A series of photos showing students casually lighting up cigarettes in what looks like a college classroom have been doing the rounds online for several months, leaving everyone puzzled as to what is going on. As it turns out, it’s just a display of hands-on learning in a course on tobacco.

The controversial photos originally went viral on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, back in November of last year, but they’ve been resurfacing on various other social networks and news sites ever since. Young students can be seen lighting cigarettes and casually smoking them, while others take their photos with smartphones and the teacher casually observes the spectacle. Teen smoking is frowned upon in China, as it is pretty much everywhere else, so the photos caused quite a stir online even after the dean of the university where the smoking took place offered an explanation.

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A strict mother in China reportedly abandoned her 12-year-old son in the middle of a busy street in Luoyang City after he only managed to score 81 percent on an exam, which apparently wasn’t good enough.

Police officers in Luoyang’s Gucheng district found the boy wandering the streets close to where his mother dropped him off before driving away. They had been alerted by passers-by who saw the woman stopping her car in the area, pulling the boy out and then scolding and hitting him before leaving him there by himself. CCTV footage shows the officers approaching the disoriented child in an attempt to find out what happened. They later told local reporters that the boy had been abandoned for not achieving the 95 percent score that his mother expected on a recent exam.

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Money counting machines have been a staple of banks all around the world for decades now, and China is no exception, but here bank tellers still practice their banknote counting skills every day, and some of them can really give those automated counters a run for their money.

Videos of Chinese bank tellers showing off their amazing money counting skills have been doing the rounds online for a long time, and for good reason. There’s something oddly satisfying about watching someone breeze through a wad of cash in mere seconds, but if you go deeper down this rabbit hole, you’ll find that there’s a whole lot more to Chinese banknote counting, including several techniques, one more impressive than the other, and even a popular TV contest in which money counting champions of different banks compete for the title of fastest and most accurate “human banknote counting machine” and the bragging rights that come with it.

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Firefighters in West Virginia were stunned to find that not one of the over a dozen paper bibles and several wooden crosses at the Freedom Ministries Church were destroyed by the devastating fire that engulfed the holy place last Sunday morning.

In a Facebook post that quickly went viral, the Coal City Fire Department shared photos of nearly two dozen bibles and three wooden crosses that survived flames so massive that at one point firefighters had to back out. The fire was so devastating that the church will have to be rebuilt, and firefighters themselves admit that judging by the intensity of the flames everything inside should have been turned to ashes, and yet none of the bibles and crosses were destroyed.

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If the idea of getting paid a decent monthly wage to do nothing, or whatever you want, for the rest of your life sounds appealing, you may be interested in this Swedish experimental art project that plans to hire a very lucky person for a responsibility-free job with just one very simple requirement.

This government-funded conceptual art project/ideal employment opportunity in Gothenburg, Sweden will select one very lucky applicant to show up at a train station currently under construction in the city every day and punch a time clock. This will turn on a set of fluorescent lights over the boarding platform to let everyone know that the useless employee showed up at work that day. After that, the person is free to do anything they want, or nothing at all, just as long as they return to the station to clock out and turn off the lights when their shift is over. They don’t have to hang around the train station during working hours, and they can quit or be replaced by someone else anytime they want. As long as they don’t get another job, the position is guaranteed for the rest of their lives.

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A Japanese tech startup claims to have developed an artificial intelligence software that analyzes surveillance camera footage in order to detect suspicious behavior and prevent shoplifting before it actually happens.

In 2002, when the movie Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, came out, the concept of preventing a future crime before the perpetrator did anything remotely suspicious was nothing more than a cool sci-fi idea, but thanks to the rapid advancement of artifical intelligence, we already have an early version of the technology displayed in that movie. VaakEye, an AI software developed by Japanese startup Vaak, can allegedly detect shoplifting before it occurs by analyzing surveillance camera footage for discrete suspicious movements and behaviors of people caught in the camera’s field of view. If the algorithm decides that there is a high-enough probability of a person shoplifting, it sends an alert via a smartphone app so the crime can be prevented.

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A 56-year-old woman from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has been diagnosed with Transient Global Amnesia (TGA) after a terrible headache apparently caused her to completely forget the last 38 years of her life.

One day in early October of last year, Kim Denicola was leaving a bible study at a local church when she called her husband to complain about an excruciating headache and blurry vision. He told her to go to the emergency room, but some friends found her passed out in the church parking lot and rushed her to the hospital. The first thing Denicola remembers from after that incident is lying in a hospital bed and a nurse asking her questions she apparently had all the wrong answers to.

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Mansur Çalar, a 33-year-old soccer player from Turkey, has been accused of using a concealed sharp object to repeatedly slash players of the opposing team during a third-division game last weekend.

Allegations against the footballer started pouring in on Monday after several players from Turkish club Sakaryaspor, the club Çalar’s team, Amedspor, had played against a day before, started posting photos of sustained slash wounds online. Some had scratch-like marks on their arms, others on their backs and necks, but they all accused Mansur Çalar, asking that he be reprimanded. Both the accused and his club dismissed the allegations, but then a video collage showing Çalar’s behavior in several tense moments during the Sunday match went viral online and authorities opened an official investigation.

