A Japanese man recently shocked the internet after announcing that he managed to save 132 million yen ($640,000) over the last two decades with the goal of retiring early from his stressful job.

The unnamed 45-year-old man took to social media to announce that he had finally achieved FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) after dedicating the last twenty years and ten months to this goal. In the early 2000s, he managed to secure a stable but very demanding job where he was constantly required to work overtime, sometimes past midnight. He had a decent salary of around five million yen ($32,000) per year, so instead of quitting his job and looking for something less stressful, he decided to push through all the hardships and save as much money as possible so he could retire early. However, the level of frugality he endured throughout the last two decades left a lot of people wondering if his efforts were worth it.

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A young Chinese woman who weighs only 25 kilograms (55 lbs) has been getting a lot of attention after showcasing her shockingly thin body online and claiming she wants to be even skinnier.

The young woman who goes by ‘Baby Tingzi’ (婷子宝宝) is 160 cm tall but weighs only about 25 kg and apparently aims to lose even more weight. She has more than 42,000 fans on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, most of whom constantly express concern about her health. Baby Tingzi always brushes off such concerns, claiming that she prefers to be super skinny and adding that her skeleton-like silhouette has no negative impact on her life. The up-and-coming social media influencer, who reportedly hails from Guangzhou, China’s Guangdong Province, constantly posts clips of herself in skimpy outfits to show off her slender physique and apparently doesn’t care about criticism.

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A Japanese couple known for uploading wholesome family videos on YouTube sparked controversy after filming their 2-year-old daughter crying inside a locked car on a hot day for about 30 minutes instead of getting her out.

At the end of May,  ラウなのファミリー (“Rau-nano Family), a YouTube channel that documents the daily life of a Japanese couple with their three children, uploaded a video titled 炎天下の中…2歳娘が車に閉じ込められました (“Under the blazing sun… my 2-year-old daughter was locked in the car,”).  The shocking title hints at the couple’s goal of grabbing attention and boosting viewership, but while the video managed to do just that, they didn’t anticipate the criticism coming with their new-found fame. That is surprising, to say the least, as the controversial video shows the father of the family casually filming his 2-year-old daughter as she cries desperately for about 30 minutes after accidentally getting stuck in the family car on a hot summer day with no windows open.

The disturbing video, which has since been removed from the Rau-nano Family YouTube channel, shows the head of the family placing the older daughter, two-year-old Nanoka, in the backseat of the family’s Toyota, and preparing to do the same with her younger sister. It is at this moment that Nanoka, who is holding the car keys as her father handles the little sister, accidentally locks herself in the car.

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A French woman is taking telecom giant Orange to court for “moral harassment and discrimination at work,” accusing the company of paying her for 20 years without giving her any tasks.

Laurence Van Wassenhove was recruited as a civil servant by France Telecom in 1993 before the company was taken over by Orange. Her original employer knew that she was hemiplegic – partial paralysis of the face and limbs – from birth and suffered from epilepsy, and offered her a position adapted to her medical conditions. She worked as a secretary and in the HR department until 2002 when she asked to be transferred to another region of France. Her request was approved, but her new workplace was not adapted to her needs, and an occupational medicine report confirmed that the position was not suited for her. Despite this, Orange allegedly failed to make any adjustments to her job, preferring to pay her full salary for the next 20 years, without giving her anything to do.

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A football referee has been suspended for life for allegedly celebrating with a club he helped win by eliminating 3 players from the opposing side and granting 15 minutes of extra time, enough for the winners to score a necessary goal.

Earlier this month, Dutch football clubs St. George and SV De Valken met in a final match of the country’s fourth division to decide which of the two teams would be promoted to the third division. It may not seem like very high stakes, but they take football very seriously in the Netherlands and passions ride high, so this particular match was very important to both clubs. It was supposed to be a close game between the two most dominant team in the division, but the match played out very differently than expected because of the one person responsible of fair play, the referee. Jan Smit stands accused of not only rigging the game in one team’s favor, but also celebrating with its members after the win.

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A Chinese man recently lost his life while performing a controversial type of exercise that requires practitioners to hang only by their chins to relieve neck and spine pain by reducing pressure on nerves.

Over the past decade or so, a bizarre form of exercise has been getting traction throughout China. It basically involves swinging one’s body while hanging in the air supported only by a leather chin strap. Reportedly invented around 2017 by Shenyang native Sun Rongchun as a way to relieve back pain, neck swings quickly became a familiar sight in parks and outdoor gyms all over the country. Although hanging in the air by one’s chin doesn’t sound like the safest thing in the world, paractiotioners swear by it, claiming it does wonder for neck and back pain. Still, doctors have been warning about the dangers of neck hanging for years and a recent tragedy suggests that when performed incorrectly, this type of exercise can be lethal.

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The backbend is considered a crucial move in Chinese folk dancing, but it is also the main cause of severe spine cord injuries in children as young as five, leaving thousands of them paralyzed for life.

Ironically, the vast majority of parents pushing their beloved children towards folk dancing have their offspring’s best interest in mind, hoping to improve their physical fitness and overall health, but studies have found that one particular move taught in folk dancing schools is putting children’s lives at risk. Data analyzed by the Chinese Orthopaedic Association showed that the percentage of spinal cord injuries caused by the backbend exploded from just 4% between 1992 and 2002 to a whopping 33.9% of all pediatric spinal injuries between 2015 and 2019. Other reports show that, since 2005, over 1,000 children have been left paralyzed after doing backbends in dance classes, making this move the single greatest paralysis threat for young Chinese children.

