The Tokay Stakes 2023 horse race at the Chukyo Racecourse in Nagoya, Japan was technically won by a racehorse that ran the entire race without a jockey.

While it’s true that a jockey can’t really help a slow horse win a race, their role in professional horse racing is undeniable. The jockey plays many roles during a race. They control the pace of the animal, either pushing it from the beginning in a race where setting the pace for the rest of the pack is important or conserving its energy for a final push. They are also responsible for how fast the horse comes out of the gates at the start and tactical movement during the race. At least that’s what most horseracing enthusiasts will tell you, but one animal recently proved that they are just dead weight…

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A Bangladeshi boy can consider himself lucky to be alive after hiding in a shipping container while playing hide and seek and getting locked inside for six days.

On January 17, while unloading containers off of a Bangladeshi vessel, staff at Malaysia’s Port Klang were shocked to see a confused and emaciated boy step out of one of the containers. He didn’t speak the local tongue so the port authorities couldn’t get any information out of him, but they suspected that he was the victim of a human trafficking crime organization, so they immediately called the police. It turned out, that the young boy had been playing hide and seek with friends in his home city of Chittagong, Bangladesh and chose a shipping container as a hiding spot. He got locked inside and spent the next six days on a ship to Malaysia.

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Several kids in Indonesia have reportedly suffered stomach burns after consuming a popular liquid nitrogen-containing street snack called ‘chiki ngebul’.

Commonly known as ‘dragon’s breath’ in Indonesia, chiki ngebul is an assortment of rainbow-colored candies coated in a cloud of liquid nitrogen mist that causes the person eating them to exhale that mist, like a dragon. However, health experts warn that if the snack is consumed before the liquid nitrogen has evaporated, it poses a very real risk of intestinal burns and perforations. So far, over 20 kids have been diagnosed with stomach burns after allegedly filming themselves eating chiki ngebul as part of a dangerous TikTok trend.

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Ruben Jordan Langsted is a talented tattoo artist who specializes in photo-realistic black & grey tattoos with high contrast and soft shadows.

Born in Norway but currently working out of the Dropout Collective tattoo shop in Copenhagen, Denmark Ruben Jordan Langsted is regarded as one of the world’s best tattooers when it comes to realistic black & grey tattoos. He claims that he only does this style of tattoo simply because he’s “not good at anything else,” but according to other sources, he does it because it is such a technically demanding style that no matter how good you get, there is always room for improvement. Looking at some of his black & grey artworks inspired by classic sculptures and artistic interior design, it’s hard to believe he could do any better.

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A Chinese woman accused her ex-husband of getting her addicted to hormone-based drugs that have ruined her life, after wrongly suspecting that she had cheated on him.

Liu Chang, a doctor from the Chinese province of Shandong, first accused her ex-husband, who is also a physician, of slowly poisoning her in 2019. At the time, Liu posted on social media that her spouse, Gao Zhisen, had been secretly administering her hormone-based drugs since 2016, and that they had caused her physical disability and severe second-degree injury. The couple divorced in 2017, and Liu has been fighting to bring her ex-husband to justice ever since. Despite efforts to have Gao answer for his alleged crime, Liu only managed to get a court date earlier this month, four years after her first revelations.

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KFC Thailand recently teamed up with several scent experts to create incense sticks that not only look edible but also smell like KFC fried chicken when lit.

Colonel Sanders’ secret recipe containing 11 herbs and spices is notoriously hard to replicate in the kitchen, let alone in insence sticks, but KFC Thailand claims to have achieved the impossible. Partnering with a number of scent and perfume experts, the Thai branch of the international fast food chain managed to come up with an incense stick formula that not only looks good enough to eat, but gives off the same aroma as KFC fried chicken when lit. The only problem is that you can’t buy these incense sticks, only win them.

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A 23-year-old successful French YouTuber recently shocked her nation by announcing that she plans to undergo assisted suicide to deal with her dissociative identity disorder (DID).

Le Journal d’Olympe is a popular YouTube channel with over 250,000 subscribers where a young French woman documents her life with dissociative identity disorder a mental condition formerly known as multiple personality disorder. The 23-year-old was reportedly the victim of severe trauma growing up and has developed a number of alternate personalities as a result. They sometimes take over and constantly having to struggle with this has apparently become too much for the young woman. She recently announced her plan to undergo assisted euthanasia in Belgium at the end of 2023.

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A restaurant in Osaka, Japan has built a reputation for serving traditional miso ramen with an unusual twist, like a slice of strawberry shortcake.

