An Irish financial manager for Ireland’s national railway network claims that he gets paid almost $130,000 (€108,000) a year to eat lunch and read newspapers all day.

Getting paid to essentially do nothing doesn’t sound like something most people would complain about, but for Dermot Alastair Mills, an employee at Irish Rail, it’s discrimination. The financial manager claims that after turning whistleblower about the company’s accounting in 2014, he was gradually relieved of virtually all of his duties, to the point where he now spends most of his days eating lunch and reading newspapers. Despite all this, he still cashes his regular paycheck every month.

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If you’re the kind of person who likes to show off their wealth, head over to Art Basel Miami Beach and use their unique ATM machine to have your account balance featured on its leaderboard for everyone to see.

Developed by New York-based art collective MSCHF in collaboration with Perrotin Gallery, ATM Leaderboard is an artistic project inspired that, just as its name suggests, displays the cash balances of anyone who uses it like the high scores of a classic arcade game, depending on the size of their bank accounts. It was inspired by the wealth-flaunting trends of modern influencers who use their apparent wealth for fame and social media followers.

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‘I Am Jesus Christ’, a controversial video game that literally lets you play as the Messiah, from His birth to His crucifixion and subsequent resurrection, recently became playable on Steam.

We wrote about I Am Jesus Christ in 2019, back when it was first announced by indie developer SimulaM. The premise of the game was as bold as its title suggested – it put players in the shoes of the Son of God, from his birth to his resurrection, allowing them to perform all sorts of biblical miracles, meet Jesus’ disciples and other characters, and even battle Satan. It got a lot of people talking, either out of excitement or outrage, but apart from some pre-rendered content and a short teaser, we didn’t get anything for the next three years. Well, the wait is over, thanks to a playable prologue of I Am Jesus that recently became available on Steam.

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A Chinese woman recently sparked controversy online after claiming that she has spent the last 12 years of her life trying to raise enough money to ensure that her brother finds a bride.

It’s no secret that securing a bride in China is harder than in most other countries. One of the unexpected effects of the Asian country’s notorious one-child policy was gender inequality. For decades, many couples, especially in rural regions, aimed for boys, turning to sex-selective abortion and even infanticide to make sure that their only child was a boy. Males were strong enough to work and more likely to be successful enough to look after their elderly parents later on in life. Only that created a serious gender inequality in China, with more bachelors for every single woman, which makes it very difficult for men to secure a bride. So in some cases, their families offer them financial support, to increase their chances of finding a suitable bride.

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Epiphyllum Oxypetalum is a popular species of cactus famous for producing large, fragrant, white flowers only one night per year.

‘Queen of the Night’ is only a nickname, but one that fits Epiphyllum Oxypetalum perfectly. Unlike the several species commonly referred to as Night-Blooming Cereus which also bloom at night time, producing large, fragrant flowers over several weeks, Epiphyllum Oxypetalum only blooms one night a year, for a couple of hours, with its large, waxy flowers withering before sunrise. The bloom of a Queen of the Night is a rare event, one that draws crowds of flower enthusiasts to the jungles of Mexico, Central America and the Antilles for a chance to witness it in person.

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A Chinese woman required emergency surgery to have half of her kidney removed after a rough weight loss massage session.

The 41-year-old woman referred to only as Ms. Miao (a pseudonym) reportedly wanted to lose some weight with help of massage, so she went to a salon in Hangzhou, China’s Zhejiang province for a session. Midway through the special weight loss massage, the woman could barely stand the pain in her abdomen, but when she told the masseuse about it, she said that it was just the fat leaving her body. That apparently reassured Ms. Miao and she gritted her teeth through the rest of the session, but the pain in her abdomen only got worse after she got home.

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Hemgenix, a single-dose cure for a form of the blood-clotting disorder hemophilia, recently set a new world record for the most expensive drug ever at a whopping $3.5 million per dose.

On Tuesday, The US Food and Drug Administration approved Hemgenix, a cutting-edge gene therapy designed to treat adults with hemophilia B, a serious genetic disorder in which people do not produce a critical protein needed to clot blood in case of bleeding. Until now, typical treatments required routine injections to maintain sufficient levels of the missing protein in patients, but thanks to Hemgenix, sufferers of hemophilia B require a single IV infusion to be cured forever. The only problem is that that single dose costs no less than $3.5 million, making Hemgenix the most expensive drug ever.

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A Taiwanese man has been getting a lot of attention on social media after getting a payment app barcode permanently tattooed on his forearm.

The unnamed man recently took to the Taiwanese social media platform Dcard to share a functional barcode tattoo. Apparently, they had been contemplating getting a tattoo for a while, but they wanted something special instead of the artsy things people get inked. One day, while thinking about how cumbersome it was to constantly have to pull out his smartphone to pay for stuff, it hit him: why not get a functional tattoo to solve that problem? So he had a tattoo artist ink his payment app barcode on his forearm so he wouldn’t have to use his phone anymore.

