Who knew that the World Cup Fever could actually kill people? Football fans in China are actually succumbing to the ‘disease’ – three men have died so far just from World Cup excitement and exhaustion.

The first to go was 51-year-old Li Mingqiang, from Liaoning Province. He started feeling unwell during the match between Spain and the Netherlands, and his friends quickly called an ambulance. Unfortunately, the paramedics were unable to save his life; he died of a heart attack on the way to the hospital.

Just hours later, a similar incident was reported – a 25-year-old man was found dead in his apartment in Suzhou in Jiangsu Province, on Saturday morning. Once again, he was rushed to the hospital and declared dead on arrival. The police said that the man had been watching the World Cup on his computer.

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Seven years ago, a homeless man in China was scavenging in a garbage bin when he found something that would change his life forever – a tiny baby girl! He was so overcome with emotion that he decided to raise her as his own child. 50-year-old Xiong Jianguo now lives under a bridge in Nanchang City with his seven-year-old adopted daughter, whom he named Yanyan.

“I guess she was one of those children that was born to a family who didn’t want a girl,” said Xiong. “I had lifted the top of the rubbish bin and was looking to see if there are any plastic bottles I could sell to recycle, when I heard a baby. She was in a box in a blanket and I was absolutely stunned.” The box, apparently, contained a single note: “Was born on October 15, 2007.”

The baby looked so helpless that Xiong took her home; at the time, he lived with his wife in a tiny room. The couple bought a baby bottle to feed her, and that’s when he knew that he wanted to look after her for as long as he could. “No matter how hard it is, I intend to make sure that I raise her until she is old enough to stand on her own two feet. I don’t believe she would have had a good life in an orphanage,” he said.

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24-year-old Ting Tien has done something that’s not really expected of girls her age – she’s gone and given up all her material comforts to become a monk. In her former life, Ting lived in luxury; she was a fashion designer with access to the best of clothes and make up. But the shine of material objects wore off quite soon in Ting’s case and she chose to look for inner peace instead.

Ting, a native of Jinan City in Eastern China, attended the Qingdao University in Shandong Province, specializing in luxury goods design. But when she graduated, she became disillusioned with the lifestyle that she and her friends were leading. She found everything around her increasingly materialistic and too much to handle.

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Nanjing city, the capital of China’s Jiangsu Province, is the new home of the world’s largest and longest 3D street painting. The artwork, named ‘Rhythms of Youth’ was unveiled on June 11; it is a whopping 365 meters long, covering over 2,500 square meters on the campus of the Communication University of China (CUCN). It has set two new Guinness World Records  – one for the largest, and the other for the longest street painting in the world.

The technique used to make the 3D painting is known as ‘anamorphic’ – the artwork is painted in a distorted fashion so it will only look right from a certain point of view. The team that created it was led by famous Chinese artist Yang Yongchun. “It took my team more than 20 days to finish the painting on the ground,” he said. “Every day, we worked on it from daybreak when we could barely tell the colors apart until it was too dark to see anything. We’ve devoted all of our time, energy and attention to this painting.”

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Around 70 primary school students in Luoyang, China were recently involved in a controversial drill that involved submerging their heads in washbasins and buckets full of water to experience drowning.

The Qianzhizhuang Primary School in Henan Province is located near a river where children often play to cool off during the summer, so, apparently, school officials thought it would be a good idea to let the kids find out what it’s like to be drowning in a safe and controlled environment, rather than risking it happening for real with no one to rescue them.

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When 80-year-old Ruan Tang had retired, around 14 years ago, she wanted to spend her time doing something useful for her community. And when she realized how much the flies were bothering people during the summer, she decided to do something about it. Tang is now a woman on a mission – to swat as many pesky flies as possible.

“I decided that killing flies was the best way for me to be useful – and I’ve been doing it now every day since,” she said. Tang, who belongs to the Changmingsixiang Community in eastern China’s Hangzhou City, has made it her full-time hobby – for the past 14 years she has spent eight hours a day, seven days a week, killing flies.

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A Chinese tourist from Shenyang city, in Liaoning Province, known only as ‘Mr. Zhang’, is currently stranded in Korea for a very bizarre reason – his four -year-old son doodled on his passport! The two were on a short father-son bonding trip to Korea, organized by a local hospital, but had to extend their stay after custom officials denied the dad passage due to his doodled passport photo.

This is really serious business for Mr. Zhang, but this story had me laughing out loud, especially after seeing pictures of what the kid did with his dad’s passport. The little tyke apparently didn’t realize that it was an important document, and used it as a sketchbook. He drew animals, clouds, plants, people and unintelligible doodles all over the passport, and even ‘improved’ his dad’s photograph with a mustache and beard.

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Yangsi, a remote village in southwest China’s Sichuan Province, has baffling scientists for decades. Around 40 percent of its inhabitants are several heads shorter than the average human being. 36 of the village’s 80 residents are dwarfs – the tallest one is about 3 ft. 10 inches tall and the shortest, 2 ft. 1 inch. That’s too large a percentage to be categorized as random occurrence, but so far no one has been able to provide a better explanation.

Today, because of the large number of height-challenged residents, Yangsi is known as the ‘Village of Dwarfs’. According to village elders, their peaceful, happy life was ruined on a summer night many years ago, when a vile disease struck the region. Several locals suffered from a mysterious condition that mainly affected young children between the ages of 5 and 7. These children just stopped growing, remaining at the same height for the rest of their lives. Apart from their inability to grow taller, some of the victims also suffered from various disabilities.