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The Department of Otorhinolaryngology at Taiwan’s Asia University Hospital recently reported the case of a student who fell asleep while listening to music with earbuds on and woke up completely deaf in one year.

The popularity of headphones and earbuds has skyrocketed right alongside that of smartphones, with people using them pretty much everywhere, either to listen to music, take phone calls or even study. Some people reportedly use them while sleeping to learn foreign languages subconsciously. Even though “hypnopedia”, or the ability to learn during sleep, isn’t supported by any scientific evidence, many people still believe that because the brain is able to perceive sound during sleep, by exposing it to new information will cause it to retain at least some of it. But apparently, testing this concept, or even listening to music with earbuds or headphones on while sleeping isn’t a very good idea.

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Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan combined a military truck and a Jeep to create what he believes to be the world’s largest SUV.

Called Dhabiyan, the monstrous 10-wheel vehicle is based on the Oshkosh M1075 military truck with a Jeep Wrangler annexed to it as a driver cabin. It is powered by a 600hp, 15.2-liter, 6-cylinder Caterpillar C15 diesel engine, weighs a whopping 24 tonnes and measures 10,8m in length, 2.5 meters in width, and 3.2 meters in height. Dhabiyan was reportedly designed and built by Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan, one of the most well-known car collectors in the UAE.

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Oleg Omelchuk, the mayor of the Ukrainian city of Olevsk, recently became an internet meme after being tricked into posing for a photo in front of the city hall holding a poster accusing him of infringing on the rights of citizens.

The photo of Omelchuk standing shoulder to shoulder with the people protesting against him and his administration and holding a poster that read “The mayor and his minions infringe upon the rights of society” went viral after being shared on Twitter by journalist Taras Oleinik, an editor of Ukrainian news portal ITC.ua. However, his caption was a bit suspicious. Oleinik claimed that the mayor had been the one trolling protesters by showing up and holding up the poster as a joke, without anyone recognizing him. That would have indeed been some epic trolling by Omelchuk, but in fact he was the one getting trolled.

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Most chicken farms nowadays consists of hangar-like facilities where chickens are cooped up by the thousands with hardly enough space to move around and, in some cases, no sunlight. It’s sad, but it’s also the only way food corporations can keep up with the increasing demand for cheap meat and eggs. However, one farmer in northern Italy runs a very different type of poultry farm – he is raising over 2,000 chickens in a patch of pristine Alpine forest.

48-year-old Massimo Rapella claims he became a chicken farmer by accident. He and his wife used to run an education NGO in the town of Sandrio, in northern Italy’s Valtellina valley, but when the 2008 financial crisis hit and the Italian government cut funding for social enterprises, they decided to move to the nearby mountains. They got a few chickens to provide eggs for their own consumption and soon noticed something interesting. The domesticated birds loved venturing into the nearby chestnut forest, but instead of building a fence to prevent them from doing so, the Rapellas actually encouraged this behavior. Today, they own around 2,100 chickens who spend their days rummaging and laying eggs in a 2-hectare patch of Alpine chestnut forest.

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Authorities in the German town of Ahlen have come under fire for seizing a family’s dog over unpaid taxes and then selling it on eBay to recover the money owed.

This bizarre story started back in November, 2018, when a court bailiff and two city officials showed up at an Ahlen family’s home to seize valuables as compensation for financial debts owed to the municipality. The family, who preferred to remain anonymous, told local newspaper Ahlener Tageblatt that the officials first tried to seize her disabled husband’s wheelchair, but couldn’t because it wasn’t their property. Instead, they settled on the family’s pet dog, a pedigree pug named Edda.

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There are lots of popular animals on Instagram, but while most of them rely solely on their looks to gain followers, a few actually use their talents to do it. Take Ghost the Samoyed, a fluffy canine who just loves to sing.

It isn’t like Ghost isn’t cute enough to get attention on Instagram just by posing for photos, she just has other special talents. You see, Ghost has a lovely singing voice and she likes to show it off whenever she hears a sound that inspires her. Whether it’s Beyonce singing on TV, her master’s voice on Facetime, or a simple squeaky toy, Ghost just lets loose. Her singing is more like howling, but in many of the performances that her owners upload on Instagram it’s obvious that her howls are not random at all. Especially when listening to a song, Ghost tries to follow along as best she can.

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Poppy farmers in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh are forced to guard their fields day and night in a desperate attempt to fend off large groups of opium-addicted parrots who get high off the narcotic effects of poppy seeds.

Scattered rains have already affected poppy production in Neemuch district, but farmers here say that the increasing number of opium-addicted parrots that pillage their crops on a daily basis are making things even worse. Using loudspeakers and firecrackers to keep the birds at bay has failed and the farmers’ appeals to local authorities have fallen of deaf ears, so people have no choice but to guard the poppy fields day and night. But even so, the birds still come to get their fix dozens of time a day.

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