52-year-old Simon Lee has been sleeping rough on the streets of Hong Kong for the last seven years, but unlike most homeless people, he didn’t just wind up there after some tragic, life-altering event. He actually chose to be homeless, giving up on his material possessions and a comfortable office job for a carefree, stress-free life.

You couldn’t really tell by looking at him, but Simon Lee graduated from university with a degree in chemistry, and until 1997 he had a steady office job. But one day he decided he didn’t need the stress of a white-collar job, so he quit and moved to neighboring Macau. He made a living tutoring children for a few years, but in 2004, he moved again, this time to Zhuhai, where he lived off of his savings, before going back to Macau two years later. The casinos were starting up and rich gamblers were more than happy to share a tiny fraction of their winnings with someone less fortunate than them, so Simon decided to live on the street and survive off casino hand outs.

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A 42-year-old man in Shenzen, China, was recently hospitalized with a stroke after the staff at a local internet cafe noticed that he hadn’t got up from his seat in 50 hours.

According to CCTV footage, the unnamed man arrived at the internet cafe on the morning of March 31st and never once got up from his chair for the next 50 hours. It was only on the evening of April 2nd that the staff checked CCTV cameras and noticed that he had been there for over two days. When they checked on him, they found that he was paralyzed, unable to speak and suffering from incontinence. When he arrived at the Longhua District People’s Hospital, he was barely conscious and couldn’t move the limbs on the right side of his body. Doctors diagnosed him with massive cerebral infarction on the left basal ganglia and frontotemporal lobe, otherwise known as a stroke.

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A 58-year-old street cleaner in China has been hailed as a hero after it was reported that he has donated over 180,000 yuan ($27,000) to dozens of poor children in the last 30 years, despite earning a monthly salary of just 2,000 yuan ($300).

Mr. Zhao, a street cleaner from Shenyang, in China’s northeast Liaoning Province, leads a very frugal lifestyle. Most of his meals consist of simple boiled noodles, he hasn’t bought new clothes in about 30 years, and he and his family live in a very modest house. Even though he earns just 2,000 yuan per month, he could probably have  much more comfortable life if he didn’t give most of his income away. Coming from humble beginnings himself, Zhao known all about poverty, so he has dedicated the last three decades of his life to helping impoverished children, while also taking care of his own family.

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Kayabuki no Sato, a small hamlet in Kyoto famous for its traditional thatched roof houses, features a concealed sprinkler system that turns the whole place into a water fountain.

Known as Miyama’s Thatched Village, Kayabuki no Sato has a higher percentage of thatched roof farmhouses than any other place in Japan. This makes it very popular with tourists, who love walking among the over 40 traditional thatched roof abodes and even spending the night in one of them, but also very vulnerable to fire. Local officials realized this in the year 2000, when a fire burned down the archive center, so apart from asking people to be vigilant at all times, they decided to install a special sprinkler system to cover the whole hamlet. They test it twice a year, usually in May and December, and people from all over Japan and beyond come to see the powerful sprinklers in action.

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In a medical case that doctors have called a “world’s first”, a Taiwanese woman was found to have four live sweat bees living in her eye, feeding on her tears.

The patient, referred to only as Ms. He, was reportedly tidying up a relative’s grave at the cemetery by pulling out weeds when a gust of wind blew what she though was sand and dirt into her eye. She cleaned her eyes with water, but a few hours later she started feeling a sharp pain in her left eye and started constantly tearing up. The 20-something woman was taken to Fooyin University Hospital in Taiwan’s southern county of Pingtung , where ophthalmologists were shocked to find four live sweat bees feeding on her eye like it was a salt lick.

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For over a year a couple angered their neighbors by keeping around 10,000 bees in the balcony of their high-rise apartment in the Chinese city of Ningbo.

Police were recently called to a residential building in the coastal city of Ningbo after a couple living there ignored numerous complaints from their neighbors about the thousands of pet bees they kept on their balcony. About a year ago, the unnamed couple installed a small beehive in their high-rise apartment with the intention of using them for “bee sting treatment”, a form of alternative medicine believed to help alleviate the symptoms of painful conditions like rheumatoid arthritis. However, the insects kept breeding and their number swelled to around 10,000, becoming a nuisance to the other residents.

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Traffic police in the Chinese city of Liuzhou got the shock of their career after pulling over a motorcycle driver only to find that instead of a driver’s license he had a handwritten piece of paper with his picture glued to it.

Faking official documents is common practice all around the world, but in the vast majority of cases people actually go out of their way to make sure their forgeries look as genuine as possible. Not the protagonist of this news story, though, he just made sure to include all the necessary details on his fake driver’s license, even though all he did was scribble them on a piece of paper hoping it would be enough to fool police. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.

When police in Liuzhou pulled over a silver motorcycle for a routine check, on March 31, they didn’t expect to see the funniest driver’s license of their entire careers. The man, surnamed Tang, certainly didn’t seem nervous when the officers asked for his documents, and the driver license itself had a regular cover, so there was nothing to prepare police for what they were about to see.