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A French court recently ruled that a man fired from a consulting firm for not being fun enough at the workplace has the right to be as boring as he likes.

In 2015, Cubik Partners, a French management consultancy based in Paris, fired Mr. T, whose full name was not disclosed for privacy reasons, arguing that he was difficult to work with, a poor listener, and simply boring. What the company apparently meant, however, was that Mr. T didn’t go out with his colleagues enough after work, as part of the company’s “fun-based” approach to team building. The employee, on the other hand, clarified that he simply refused to forcibly partake in various excesses, such as consuming large quantities of alcohol and even sharing a bed with colleagues afterward.

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A Chinese couple recently sparked controversy online after punishing their child for watching too much television by making him stay up all night watching TV.

It’s a problem most modern parents – myself included – deal with at some point. Kids today love looking at screens, be they big or small, and unless you do something about it, they become little addicts. And it’s up to parents to either prevent that from happening or manage screen time to ensure they actually do something else. Anyway, this story is about a couple of parents who decided that more TV was actually the way to wean their son off watching TV. So they made him stay up all night watching whatever he wanted.

Before going out, the couple, who hail from China’s Hunan province, reportedly asked their 8-year-old son to finish his homework and be in bed at 8:30. But when they returned later that night they found him on the sofa watching TV even though it was passed his bedtime. They also learned that he had not done his homework, so they decided to teach him a lesson.

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A Canadian judge recently canceled a marriage annulment after discovering that the “wife” who testified during court proceedings had been an imposter.

Warren and Gina Zant married in the tropical Cook Islands on Nov. 27, 1999, but split two decades later, filing a separation agreement that stated that the ex-wife would receive survivor benefits under Warren Zant’s Operating Engineers’ Pension Plan. However, last year, the husband filed a bizarre case with the British Columbia Supreme Court in Kamloops seeking the annulment of his former marriage, based on a testimony of his ex-wife, who claimed that she had been fully aware that their marriage had not been legally binding. Only the woman claiming to be Gina Zant was apparently an imposter.

Almost a year ago, Justice Dennis Hori approved Warren Zant’s request to have the marriage annulled, which meant the loss of his ex-wife’s interest in the man’s pension plan, after hearing the testimonies of two people who identified themselves via “remote audio connection” as Warren and Gina Zant. However, the court would later hear from Gina Zant, who appeared distraught with the annulment, claiming to have never been involved with the case at all.

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A couple of Japanese math enthusiasts recently spent 24 hours covering the walls of an entire room with calculations in an attempt to find the ultimate answer to the ‘1+1’ formula.

It’s widely regarded as the easiest mathematical formula, but ‘1+1’ isn’t as simple as it appears. Well, at least not to math purists looking to apply multiple fields of mathematics while tackling this deceptively simple calculation. Popular YouTubers and math enthusiasts Hanao and Dengan recently proved this by spending a whopping 24 hours and covering the walls and floor of an entire room with calculations in one of their most intriguing projects yet.

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A bankrupt former millionaire in China has been making news headlines for his plan to pay a debt of 46 million yuan ($6.4 million) by selling grilled sausages at a street food stall.

Not too long ago, Tang Jian, a restauranteur in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, was considered one of the most successful businessmen in all of Zhejiang Province. By the age of 36, he already owned a chain of restaurants and had amassed an enviable fortune. But in 2005, Tang decided to invest a sizeable portion of his money into a completely new industry and things started going horribly wrong for him. Now at 52, the former millionaire finds himself over $6 million in debt, but he is working hard to repay every single cent by selling grilled sausages on the street.

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A herd of sheep in China has been walking in a circle for almost two weeks now, and no one seems to really know why.

The bizarre behavior was captured on surveillance video at a sheep farm in northern China’s Inner Mongolia region. In a video released on Wednesday by Chinese state-run news outlet People’s Daily, dozens of shep can be seen walking clockwise in a large circle, as other animals stare from outside the circle or at times stand motionless in the middle of it. Although it has been reported that the sheep appear to be perfectly healthy, it’s unclear if the animals ever stop to eat and drink, and if others take their place in the circle when that happens.

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An Indian woman who went into a private clinic to have her uterus surgically removed woke up from the procedure to find that both her kidneys had been stolen.

A couple of months ago, we featured the shocking story of an Indian woman who claimed that one of her kidneys had been stolen by her husband and sold for profit. As cynical as this may sound, she was lucky compared to another fellow Indian who had both her kidneys removed without her consent and now has to rely on daily dialysis to survive. Back in September, Sunita Devi, a woman from Bihar’s Muzaffarpur district went to a private clinic in Bariyarpur to have her uterus surgically removed. Only instead of her uterus, doctors there removed both her kidneys and then disappeared.

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