With tourism at an all-time low, a struggling Japanese railway operator is trying to avoid going under by selling canned stones from its railway tracks.

Founded in 1923, the Choshi Electric Railway company, in Japan’s Chiba Prefecture, had to overcome adversity several times during its 97-year history, but the situation has never been more dire than it is now. The railway operator relies on tourism to support its operations, but with the novel Coronavirus wreaking havoc all over the world, business has never been worse, so management had to come up with alternative ways of generating income. Among these, starting a YouTube channel and selling canned stones have been proving unusually successful.

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A family from Phoenix, Arizona came up with an original way of punishing their 14-year-old son after he was caught by police speeding in the family car: they made him give away all his possessions.

14-year-old Angel Martinez’s parents were celebrating their anniversary in Las Vegas earlier this month when they received a call from police about their teenage son. He had taken the family’s Range Rover out for a spin and had disrupted the neighbors. The couple were forced to cut their anniversary celebration short and go home, but they made sure to let Angel know just how “happy” they were about it. They pretty much emptied the boy’s room, put all his stuff in the driveway and made him give it all away personally as punishment.

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A newly opened highway in China’s Guangdong province has been making news headlines for a very peculiar reason: it’s built around the tiny home who refused to move.

China is well-known for its “nail houses”, properties of homeowners who reject compensation from a developer for their demolition, but while most such examples are encountered within new residential complexes, the one we’re featuring today stands in the middle of a highway bridge. Footage released by Chinese media shows the property tightly squeezed between the lanes of the newly opened Haizhuyong Bridge, in the city of Guangzhou. It is located in a pit in the middle of the four-lane road bridge and has become somewhat of a local attraction.

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Scientists recently discovered that a species of tiny water beetles can live through being eaten by a frog by somehow surviving a journey through its gut and simply exiting through the butt hole.

Until this week, Regimbartia attenuata was just another species of water beetle, but ever since a study on its astonishing survival skills came out on Monday, it’s been making headlines in mainstream media outlets around the world. And for good reason, as there aren’t many creatures on this Earth that can survive being swallowed alive, journey through their predator’s digestive system, simply crawl out the “back door” and go on with their lives as if they didn’t just pull off a Houdini-like magic trick.

Regimbartia attenuata were the subject of an unusual study carried out by Shinji Sugiura, an associate professor in the department of agrobioscience at Kobe University in Japan. He put the tiny beetles in the same laboratory bin with specimens from five different frog species, and the little bugs managed to crawl out the frogs’ “vents” in the vast majority of experiments.

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A 42-year-old Florida man managed to dupe dealership staff into letting him drive off in a $140,000 Porsche 911 in exchange for a fake check he had printed on his home computer.

Casey William Kelley walked into a Porsche dealership in Destin, Okaloosa County on July 27 and managed to drive off with a brand new, white Porsche 911 sports car. The really impressive thing about that is he only traded a useless piece of paper for it. Kelley had reportedly printed the check for $139,203.05 on his home printer, but staff let him take the car without waiting to see if the check cleared. They must have fallen for the conman’s confident attitude, as he was so proud of himself that he even asked staff to take a picture of him with the car before driving away.

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A 51-year-old Ukrainian woman was recently arrested after it was discovered that she had been digging an underground tunnel near the walls of a prison, with the intention of helping her convicted son to escape.

The unnamed woman reportedly hails from the Ukrainian city of Nikolaev and had rented a house near the prison where her son was serving a life sentence for murder. Every night, she drove a silent electric scooter to an empty field near the Zaporizhia maximum security prison and used rudimentary tools to dig a 10-foot-deep tunnel toward the penal colony. She worked only during the night, using an improvised trolley to take the dirt out of the narrow tunnel. She had been working for at least three weeks and had almost reached the prison walls when she was discovered and arrested.

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A Vietnamese man obsessed with traditional porcelain dishes and antiques has spent the last 25 years of his life decorating his house with almost 10,000 porcelain bowls, plates and urns.

Nguien Van Truong first fell in love with porcelain antiques in 1986, a year after being discharged from the army and returning to his home village of Kieu Son, in Vietnam’s Vinh Phuc province. He was making a living as a carpenter at a time and got the chance to paint the table and chairs of a local antique collector who first introduced him to the beauty of traditional porcelain dishes. Truong was so impressed that he decided to become a collector himself, and scoured all of Vietnam’s northern provinces in search of traditional porcelain objects, and spent all of his money trying to acquire as much of it as possible.

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A Thai family got the shock of their lives when they took home a box of sushi to eat only to see it glow bright blue in the dark after allegedly becoming infected with fluorescent bacteria.