Franken, a Japanese restaurant specializing in miso ramen, first made international news headlines last January, when it started selling a unique variant of sweet-and-sour red miso ramen with a cone of soft-serve vanilla ice cream melting in the middle of the bowl. The combination sounds offputting, but the restaurant was so confident that people would love it that it only served its red miso ramen with the ice cream cone. Well, until this month, when Franken started selling another weird dish, a miso ramen with a slice of strawberry shortcake soaking in the hearty soup.

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Chu-hi-cha is the name of a new type of tea discovered by a Japanese researcher at Kyoto University. It involves brewing the droppings of caterpillars that have feasted on various plants.

Tsuyoshi Maruoka came up with the idea of caterpillar tea during graduate studies at Kyoto University’s Faculty of Agriculture, while researching the mysterious relationship between insects and plants. One day, a senior brought 50 gypsy moth larvae into the lab and told Maruoka that they were a souvenir. He didn’t really know what to do with them at first, but he eventually decided to at least keep them alive until he could decide, so he picked some leaves from a nearby cherry tree and fed them to the caterpillars. When cleaning the droppings left by the critters, he noticed that they had a pleasantly fragrant smell and was almost instantly inspired to brew them into tea.

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A UK woman has been issued a restraining order after reportedly sending her ex-boyfriend up to 150 texts per day, trying to rekindle their relationship.

28-year-old Michelle Felton was recently banned from contacting her ex-boyfriend, Ryan Harley, in any way for 18 months, and sentenced to 18 months of community service with 30 days of rehabilitative activity. The young woman from Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, reportedly harassed Mr. Harley by texting and calling him over 1,000 times after being dumped by him. Despite making it clear that he did not want anything to do with her, Harley claims that she continued trying to contact him and rekindling their 21-month romance.

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Bolivia’s state airline has become the target of ridicule after hiring an “interspecies communicator” to track down a passenger’s missing pet cat.

The disappearance of Tito the cat has been a matter of state business in Bolivia for about a month, ever since the feline was lost by staff of Bolivia’s state-owned airline. Tito’s owner, a woman working in Ireland, was taking the feline from Tarija to Santa Cruz to have it certified as a therapy animal, but was told that the cat had to go into the cargo hold. When the plane landed, she was shocked to see Tito’s cage empty. Airline staff admitted to losing Tito prior to takeoff and the cat’s disappearance became the number one news story in Bolivia. Recently, the Ministry of Justice even hired a self-proclaimed interspecies communicator in hopes of finding the cat.

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Diana Caldarescu is a talented technical designer and fashion illustrator who specializes in chandelier-shaped earrings that actually light up.

Having miniature chandeliers hanging from your earlobes may sound kitsch, but if that’s the style you’re going for, you may as well go big with the amazing light-up chandelier earrings of Diana Caldarescu. The young New York-based artist creates these metal wonders out of brass, sterling silver, 14-karat gold, and glass crystals and adds a bit of magic in the form of LED-tipped candles that actually turn on thanks to power provided by a small battery pack hidden behind the wearer’s ear.

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The small Australian town of Helensburgh is home to one of the most amazing places on the planet – an abandoned railway tunnel that glows an eerie blue at night.

The Helensburgh Glow Worm Tunnel is an abandoned rail tunnel in Helensburgh, New South Wales which has become famous both for the ghost stories surrounding it and the glow worm colony that give it its iconic bioluminescent blue glow. Originally known as the Metropolitan tunnel, the 624-meter-long underground passage was inaugurated at the end of the 19th century and used to transport coal from the local mine to the suburbs. However, it closed down a couple of decades later and remained abandoned until the mid-90s, enough time for a colony of glow worms to claim it for themselves…

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The Taliban-led Government of Afghanistan recently unveiled the country’s first-ever indigenously built supercar, named Mada 9.

On the list of things you were expecting from the Taliban, unveiling a supercar prototype probably ranked pretty low, but here we are. Reportedly developed by a team of at least 30 engineers from a company called ENTOP and Kabul’s Afghanistan Technical Vocational Institute (ATVI) over a period of 5 years, the Mada 9 definitely has the looks of a supercar, but is currently powered by a modified 2000 Toyota Corolla engine. It is apparently capable of moving at “higher speeds”, but the end goal is to fit it with a more powerful electrical engine.

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A 41-year-old man has reportedly been making a killing selling women’s high heel shoes and boots by modeling them himself.

The unnamed man who reportedly hails from China’s Sichuan province recently made news headlines after it was revealed that he had been using a very unusual technique to boost up his online sales. Live stream commerce is big business in China, but the competition is so stiff that entrepreneurs constantly have to come up with gimmicks to set themselves apart and gain potential customers. In this particular case, the guy films himself walking and even running in the high-heel women’s footwear he sells, and people seem to love it.

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