Indonesian settlements are trying an unconventional solution – volunteer ghosts.

In Kepuh village, Central Java, people brave enough to venture outside their homes at night risk coming face to face with ‘pocong’ or shrouded ghosts, legendary figures believed to be represent the souls of dead people trapped in their funeral shrouds. The pocong monitor guests coming into the village and make sure that residents stay indoors as much as possible, to prevent them from spreading the potentially deadly coronavirus. Quite unusual for ghosts known as scary and creepy in Indonesian folklore, but then again, these aren’t your usual pocong.

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Liz Y Ahmet is a self-taught artist who uses a seemingly messy technique to create incredibly detailed and expressive female portraits.

A ‘scribble’ is usually defined as “a piece of writing or a drawing that is done quickly or carelessly”, but that certainly doesn’t apply to Liz Y Ahmet’s work. While her style certainly looks very similar to scribbling, it’s not done quickly and it certainly isn’t careless. The talented artist’s technique is intentionally messy so as to “portray the chaos of emotions that are hidden beneath” her characters’ mask-like visage.

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