Scientists and experts visited Yangsi, to study the water, soil, and grain in the region. They also examined the affected individuals in the hopes of gathering a few clues. However, they were unable to determine the cause behind the condition. It remains as mysterious today, as it was some 60-odd years ago.

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If you thought suitcases with wheels were handy, wait till you check out this new invention. It’s an electric suitcase that not only has wheels, but is also equipped with a small motor – so instead of carrying or dragging it, and you actually get to ride it wherever you need to go. Getting by in an airport will seem a breeze with this bad boy. You just sit on it, start it up, and go!

The 15-pound, battery-operated, drivable suitcase is the brainchild of Chinese amateur inventor He Liangcai. On a full charge, the suitcase can transport two adults at 12 mph for a distance of up to 37 miles. It also has GPS navigation and a burglar alarm.

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Many cultures view old age as a time for peaceful reflection and a preparation for the final journey of life. However, a few elderly people in China are being forced to hasten the process of ‘passing on’. Dozens have been voluntarily taking their own lives for a chance to be buried in a cemetery, before a government ban on burials takes effect.

The authorities of China’s Anhui province plan to close all cemeteries after June 1, simply because there isn’t any space left. The public was informed of the new rule on April 1: “Before June 1 people can still consign their bodies for burial, but after that the only option offered will be cremation.” The announcement has caused quite a stir among the elderly residents, especially in rural areas.

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HuaChi, a simple monk from China, has achieved something that only few are able to – he has left a mark in this world, quite literally. The pious man has knelt to pray in the exact same spot for nearly 20 years now. He’s performed the ritual so many times that his footprints are deeply ingrained in the wooden floor of his temple, in the monastery town of Tongren, in Qinghai Province.

The highly disciplined monk follows a never-changing routine – he arrives at the temple steps every day before sunrise, places his feet on the footprints and prostrates a few thousand times in prayer. Having done this for two decades, the wood beneath his feet has softened considerably, transforming into perfect footprints that are 1.2 inches deep.

When Hua Chi was younger, he would prostrate 2,000 to 3,000 times a day. “But I have grown older, so in recent years I have only done around 1,000 each day,” he said. Sometimes, during winter he can only manage 500. But even that is seriously impressive; I couldn’t imagine doing a handful of prostrations without exhausting myself. After completing his prayers, he walks around the temple as well.

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A hospital in eastern China has decided to do away with plain white nurse uniforms. Instead, they have their nurses dressing up like flight attendants. The new initiative began earlier this month at the Lianshui Traditional Chinese Medicine hospital in Huai’an city. Their idea is to glamorize the otherwise thankless profession of nursing, and also provide patients with superior customer service.

Bu Haijuan, head of the hospital’s nursing unit, came up with the idea as a way to remind her nurses to improve their bedside manner. “If you think of all the professions of the world, which one comes to mind when you think of good customer service?” she asked. “It’s airline stewardesses, isn’t it? Nurses learn all sorts of technical skills at college but customer service can be easily overlooked. But flight attendants are specifically trained to have a good attitude and manners.”

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Zhengzhou, the capital city of north-central China’s Henan Province, is currently a sandy mess. Officials wanting to create an artificial lake on the outskirts of the city have botched things up so bad that it’s turned into a sprawling desert instead. The sand is everywhere – about 10 meters high and covering an area as large as four football fields. Naturally, Zhengzhou’s residents aren’t pleased.

The idea was nice to begin with – the officials planned to make a beautiful lake on the outskirts of the city by tapping a natural water source called Dragon Lake and removing hundreds of thousands of tons of sand around it. Unfortunately, nature did not play along with the plan. The underground water source dried up and all the dug-up sand began to spread. It has now resulted in a large wasteland of parched earth in the area.

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Thankfully, I’ve never been beat up, but I imagine it must be a horrible thing to go through. Which is why I find this 48-year-old Chinese man’s choice of career strange, to say the least. Xie Shuiping actually volunteers to take punches from random strangers, for a fee. Surprisingly, taking a beating is a rather decent source of income, earning him about $3,500 a month.

Xie, who is also known as the ‘human punching bag’, hangs around streets, bars and nightclubs, just waiting to get punched. Each person who comes forward is allowed to punch him three times in the stomach, as hard as possible. The ‘performance’ lasts about 20 minutes, and those who beat him or shake him can receive free drinks at the bar. Financial rewards aside, the human punching bag also likes to think he helps people let off some team as well. “If you are upset by your boss or your wife, don’t blame them. Vent your anger on me. Let society be harmonious,” he said.

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Of all the Mother’s Day events this year, I think this one was the most befitting – putting men through the pain of childbirth. A local TV station in Nanchang City, in south China’s Jiangxi province, had about 20 men volunteering to put themselves through the excruciating pain of labor . They were hooked up to a special machine that simulated the pain using electric shocks. Needless to say, the men couldn’t even last 30 seconds.

The theme of the TV show was to have men submit to the pains that women endure during childbirth. The challenge consisted of 10 levels of pain, with an agony scale ranging from 50 to 500. Electric shocks were sent into the abdomens of the male volunteers in order to achieve the desired effect. Predictably, the men were writhing in pain within seconds, begging to stop the experiment.

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