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Topi Amma, the mysterious ‘Hat Mother’ of Tiruvannamalai, a Hindu pilgrimage city in Tamil Nadu, is a controversial religious figure that has divided Indian society.

India has no shortage of mystics and real-life incarnations of Hindu deities that people flock to worship, but even in this context, Topi Amma is an unlikely religious figure. The hat-wearing woman is often referred to as a ‘siddha’, an enlightened being who has attained perfection, but to those with a more secular view of the world, she is just a mentally disabled woman in need of medical help. Where believers see a mystic walking through the streets of Tiruvannamalai and speaking in an ancient Tamil dialect that no one understands, others see a homeless woman wandering aimlessly and mumbling jibberish. It’s all a matter of perception, but considering Topi Amma doesn’t even seem to realize the religious craze she has inspired, the latter is probably true.

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A Chinese woman was recently sentenced to prison for kidnapping an 11-year-old girl whom she planned to raise into the perfect wife for her 27-year-old son.

The woman surnamed Yang met the underaged girl on February 13, 2023, while visiting a village in Liupanshui City in the southwestern province of Guizhou. Convinced that she would make a great bride for her much older son, she asked the girl’s parents if they would allow her to come back with her to Qujing City, Yunnan province. The girl’s father refused the proposal, but that only made the woman go ahead with her backup plan. She conspired with her 27-year-old son to kidnap the girl, and on February 14 they waited until the target was home alone and abducted her.

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One of the most controversial forms of entertainment in US history, dance marathons saw participants dancing continuously for days, weeks, and sometimes months for a chance to win food and money.

Too much of a good thing can be bad for you, and apparently, that also includes a seemingly benign activity like dancing. During the 1920s, the revival of the Olympic Games sparked a massive interest in impressive feats of strength and endurance, which led to the rise in popularity of dance contests that lasted for extended periods of time. In 1923 the dance marathon craze saw world records for dancing without stopping being broken virtually on a daily basis, but things really got out of hand when the prosperous 1920s faded into the Great Depression of the 1930s. The harmless dance contest transformed into twisted spectacles where people literally died of exhaustion on the dancefloor for the chance to win much-needed cash prizes.

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Filipino online influencer Abby Domer Salle has come under fire for alleged animal cruelty after being spotted wearing a live chick in a small metal cage on her head on the streets of Manila.

Inspired by Japanese Kawaii culture, the so-called ‘duckling fashion’ has become very popular in Southeast Asia in the last few years. The exact origins of this fashion trend are unclear, but it has been linked to anime series or characters. There are multiple variations of this trend all over the world, but in its simplest form it involves wearing decorative plastic or plush ducklings on one’s head. However, one Filipino influencer recently took this already unusual fashion trend and took it to an all-new level of weirdness by caging a live chick and wearing it in public as a bizarre hat.

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In a high-profile divorce case that sparked heated debates in China, a man divorced his wife of 16 years after learning that none of the three children she birthed during their marriage were his.

In December 2007, Chen Zhixian married Yu Hua, a woman eight years his junior, soon after meeting her for the first time. She seemed like a simple, down-to-earth woman, and his parents had long been pressuring him to settle down, so he never really took the time to know her. Soon after tying the knot, Yu Hua informed Chen that she was pregnant, and he was so overwhelmed by the news that he was going to be a father, that he never realized his wife had to have already been pregnant when they met to have a child when she did. Yu gave birth to the couple’s first daughter, and her husband became a long-distance freight driver who was away for most of the year, only coming home, in Dexing, Jianxi Province, for short periods of time.

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A Nashville-based hardcore band named Llorona announced that it had fired its lead singer after he allegedly dosed the band bassist with estrogen as part of a bizarre ploy to steal his fiancée.

The unusual news was shared by Llorona in a series of posts on the band’s Instagram account, which has since been suspended. Luckily, some of its fans were able to take screenshots of the revelations, which alleged that Llorona’s lead singer, Diego, had been lacing one of his bandmate’s pre-workout supplements with high doses of estrogen in order to make seem more feminine to his fiancée, with whom Diego was apparently obsessed. For the last five months, Diego has allegedly dossed Llorona bassist Styxx with estrogen, which caused him to suffer serious “physical changes”, from hormonal levels to stomach ulcers, weight loss, and muscle fatigue, as well as “notable mental changes”.

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A Quebec art teacher is being accused of selling his high school students’ artworks on his website without their consent for personal profit.

An art teacher at the Westwood Junior High School in Saint Lazare has landed in hot water with the parents of several of his students for allegedly selling their drawings and paintings online without their knowledge and permission. The discovery was made by accident when one of the students searched his name on Google only to discover one of his art class drawings listed for sale on his teacher’s website. Word spread around the school, and before long, other students reported their own artworks had been listed online by the teacher. Some of the kids told their parents about the bizarre practice, and they appealed to the high school board for clarification. Now, some parents are asking for moral and punitive damages from both the art teacher and the high school.

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A young tattoo artist from St. Petersburg, Russia, was recently detained for insulting religious believers with controversial tattoos featuring Jesus Christ, the cross and other Christian symbols.

Daria Krichker is facing up to one year in jail for her crimes. According to the Orthodox activist group that filed a complaint against her, she has committed “repeated gross blasphemous acts against Christ, the Mother of God, and the saints of the Church,” which “cannot be tolerated on Russian soil. It all started earlier this month when photos of a tattoo reportedly inked on Krichker’s own calf went viral on social media. It showed Jesus on the cross having an orgasm, which isn’t the kind of creative work that religious people would appreciate. It’s weird, many would describe it as disgusting, but in Russia, such a tattoo can literally land you behind bars.

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