A former University of Iowa Hospital employee admitted to stealing another man’s identity and using it for the last 35 years, thus causing that person to be arrested and committed to a mental hospital.

On April 1st, 58-year-old Matthew David Keirans pleaded guilty to federal charges that he had stolen another man’s identity and used it for the last 35 years. At the time of his arrest, Keirans was working at the University of Iowa Hospital under the name William Donald Woods, an alias he had adopted in 1988, after working with the real Woods at a hot dog cart in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It’s unclear how the 58-year-old man was able to use Woods’ identity in every aspect of his life, but court documents revealed that in 1990 he was able to a fraudulent Colorado identification card with Woods’ name and birthday, and in 1991 he bought a car in Woods’ name with two checks that eventually bounced.

After driving the stolen car to Idaho, Keirans abandoned it and used all his money from the Colorado bank using an ATM to leave the state. An arrest was issued in Woods’ name for the car theft, but court documents don’t show whether it was actually enforced. Keirans went on with his adopted life, marrying a woman in 1994 and even fathering a child whose last name is Woods.

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A Mexican woman is being accused of paying three thugs to throw red paint on her future daughter-in-law’s wedding dress to stop her from marrying her son.

On February 17, a couple managed to get married in the town of Ciudad Obregón, Mexico’s Sonora Province, despite facing constant harassment from the groom’s family. News of the couple’s plight went viral in Mexico after photos of the bride wearing a white wedding dress splattered with red paint on her big day started doing the rounds on social media. According to numerous reports from sources close to the couple, as the bride was standing outside the church where the wedding ceremony was to take place, three thugs showed up and splattered her with red paint while recording the whole thing, most likely as evidence for the person who hired them. This was allegedly only the latest incident orchestrated by the groom’s family to stop the couple from going through with the wedding.

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A Chinese makeup artist known as Tuzi (Rabbit) has been getting a lot of attention on social media for her ability to completely transform her clients to the point where they are impossible to recognize.

Tuzi runs the Starlight Rabbit Portrait Studio in Yunan Province, but she gets most of her clientele from social media, particularly Douyin (China’s version of TikTok) where she regularly posts clips of impressive makeup transformations, where she either makes her subjects look decades younger than they actually are, turns them into heroes of Wuxia tales, or simply makes them unrecognizable. Over the years, she has had collaborations with fellow influencers and celebrities, including celebrities, actors, and singers.

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A Chinese marathon runner famous for chain-smoking during official running competitions has been banned by the athletic federation for two years for his “uncivilized” behavior.

Chen Mouxian, aka ‘Uncle Chen’, first made international headlines in 2022, when photos of him running in the Xin’anjiang Marathon went viral on social media. What drew people’s attention to the then-50-year-old experienced runner was that he always had a lit cigarette in his mouth, and kept lighting up as soon as he finished a cigarette. Dubbed “Smoking Brother”, Chen sparked controversy on Chinese social media, with some users praising his athletic abilities, and others criticizing him for promoting an unhealthy habit and also exposing other runners to harmful tobacco smoke. This month, Uncle Chen was banned from participating in marathons for two years after once again smoking his way through the 2024 Xiamen Marathon in Fujian on January 7th.

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A 40-year-old garbage collector in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi tragically lost his life after being shot by a loaded gun that had been thrown away in a plastic garbage bag.

Imagine living in a place where gun crime is so high that people casually throw loaded firearms in garbage cans where they can literally kill garbage collectors. One such incident took place on October 16, near the Rioverde town hall, in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. A group of garbage collectors was doing their jobs when tragedy struck. One of the men was calmly picking up garbage bags and throwing them into the back of a garbage truck when suddenly a gun went off. His colleagues froze in place and then started looking around for assailants, but there was no danger in sight. Then, they saw the man lying on the pavement…

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Kurt Wenner, a former NASA illustrator turned professional artist, specializes in chalk-drawn three-dimensional illusions that seem carved into the pavement rather than drawn on it.

Born and raised in Santa Barbara, California, Kurt Wenner attended both the Rhode Island School of Design and Art Center in Pasadena and was quickly recruited to work for NASA while studying at the Art Center. There, he was among the few highly skilled artists whose work was done solely by hand. Eventually, Kurt eft the agency and moved to Europe to study some of the world’s greatest works of art. Disappointed to find no class on the principles of classicism, the young artist came up with his own self-learning program which involved spending countless hours drawing from the magnificent art collection of the Vatican Museums and the Pantheon.

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Lino Tomasén, a 32-year-old street performer known as the ‘Cuban Ironman’, has allegedly been conditioning his body of iron by hitting himself with a heavy hammer around 1,000 times per day.

The so-called Cuban Ironman first garnered media attention in 2020 when a video showing him banging his fists and elbows against concrete walls went viral. Since then, his strongman reputation has been steadily growing. These days, he has an Instagram following of over 100,000 people and makes a living by putting on street performances in which he showcases his incredible strength. Most of the time he does pushups on his wrists with another person on his back, and uses a large hammer to hit his wrists, fists, and shins, or has someone else do it to prove it’s not fake.

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Catia Lattouf de Arída has been using her apartment in Mexico City as a hospital and sanctuary for injured and abandoned hummingbirds for the last 11 years.