Last Tuesday, Arun Yolpaiboon, 58, and her son, 21-year-old Natthanai Kanchanawasa, had just returned home with some boxes of sushi, which they consume regularly, when they noticed that some of the pieces of shrimp glowed an unnatural blue in low-light areas of their home. Even after boiling the pieces of sushi, the unnatural glow remained, so the pair shot a video showcasing the bizarre blue color of the shrimp. Then then woman’s son ate one of the radioactive-looking pieces just for fun.

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Daisugi is a centuries-old forestry technique developed in Japan as a way of cultivating the highly-prized Kitayama Cedar without actually using any land. Today, the visually-striking technique can be witnessed in ornamental gardens.

Dating back to the 14th century, daisugi allowed for the cultivation of Kitayama cedar, a species of tree known for growing exceptionally straight and lacking knots, in a time when high demand and lack of straight land for planting enough trees made growing Kitayama cedars impossible. Similar to the famous art of bonsai, daisugi basically involved heavily pruning a so-called “mother cedar tree” so that only the straightest shoots are allowed to grow. Careful hand-pruning is conducted every couple years, leaving only the top boughs and ensuring that the shoots remain knot free. After about 20 years, the now massive shoots can either be harvested as exceptional Kitayama lumber, or replanted to repopulate forests.

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Su ‘Moh Moh’ Naing, a 23-year-old girl from Myanmar shot to online fame earlier this week after being featured by a popular English tabloid for having an incredibly thin waist.

The Burmese student claims to have a waist circumference of only 13.7 inches, which would make it one of the tiniest waists in the world, but even more shocking is the fact that Naing insist her waist size is only linked to genetics. Despite being accused of digitally editing the photos she posts on her Instagram, and even of having some of her ribs removed or constantly wearing a tight corset to achieve such a tiny figure, Su Naing says she is all natural.

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James Maina Mwangi believes himself to be the smartest looking man in all of Africa, maybe even the world, and looking at his impeccably stylish outfits, it’s hard to disagree.

When he came to Nairobi, in Kenya, James Maina Mwangi had only one shirt and people laughed at him because they knew his father, who was an honorable but poor freedom fighter. He asked God for something to make himself stand out, and he apparently got this flamboyant fashion style. He’s been using his brightly colored suits and accessories to stand out on the streets of the Kenyan capital ever since, and has even attracted international attention thanks to his outfits.

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Villages on the east coast of the Kamchatka peninsula, in the Russian Far-East are experiencing scenes that seem taken out of an Alfred Hitchkok movie. Only instead of birds invading their community, it’s billions of mosquitoes swirling into visible “tornadoes”.

Villages like Ust-Kamchatsk are used to being invaded by large number of mosquitoes every summer, it’s normal for this insects to swarm near bodies of water, but this year it’s much worse than usual. Because of an unusually hot summer, the number of mosquitoes is much larger, making them an even bigger nuisance than they usually are. Window and door nets do little to keep the pesky buzzers out of people’s homes, as they seem to get in through the smallest of cracks, and going outside means dealing with large swarms of mosquitoes that seem to reach the sky when seen from afar.

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A Russian man is taking a bank to court for forcing him to pay interest on a loan he never asked for, after fraudsters used his stolen smartphone to take out the pre-approved loan in his name.

Vladimir Volokhovich, from Moscow, has been making news headlines in his home country of Russia after finding himself right in the middle of an unusual scandal. Volokhovich is being asked by the Russian branch of Alpha Bank to pay up a pre-approved loan taken up by fraudsters in his name, using his stolen mobile phone. Not only did the scammers manage to transfer part of the funds to their accounts, but the interest on the loan Vladimir never asked for is adding up every day. The bank, however, refuses to cancel the loan, claiming that Vladimir should have reported his smartphone as stolen sooner.

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An Australian mother-of-three made international news headlines this week after she became the target of an original prank thought up by her ex boyfriend for dumping her.

When it comes to getting back at your ex-partner after being dumped, it just doesn’t get more original than advertising a Chewbacca roar contest and encouraging total strangers to call your ex’s number and leave their impression of the furry Star Wars character as voice messages. That’s exactly what one Cairns man did earlier this week, after being dumped. He put up portraits with the fake Chewbacca roar contest featuring his ex’s phone number and promising a $100 prize to the best Chewbacca.

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Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, a.k.a. “El Mencho”, the leader of Mexico’s fastest-growing drug cartel, has allegedly built his own private hospital in order to avoid having to treat his illnesses at other, less secure healthcare facilities.

El Mencho, under whose leadership the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel (CJNG) became the most prominent criminal organization in Mexico, reportedly suffers from kidney failure and other serious illnesses that require constant medical care. Unlike most drug kingpins, who usually keep doctors on their payrolls in order to avoid going to hospitals where they could be arrested or killed by police, El Mencho decided to go one step further. Because his serious kidney condition means he can’t have it treated in one of his many mountain hideouts across Jalisco, he allegedly decided to build his own hospital.

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