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A pair of identical twin brothers in China who had been sharing the same driver’s license for 20 years recently got bused by police after one of them started going bald.

According to Chinese media, the two brothers, surnamed Yan, had been sharing a driver’s license without any issues until 2017, when the younger brother’s permit was suspended for driving under the influence of alcohol. That didn’t turn out to be too much of an issue, because they continued sharing the other brother’s license, until it too got suspended, also for drunk driving.Luckily, by the time that happened, the younger Yan had gotten his driving license back, so the pair continued sharing that one. It was the perfect scenario, whenever one of the identical twins happened to have his driver’s license revoked, they still had another one to fall back on. Then one of them started going bald…

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Police in Zhenxiong, China’s Yunnan province recently apologized after being ridiculed online for using a 17-year-old suspected criminal’s childhood photo for a wanted poster, because they couldn’t find a more recent one.

Look at those chubby cheeks! Does this look like the face of someone who could commit gang crimes and other violent offences? Well, technically, yes. You see, the photo below is of Ji Qinghai, a dangerous alleged criminal who has been successfully avoiding police for a long time. He’s also just a pre-schooler in this picture, which makes things a bit confusing. He’s actually 17 now, but police couldn’t find any recent photos of him, so they just decided to go with one of him as an adorable kid.

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No one ever said that ending a romantic relationship was easy, but planning your own kidnapping and subsequent murder just to avoid telling someone “it’s over” sounds ridiculous. And yet, one Chinese woman did just that rather than tell her boyfriend she didn’t want to be with him anymore.

A 37-year-old woman from Wuhan, in central China’s Hubei Province, was recently arrested after it was revealed that she had faked her own kidnapping and murder at the hands of her ex-husband in order to avoid having to break up with her current boyfriend, whose financial situation she considered lacking. The woman, surnamed Yu, had been dating her boyfriend, Lin, for a while, but she only learned that he was poor after visiting his home during the Chinese New Year. It was something she apparently just couldn’t get over, so she decided to leave him, but fearing that he would get clingy and refuse rejection if she simply told him she wanted to end the relationship, Yu devised a plan to make herself disappear.

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A 59-year-old man from Taiwan has become an internet meme thanks to his ridiculously square hairdo that makes him look like a real-life Minecraft character.

Wu Goren first made news headlines back in 2014, when photos of his bizarre square hairdo went viral on social media. Taiwanese news channels quickly tracked down the middle-aged man and questioned him about his unique hairdo. As it turns out, Wu, who works as a medical scientist at National Taiwan University Hospital, adopted the look after being rejected by a woman, as a way of making himself look like a man in his 20s or 30s. It’s unclear how he came to the conclusion that square hair makes someone look younger, but there’s no denying that it is eye-catching.

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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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The last thing you’d expect to find in the center of a Vietnamese rural district is a spectacular European-style palace, complete with a gilded roof, stunning facade and intricately decorated walls, and yet that’s exactly the sight you’re treated to in the heart of Gia Vien, in Vietnam’s Ninh Binh province.

I know what you’re thinking, Vietnam was a French colony for more than six decades, so this European-looking marvel must be a well-preserved relic from that period. But Thanh Thang Palace has nothing to do with French colonialism or Vietnamese history in general. This opulent complex is merely the residence of a local billionaire who reportedly spent between 300 and 400 billion dong ($12 – $17 million) to fulfil his dream of living in an actual palace. While the interior has yet to be completed, the outside is finished and it looks absolutely stunning.

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A viral video of a Filipino mother who goes to an internet cafe and hand-feeds her 13-year old son because he refuses to end his 48-hour gaming binge to eat has once again reignited the debate on youth video game addiction.

37-year-old Lilybeth Marvel first noticed there was something wrong with her son Carlito about two years ago, when he began staying up late at an internet cafe near the family home in Nueva Ecija, the Philippines. Things got progressively worse as time went by, to the point where the 13-year-old now spends days on end with his eyes glued to a monitor playing his favorite “battle royale” video game, Rules of Survival. Last week, Mrs. Marvel was filmed delivering her son’s breakfast to the internet cafe and hand feeding him while he continued to play, because he had been there for over 48 hours.

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Based on the premise that people who are having trouble finding a romantic partner probably lack the confidence and experience to properly interact with a potential match, a Tokyo-based robotics association recently hosted a speed-dating party where human participants sat in silence across a table from each-other while tiny robots spoke on their behalf.

The bizarre event took place in Tokyo, Japan, and was organized by the Contents innovation Program (CiP) Association, which specializes in developing AI, robotics and other technology, according to The Japan News. In a series of videos posted on YouTube, potential matches can be seen sitting across from each other, but instead of talking, they just sit there quietly with their gazes focused on two little robots placed on the table between them. They just sit in silence while these robotic assistants ask each other questions and provide answers, based on information pre-loaded into their system from a 45-question survey participants completed prior to the event.

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