As pollinating agents, hummingbirds are a very important part of Mexico’s ecosystem, but because of the ever-expanding urban landscape, they face all sorts of serious threats. That’s where 73-year-old Catia Lattouf de Arída comes in. As a self-taught hummingbird caretaker, she dedicates most of her free time and resources to nursing the tiny birds back to health or at least providing the necessary palliative care to ensure an easy, dignified passing. She has been doing it for over a decade and her home in Mexico City has become known as a hummingbird hospital.

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A Mexican man can consider himself lucky to be alive after being shot in the head at least two times only to have the bullets ricochet off of his skull.

On August 2nd, the man, referred to only as Francisco by Mexican media, was strolling through the streets of the Gustavo A. Madero neighborhood of Mexico City when he was approached by a man identified as Carlos N. who shot him in the head at close range two times. The reasons for the attack have not yet been revealed, but what most headlines have been focusing on is the miraculous outcome of the gunshots. Instead of growing through Francisco’s head, the point-blank shots ricocheted off of his skull, leaving the victim with minor flesh wounds.

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An Australian sailor and his loyal dog were recently rescued after surviving two months adrift in the Pacific Ocean by eating raw fish and drinking rainwater.

54-year-old Tim Shaddock and his dog Bella left Mexico for French Polynesia back in April, but a few weeks into their 6,000 km journey, Tim’s catamaran was severely damaged in a storm, and they were left with no way to sail. The storm also knocked out all the electronics, so the Sydney-based man had no way of contacting anyone for help, or even cooking his supplies. The last time Shaddock saw dry land was in early May as he sailed out of the Sea of Cortez and into the Pacific during a full moon. He and his canine have been drifting in the Pacific ever since, taking shelter from the sun under a canopy, eating raw fish, and drinking rainwater.

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A 17-year-old Mexican teenager died because of a brain embolism allegedly caused by the hickey his older girlfriend left on his neck during a date.

There is a viral video going around Latino TikTok these days about the tragic story of Julio Macías González, a 17-year-old teenager from Iztapalapa, Mexico, who died in 2016 because of a hickey. In the viral video, which has been doing the rounds online for about a week, an AI avatar of young Julio tells the tale of how he died after collapsing during dinner at his parents’ house. On August 25, 2016, while making out with his 24-year-old girlfriend, Julio got a hickey on his neck, but he didn’t think anything of it. After all, young lovers give themselves hickeys all the time, and they’re considered virtually harmless. But what the teen boy didn’t know was that in very rare cases, they can apparently be deadly…

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A Mexican court of law recently sparked outrage by sentencing a young woman to six years in prison for “excessive use of legitimate defense”, because she killed the man who was raping her.

The sentencing of Roxana Ruiz, a 23-year-old single mother from Nezahualcoyotl, Mexico, on Monday has been making international news headlines all week. The young woman was charged with homicide with an excess of legitimate self-defense after she strangled the man who was raping her in her own home, and is now facing six years in prison, as well as an obligation to compensate her assailant’s family financially. Ruiz, who has already served nine months behind bars after her initial arrest in 2021, claims that she would have most likely been killed by the man raping her if she didn’t kill him first, but the judge ruled that a simple blow to the head would have been enough to incapacitate the assailant.

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Los Algodones, a small Mexican town of about 7,000 people, has the highest concentration of dentists per square mile in the world and is famously known as Molar City.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans visit Los Algodones every year, but they don’t come in search of sandy beaches, they come for veneers, root canals, and dental implants. Of the roughly 7,000 inhabitants of Los Algodones, about 600 are dentists and the four main streets of the town are full of dental clinics offering a variety of services at a fraction of the cost in the United States. Between November and April, the population of Los Algodones almost doubles, as the tiny town is overrun by US tourists, but also some from Canada and even as far as the UK. Despite the stiff competition between dental clinics in the small Mexican town, demand often exceeds supply when it comes to dental services.

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A new board game marketed as a ‘Christian’ version of the Ouija board has sparked quite a controversy among clerics, with one priest describing it as a ‘trap from the devil’.

It sounds like a clever April Fools prank for Christians, but it turns out that the Holy Spirit Board is an actual game that anyone can find on sites like Amazon. It’s basically a Ouija board, only instead of demons, ghosts and other unholy beings, ‘this is a one-way ticket straight to heaven’ that relies on the classic planchette system to allow users to communicate directly with “our lord and savior Jesus Christ!” The layout of the planchette is similar to that of a Ouija board, only it is decorated with Christian symbols like Jesus crucified on the cross, three angels, and a dove. Oh, and instead of the triangular pendant moved on the Ouija board, the Holy Spirit Board uses a golden cross.

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A Mexican influencer and businessman recently sparked controversy by offering to sell his embryos for $2 million each to people who can’t have children and want the guarantee of good-looking babies.

Poncho de Nigris, a Mexican television presenter, entrepreneur and influencer who originally became known nationwide after participating in the second season of hit reality show Big Brother Mexico, recently sparked controversy after claiming that he is considering selling two embryos he and his wife saved in case they ever wanted to have more children. The Mexican celebrity said that because the quality of the embryos is ‘guaranteed’ and they would be helping ‘improve the human race’, it wouldn’t be fair to just give them away. Instead, he reportedly plans to charge interested couples for $2 million for each of the two frozen embryos.

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